History in the Making – Medicalizing Animals as Food and Drugs in Chinese Asia (Dr. Liz P.Y. Chee, Assistant Professor, The Hong Kong University of Science and Technology)

This talk will discuss my current book project, tentatively titled Medicalizing Animals as Food and Drugs in Chinese Asia. As the title indicates, this project focuses on animals and their consumption at the nexus of  medicine and medicalized food in ‘Chinese Asia’ (the PRC, Hong Kong, Taiwan, and my native Singapore), from the 1970s until now.  I focus on five animals – Saiga Antelope, Snake, Dog, Shark, and Pangolin –  each constituting a chapter, and documenting not only how that animal was medicalized for human consumption, but revealing different aspects of the modern co-construction of a pan-Asian TCM by state, commercial, clinical, and scholarly interests. The book is also one outcome of a three year grant project which created the first database of animal drug use in modern Chinese medicine (The Faunal Medicine Database), and documenting its changing character, an initiative I’ll also discuss in my talk.

Liz P.Y. Chee is an Assistant Professor at the Hong Kong University of Science and Technology (HKUST).  Her monograph Mao’s Bestiary: Medicinal Animals and Modern China was published in 2021 by Duke University Press, and her work has appeared in such journals as Urban Studies and Science, Technology and Society. Her research centers on the history of medicine and pharmaceutics in modern China, and particularly the medicalization of animals. She is currently writing her second monograph which focuses on historicizing zootherapies in East and Southeast Asia, and understanding their relation to the wildlife trade and zoonotic disease.

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