The Monkey and the Inkpot: Natural History and Its Transformations in Early Modern China

(Harvard University Press) The author examines natural history in 16th-century China through the encyclopedic Bencao gangmu of the doctor Li Shizhen (1518-1593). Li’s text, widely lauded as a classic embodiment of pre-modern Chinese medical thought, uses natural history to guide the application of natural and artificial objects as medical drugs. Exploring the gems, beasts, and oddities that populate its pages, Nappi ultimately challenges the idea of a monolithic tradition of Chinese herbal medicine, showing the importance of debate in early modern scholarly and medical culture. She is an assistant professor of history at the University of British Columbia.