Drugs on the Page

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.

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This volume . . . nicely illustrates the paradoxical situation of the history of pharmacy as a field of study within the history of science. 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

Drugs on the Pageoffers 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

Table of Contents

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Pharmacopoeias and Healing Knowledge in the Early Modern Atlantic World

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384 Pages, 6 x 9 in.

May, 2019

isbn : 9780822945628

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