Barbara Gerke's new book "Taming the Poisonous: Mercury, Toxicity, and Safety in Tibetan Medical Practice" is rich ethnographic and socio-historical account uncovers how toxicity and safety are expressed transculturally in a globalizing world. For the first time, it unpacks the “pharmaceutical nexus” of mercury in Tibetan medicine, where, since the thirteenth century, it has mainly been used in the form of tsotel (btso thal). Tsotel, an organometallic mercury sulfide compound, is added in small amounts to specific medicines to enhance the potency of other ingredients. In concordance with tantric Buddhist ideas, Tibetan medical practitioners confront and tame poisonous substances, and instead of avoiding or expelling them, transform them into potent medicines and elixirs.
Author(s): Barbara Gerke
Series: Heidelberg Studies on Transculturality
Publisher: Heidelberg University Publishing
Year: 2021
Language: English
Pages: 379
City: Heidelberg
Cover, Front
Title
Table of Contents
A Note on Tibetan and Sanskrit Terms
List of Abbreviations
List of Illustrations
Acknowledgements
Maps
Chapter 1
Introduction: “It takes time to tame a wild horse”
Transculturality in acts of translation
Chapter outline
The fieldsites
Methodological and ethnographic challenges in the field
The ethnographic positionality of safety
Chapter 2
Setting the Scene: Poison and Potency
Taming substances and the origin myth of poisons
Sourcing mercury
Following the poison: An ethnography
Exploring concepts: Pure or processed?
The politics of mercury toxicity
Chapter 3
The Pharmaceutical Nexus of Mercury Practices
Dynamics of support
The Dalai Lamas and mercury practices
Making tsotel in a Chinese labor camp in 1977
Making tsotel in exile
Chapter 4
History and Knowledge Transmission
Situating mercury practices between science and religion
Narratives of mercury transmissions from India to Tibet
Orgyen Rinchenpel receives the tsodru chenmo practice from Vajrayoginī
Mercury refinement practices in Tibet (fourteenth to nineteenth centuries)
Heterogeneity, lineages, and the question of origins
Secrecy and Tibetan publications on mercury formulations
Chapter 5
Blood and Semen: Women and Mercury
The missing ingredient
Embodied metals in Indian alchemy
Tibetan women processing mercury
Body and gender in early Buddhist and Tibetan medical literature
Protected places of mercury processing
Gendered voices
Chapter 6
The Evidence of Safety
Assessing risk
Short mercury processing techniques and their evaluations of safety
Taming the poisons of mercury: The long processing technique Tsodru Chenmo
Occupational safety
Changing risk and safety assessments
Chapter 7
Taming the Poisonous and the Potent
Regulating multi-compound elixirs
The patronage of science
Translating epistemologies of toxicity
Contamination and the ecological turn
Chapter 8
Conclusions
Enlarging the pharmaceutical nexus
The poison-medicine spectrum
The taming narrative
Patronized practice
Science as a patron
The demons of the Anthropocene and the limits of taming
Appendices
Appendix A: Relevant Chemical Mercury Compounds,their Absorption, and Toxicity
Appendix B: Tsotel Manufacture Events at the Men-Tsee-Khang in Dharamsala (1982–2014)
Appendix C: Small-Scale Tsotel Events (1953–2008)
Appendix D: The Collected Works on Mercury Formulations
Glossaries of Tibetan and Sanskrit Terms
1: Who is Who? Glossary of Tibetan Names
2: Glossary of Recurrent Tibetan Terms (Including Place Names)
3: Glossary of Tibetan Formula Names
4: Glossary of Sanskrit Names and Terms
References
Tibetan-Language Sources
Other Sources
Index
A
B
C
D
E
F
G
H
I
J
K
L
M
N
O
P
Q
R
S
T
U
V
W
Y
Z
Cover, Back
