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Article: Narcotic Culture: A History of Drugs in China.(Book review)
- Article from:
- The Historian
- Article date:
- June 22, 2006
- Author:
CopyrightCOPYRIGHT 2006 Phi Alpha Theta, History Honor Society, Inc. This material is published under license from the publisher through the Gale Group, Farmington Hills, Michigan. All inquiries regarding rights should be directed to the Gale Group. (Hide copyright information)
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Narcotic Culture: A History of Drugs in China. By Frank Dikotter, Lars Laamann, and Zhou Xun. (Chicago, Ill.: University of Chicago Press, 2004. Pp. 319. $35.00.)
This is a terrific book. It is an important correction to the China field's, and almost everyone else's, interpretation of opium's impact on Chinese society. The conventional wisdom has long held that opium use caused a pandemic addiction in nineteenth-century China. Not so, claim the authors in this fact-filled revisionist account. Long before the introduction of modern medications (e.g., aspirin and penicillin), opium's therapeutic powers were well known. It was recognized as beneficial in fighting ...