Bodies of the plant and Animal Kingdom: An illustrated manuscript on materia medica in the Netherlands (ca. 1800).

ETHNOPHARMACOLOGICAL RELEVANCE: Around 1800, Amsterdam was a global trade hub for materia medica of Dutch, European and exotic origin. Contemporary knowledge on medicinal plants in academic circles has been well documented in local pharmacopoeia, illustrated herbals and catalogues of botanic gardens. Until the end of the ancient regime, physicians, surgeons and apothecaries were trained how to use plants in their specific guild or Collegium Medicum. Little is known, however, on how the plant collectors and merchants that provided the pharmaceutical substances to apothecaries learnt to recognise the variety of medicinal products. AIM OF THE STUDY: To analyse the content, origin, purpose and scientific importance of an anonymous, undated, hand-written Dutch manuscript on materia medica, entitled Corpora ex Regno Vegetabili/Animali (Bodies of the Plant/Animal kingdom) kept by the Artis Library of the University of Amsterdam, the Netherlands. MATERIALS AND METHODS: We digitised the entire manuscript and dated the paper by means of its watermark. We identified the plant and animal species using the historic Dutch and Latin names, the illustrations and historic literature. We compared the plant properties and uses to contemporary literature to check whether the information in the manuscript was original or copied from another source. RESULTS: The paper was produced between 1759 and 1816 in Zaandam, the Netherlands. The manuscript contains 19 substances of animal origin, one mineral and 273 plants and plant-derived products, which belong to ca. 260 species. While most plants are native or cultivated in the Netherlands, 111 plant entries (105 spp.) represent exotic products, imported from as far as Madagascar and Australia. A total of 134 illustrations were cut out from a 1549 Dutch edition of the New Herbal by Leonhard Fuchs (1543), but only 69% correspond to the correct species. The manuscript contains detailed descriptions on growth locations, field characteristics, flowering season, provenance and quality of the medicinal products, including methods to detect forgery. The author mostly described humoral properties of the plants rather than listing medicinal recipes. We did not find evidence that he copied his texts from other sources, but the Dutch and Latin names correspond largely with the Amsterdam pharmacopoeia from 1795. CONCLUSIONS: The author's extensive knowledge on trade names, quality and origin of materia medica and his refrain from using literature suggests he could have been a merchant, an intermediary between herb cultivators, overseas traders and apothecaries. This manuscript offers a unique insight in the global trade in medicinal products and the circulation of knowledge in non-academic circles around 1800.

The Hidden History of a Famous Drug: Tracing the Medical and Public Acculturation of Peruvian Bark in Early Modern Western Europe (c. 1650-1720).

The history of the introduction of exotic therapeutic drugs in early modern Europe is usually rife with legend and obscurity and Peruvian bark is a case in point. The famous antimalarial drug entered the European medical market around 1640, yet it took decades before the bark was firmly established in pharmaceutical practice. This article argues that the history of Peruvian bark can only be understood as the interplay of its trajectories in science, commerce, and society. Modern research has mostly focused on the first of these, largely due to the abundance of medico-historical data. While appreciating these findings, this article proposes to integrate the medical trajectory in a richer narrative, by drawing particular attention to the acculturation of the bark in commerce and society. Although the evidence we have for these two trajectories is still sketchy and disproportionate, it can nevertheless help us to make sense of sources that have not yet been an obvious focus of research. Starting from an apparently isolated occurrence of the drug in a letter, this article focuses on Paris as the location where medical and public appreciation of the bark took shape, by exploring several contexts of knowledge circulation and medical practice there. These contexts provide a new window on the early circulation of knowledge of the bark, at a time when its eventual acceptance was by no means certain.