The Work of the Chinese Physician-Pharmacist in He Bian's Know Your Remedies.

He Bian's 2020 book Know Your Remedies: Pharinacq and Culture in Earlu Modern China analyzes many dimensions ot the path to the development of the eighteenth-century "traditional Chinese pharmacy." This essay draws on the book and some of its primary sources to add yet another dimension. It deploys the sociology of occupations developed primarily by Everett C. Hughes and his students to further analyze the division of labor between physicians and pharmacists that Bian shows developing over the course of the Ming period (1368-1644). This essay explains concepts including technique and object of technique, practitioner and client, purpose and output, guilty knowledge, dirty work, license and mandate, and code and policy, and applies them to Bian's treatment of the occupations of physician, pharmacist, scholar-official, and merchant-and the interactions between them. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]