Drugs on the Page: Pharmacopoeias and Healing Knowledge in the Early Modern Atlantic World

by Matthew James Crawford, Joseph M. Gabriel

Overview

In the early modern Atlantic World, pharmacopoeias—official lists of medicaments and medicinal preparations published by municipal, national, or imperial governments—organized the world of healing goods, giving rise to new and valuable medical commodities such as cinchona bark, guaiacum, and ipecac. Pharmacopoeias and related texts, developed by governments and official medical bodies as a means to standardize therapeutic practice, were particularly important to scientific and colonial enterprises. They served, in part, as tools for making sense of encounters with a diversity of peoples, places, and things provoked by the commercial and colonial expansion of early modern Europe. Drugs on the Page explores practices of recording, organizing, and transmitting information about medicinal substances by artisans, colonial officials, indigenous peoples, and others who, unlike European pharmacists and physicians, rarely had a recognized role in the production of official texts and medicines. Drawing on examples across various national and imperial contexts, contributors to this volume offer new and valuable insights into the entangled histories of knowledge resulting from interactions and negotiations between Europeans, Africans, and Native Americans from 1500 to 1850.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780822986836
Publisher:	University of Pittsburgh Press
Publication date:	09/10/2019
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
Pages:	336
File size:	8 MB

About the Author

Matthew James Crawford (Editor)
Matthew James Crawford is associate professor in the Department of History at Kent State University and author of The Andean Wonder Drug: Cinchona Bark and Imperial Science in the Spanish Atlantic, 1630–1800.

Joseph M. Gabriel (Editor)
Joseph M. Gabriel is associate professor of the history of medicine at Florida State University, where he holds joint appointments in the Department of Behavioral Sciences and Social Medicine and the Department of History.

Table of Contents

Contents Acknowledgments Introduction. Thinking with Pharmacopoeias / Matthew James Crawford & Joseph M. Gabriel PART I. Pharmacopoeias and Textual Traditions 1. Pharmacopoeias and the Textual Tradition in Galenic Pharmacy / Paula De Vos 2. Authority, Authorship, and Copying: The Ricettario Fiorentino and Manuscript Recipe Culture in Sixteenth-Century Florence / Emily Beck 3. An Imperial Pharmacopoeia? The Pharmacopoeia Matritensis and Materia Medica in the Eighteenth-Century Spanish Atlantic World / Matthew James Crawford PART II. Pharmacopoeias and the Codification of Knowledge 4. Beyond the Pharmacopoeia? Secret Remedies, Exclusive Privileges, and Trademarks in Early Modern France / Justin Rivest 5. Crown Authorities, Colonial Physicians, and the Exigencies of Empire: The Codification of Indigenous Therapeutic Knowledge in India and Brazil during the Enlightenment Era / Timothy D. Walker 6. Imperfect Knowledge: Medicine, Slavery, and Silence in Hans Sloane's Philosophical Transactions and the 1721 London Pharmacopoeia / William J. Ryan PART III. Pharmacopoeias and the Construction of New Worlds 7. The Flip Side of the Pharmacopoeia: Sub-Saharan African Medicines and Poisons in the Atlantic World / Benjamin Breen 8. Consuming Canada: Capillaire du Canada in the French Atlantic World / Christopher Parsons 9. Rethinking Pharmacopoeic Forms: Samson Occom and Mohegan Medicine / Kelly Wisecup PART IV. Pharmacopoeias and the Emergence of the Nation 10. National Identities, Medical Politics, and Local Traditions: The Origins of the London, Edinburgh, and Dublin Pharmacopoeias, 1618–1807 / Stuart Anderson 11. The Codex Nationalized: Naming People and Things in the Wake of a Revolution / Antoine Lentacker 12. Indian Secrets, Indian Cures, and the Pharmacopoeia of the United States of America / Joseph M. Gabriel Afterword. The Power of Unknowing: Early Modern Pharmacopoeias and the Imagination of the Atlantic / Pablo F. Gómez Notes Bibliography Contributors Index

Editorial Reviews

Drugs on the Page offers a comprehensive, comparative analysis of how pharmacopoeias, and lists of medical knowledge, developed in the early modern world, and deftly argues for their central importance in the business of healing. This volume is a major work in the history of medicine, particularly in the history of pharmaceutical drugs, and will be the definitive volume on pharmacopoeias for years to come.” —Dániel Margócsy, University of Cambridge
 


“This volume is a much-needed foray into the topic of cross-cultural pharmaceutical knowledge. Its broad view of the pharmacopoeia, which includes just about any form of systematic writing about herbs, works beautifully in drawing connections between different geographical contexts and multivalent pharmaceutical traditions, especially in the context of expanding European empires. An exciting and thought-provoking collection.” —Alisha Rankin, author of Panaceia's Daughters: Noblewomen as Healers in Early Modern Germany
 


“Drugs on the Page is a probing, well-crafted volume. It considers early modern Atlantic pharmacopeias as global collections of objects and past technologies and as workshops of translation embodying medical hybrid taxonomies. Pharmacopeias also document the relationship between individual entrepreneurship and the regulatory state, bio-imperial agendas and countercultural resistance, and print and manuscript cultures. This is a fascinating book.” —Jorge Cañizares-Esguerra, University of Texas-Austin
 

“Drugs on the Page establishes a definitive reference about pharmacopoeias for all scholars interested in the history of early modern science, medicine, and drugs.”  —Pharmacy in History
 

“One of the most striking things about this book is the diversity of approaches that are adopted in the different studies. . . . Drugs on the Page represents a significant contribution to the field.” —Metascience
 

“This volume provides a thoughtful and well-integrated discussion of the genre that demonstrates both the interconnectedness and the particularity of pharmacopoeias.” —Isis
 

“The essays here offer some intriguing insights into how pharmaceutical practices in a diverse array of settings were rendered in print. . . . Environmental historians interested in plants in the early modern Atlantic, and especially in medicines and botanical exchanges, will find much of interest here.” —H-Environment
 

From the Publisher