How did lay people in old China save their lives when dealing with acute or chronic health issues? Conventional medicine was costly and might not have been an option for many. Instead, people in villages and towns relied on remedies drawn from a woodblock-printed illustrated booklet called the Seventy-Two Therapies, first published in 1847. This book fosters an appreciation of China’s long tradition of folk remedies. The author added an historical and interpretive analysis to expand on each therapy and to place it in the context of contemporary thinking, aiming at academics interested in the everyday lives of common people in pre-1950 China, and in the folk medicine wisdom inherited from the past.
