“Reporting on Exotic Materia Medica: The Portuguese Viceroy’s 1596 Report on Indian Medicinal Plants”

Oana Baboi (University of Toronto, IHPST)

How early modern European colonial agents, missionaries, and travellers preserved their health while living in the tropical climates of Asia? As many Jesuits sent on evangelical missions to India had difficulties adapting to the new environment and helplessly watched their bodies succumb to unfamiliar diseases, they became eager to learn about local healing practices.

Only a few manuscript sources survive today to give evidence of Jesuit missionaries’ involvement in acquiring information on indigenous materia medica and therapeutic practices. One such rare manuscript belonged to François de Rougemont (Belgium, 1624-China, 1676). Entitled Breve Compendio de Varias Receitas de Medicina (Brief Compendium of Various Medicinal Recipes), the manuscript contains an extraordinarily rich collection of botanical notes and healing recipes he collected while traveling from Europe to his mission post in China. While passing through Goa, he acquired an official report on Indian plants with healing qualities. Drafted at Philip II’s order, the report is indicative of the Iberian Empire’s interest in surveying the natural sources available in its overseas territories and the secrecy surrounding such sensitive information in the early modern times.

Referencing the copy of the report collected by Father François de Rougemont, my paper discusses the construction of medical knowledge in the contact zones and its circulation in the 17th century between Asia and Europe.

“Of Rarity, Honesty and Usefulness: Pierre Pomet and the Issue of Choosing Drugs in Paris by 1700”

Laia Portet Codina (University of Cambridge)

Organizing nature and systematizing information became pressing concerns to seventeenth and eighteenth-century savants. Within a context of rapid accumulation of knowledge and materials, print and scholarship played determining roles in the selection of not only what was important to know about drugs but also which substances were worthwhile reaching for and deserved scholarly attention. Printed catalogs of drugs, medical books, pharmacopeia and botanical treatises affected and reflected the globalization of the pharmaceutical market by assisting the systematization of exotic plants and conditioning their incorporation into European medical traditions.

This paper tells the story of an early modern treatise of drugs written by the Parisian grocer-druggist Pierre Pomet (1658-1699) with the aim to assess the globalization of the medical marketplace of Paris and its immediate impact upon print culture and learned practices. It explores the relationship between types of expertise and principles of classification and how they constricted both scientific inquiry and consumption by analyzing the inner structure of the book and its place within early modern literature. Which materials were considered drugs? How were drugs identified and classified? How were they sold? Who studied them and why? By focusing on the Histoire Générale des Drogues and its author, this research sheds light on the paramount, and yet overlooked issue of choosing drugs in a city every day more fascinated by and suspicious of the world beyond its walls.

“Traditional Indian Plant Medicine: Western Notice and Mainstreaming”

Rajesh Kochhar (Punjab University Mathematics Department)

Practical considerations compelled the British Indian medical establishment to take serious and sustained notice of the traditional Indian healthcare system (Ayurveda). Imported medicines were very expensive and ran the risk of deterioration during long transportation time. Most plants and shrubs described in British Pharmacopeia were not to be found in India. Many patients who came to European doctors had previously been treated by local practitioners with indigenous preparations or drugs known only by their vernacular name. In the first stage missionaries, medical men Indologists sat with with the traditional physicians for information.

In the next stage, Indians with Western education became assistants to Europeans, and then researchers in their own right taking care to follow the methodology taught to them. . An authoritative work titled The Indigenous Drugs of India, prepared in 1867 by Kanny Lall Dey became required reading for European medical men in India. In course of time Indians became researchers in their own time, using the new methodology. In 1877, Udoy Chand Dutt extracted a Materia Medica from Sanskrit medical texts, giving only those details that arise as ‘a result of observation and experience’ and omitting those that are ‘the outcome of an erroneous system of pathology and therapeutics’. During the heyday of the colonial empire, Indians were very keen to validate their traditional knowledge in the Western eyes. It was with a great sense of achievement that the ‘British Pharmacopoeia authorities were at last prevailed upon to find a back seat for some Indian drugs in the Addendum’, published in 1900.

“Cocktails and Fairy Tales: Angelo Mariani's "Contes" and Health Advertising in Early Twentieth Century Europe”

Emily Beaton (University of Toronto)

Vin Mariani — wine combined with the South American coca leaf— was introduced to Europe by pharmacist Angelo Mariani at the end of the nineteenth century. Coca is a plant native to the Andes and has long history of use in South America, and travelers to Peru in the 1800s reported back to Europe and the United States, lauding it as a “miracle drug.” What makes Mariani’s product unique was his original advertising strategy in the form of stories, or Contes. While he did exploit the traditional avenue of poster advertisements and testimonials, the Contes helped shine a spotlight on Mariani’s product. The Contes were written by popular authors and always featured Vin Mariani and coca in a starring role. These stories were a powerful form of advertising for Mariani, and they provide a useful avenue to investigate how the health benefits of coca were marketed to the European populace. This paper asks how Vin Mariani brings together medicine and consumer culture in nineteenth and early twentieth century Europe. It argues that Mariani’s Contes made credible the health claims of Vin Mariani. Two of the fourteen Contes, Pervenche and Un Chapitre Inédit de Don Quichotte will be analyzed to understand how the choice of imagery and other literary elements contributed to the marketing of a highly desirable product to Europe’s nineteenth- and early twentieth-century consumers. Through their fictitious narratives, these works emphasized that the product had specific health benefits and allowed the coca plant to be dissociated from the non-European “other.”