背景:近年来,中国香料的历史受到越来越多的关注,但是很少研究它们适合中国早期的食品-药物连续体,在古典医疗系统的形成过程中。本文介绍了香料的通感品质如何在新兴系统中引起特殊分析,该系统将香料标记为与其他医疗材料和食品不同。我们的目的是阐明香料的特殊作用,以适应它们在身体上的跨界联觉作用。
方法:本文分析了1972年从公元前2世纪关闭的坟墓中挖掘的几个香料袋的内容。它使用了物质文化的考古报告以及早期的中国文字记录,在手稿和收到的文本中都存在,发挥香料在仪式中的作用,食品和药品。
结果:注意到早期中国的风味和香气在公元前一世纪被赋予了生理功效,我们认为,到了中世纪,香料在调节感官中发挥的独特的联觉作用已被系统地医学化。在被部署用于治疗医学疾病的同时,它们还保留在日常医疗保健领域,和宗教实践,两者都作为芳香剂来美化环境,吸引良性的精神,而且为了抵御疾病的病原体,以及通过在烹饪中使用它们来增强健康。
结论:当食品进入消化系统时,在新兴的Clasical医疗系统中,香料都被认为是“刺激性的”。他们通过鼻子和肺部作用于身体,让他们既不是食物也不是药物。这种隐含的分类医疗香料,喜欢音乐,可以影响激情,减轻精神,编纂关于仪式环境对身体影响的观察。
BACKGROUND: The history of Chinese spices has received increasing attention in recent years, but little research been carried out on where they fit on the food-medicine continuum for early
China, during the formation of the classical medical system. This paper describes how the synaesthetic qualities of spices attracted a particular analysis in that emerging system which serves to mark them as different to other medical materials and foodstuffs. We aim to clarify the special role created for spices to accommodate their boundary-crossing synaesthetic action on the body.
METHODS: This paper analyses the contents of several spice bags excavated in 1972 from a tomb that was closed in the second century BCE. It uses archaeological reports of material culture together with the early Chinese textual record, extant in both manuscripts and received texts, to bring out the role of spices in ritual, food and medicine.
RESULTS: Noting that the flavours and aromas of early
China were assigned physiological potency in the first centuries BCE, we argue that by medieval times the unique synaesthetic role that spices played in mediating the senses was systematically medicalised. While being deployed for the purpose of curing disease in medicine, they also remained within the realm of everyday healthcare, and religious practice, deployed both as aromatics to perfume the environment, attracting benign spirits, but also to ward off the agents of disease, as well as for enhancing health through their use in cookery.
CONCLUSIONS: While foodstuffs entered the digestive system spices were all considered \'pungent\' in the emerging clasical medical system. They acted on the body through the nose and lungs, making them neither food nor drug. This implicit categorisation medicalised spices which, like music, could affect the passions and lighten the spirit, codifying observations about the impact on the body of the ritual environment.