They are medicines from Kashgar in Chinese East Turkestan, collected by the missionary Lars Erik Högberg in order to be exhibited in the Museum of Ethnography in 1907.
This is what he writes about these medicines:
“The first task of a Kashgar doctor is to determine the patient’s elements. This is done by feeling the pulse, observing the tongue, the color of the skin, and the urine. In most cases, the disease is caused by the patient having consumed cold nutrition instead of hot, or the other way round. When the patient’s elements and the cause of the disease have been explained, the doctor decides on what medicine to use – wet-hot, dry-hot, wet-cold or dry-cold – and if it should be of the first, second or third degree, according to the nature of the disease.”
The bundles are telling us about something we all do: we arrange, classify and give names to our reality, in order better to understand it and cope with it.
There is Uigurian writing on the medicine bundles, indicating how the medicines are to be used. For example, you find here a wet-hot medicine that will reinforce your heart, lungs, brain and memory.
Högberg himself in his turn has numbered the bundles in red and black ink, in order to keep his collection in order.
When the medicines arrived in the museum, every little bundle was given an item number, visible on the bundle itself in microscopic digits and also on the attached label. The medicines have been arranged according to various classification systems over the years. Here and now, however, the system is built on the item numbers.
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