The Meanings of Medical Sugar

Abstract

This article examines the ways that the material transformation of sugar into multiple portable trade commodities through refinement impacted its role in medical practice across Afro-Eurasia and the Indian Ocean World. As sugar traveled across land and sea routes and was reconfigured into multiple refined, portable products, it came to represent fundamental medical concepts and practices in premodern pharmacy that made its sweetness appealing not only in culinary contexts but to apothecaries, physicians, and medical cosmologists. This article traces the origins of sugar, the archaeological record of its transregional production, and its permutations through diverse premodern medical traditions. As an embodiment of cold in ancient Indian medicine and heat in Islamicate humoral medicine sugar came to play an essential and complicated role in trade route pharmacology. Multiple forms of commodified sugar appear in records of long-distance trade in Middle Period China, and from the seventh century onward these products increasingly found their way into Chinese medical formulas and texts. An examination of the use of commodified sugar in premodern globalized medicines with an eye for how these substances were seen to embody the qualities of hot or cold reveals a vigorous intellectual and material engagement between cultures. This article highlights the lingering archaeological traces of the medical movements of sugar across the premodern world and examines how the technological processing of sugarcane into medical commodities influenced cultural understandings of its therapeutic value.