Questions:

• How did European colonialism abet the discovery of new medicines in the Modern/Early Modern Eras?
• How did these ‘discoveries’ change domestic or colonial medical practice?
• Compare and contrast Modern and Early Modern processes of medicinal discovery.

 

Core Readings:

Patrick Wallis, 'Exotic Drugs and English Medicine: England's Drug Trade, c. 1550 - c. 1800,' Social History of Medicine, 25, no. 1 (2011): 20-46 (Required - Seminar Reading).

Harold J. Cook & Timothy Walker, ’Circulation of Medicine in the Early Modern Atlantic World,’ Social History of Medicine, 26.3 (2013): 337 – 351 (Recommended).

 

Early Modern:

Benjamin Breen, ‘Empires on Drugs: Pharmaceutical Go-Between and the Anglo-Portuguese Alliance,’ in Jorge Cañizares-Esguerra, Entangled Empires: The Anglo-Iberian Atlantic, 1500 – 1830 (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2018): 63 – 82.

Pratik Chakrabarti, Materials and Medicine: Trade, Conquest, and Therapeutics in the eighteenth century (Manchester University Press, 2010).

Matthew J. Crawfurd, ‘A Cure for Empire? Chinchona Bark and the Politics of Knowledge in the Eighteenth-Century Spanish Empire,’ The Eighteenth Century, 59.2 (2018): 217 – 236.

Clare Griffin, ‘Russia and the Medical Drug Trade in the Seventeenth Century,’ Social History of Medicine, 31.1 (2018): 2 – 23.

Stefanie Gänger, ‘World Trade in Medicinal Plants from Spanish America, 1717–1815,’ Medical History, 59.1 (2014): 44 – 62.

Christopher M. Parson, ‘The Natural History of Colonial Science: Joseph-François Lafitau’s Discovery of Ginseng and its Afterlives,’ The William and Mary Quarterly, 73.1 (2016): 37 – 72.

Londa Schiebinger, Plants and Empire: Colonial Bioprospecting in the Atlantic World (Harvard University Press, 2004).

Londa Schiebinger, ‘Prospecting for Drugs: European Naturalists in the West Indies,’ in Londa Schiebinger and Claudia Swan (eds), Colonial Botany: Science, Commerce, and Politics in the Early Modern World (University of Pennsylvania Press: 2005): 119 – 134.

Patrick Wallis, ‘Exotics Drugs and English Medicine: England’s Drug Trade, c. 1550 – c. 1800,’ Social History of Medicine, 25.1 (2012): 20 – 46.

Timothy D. Walker, ‘The Medicines Trade in the Portuguese Atlantic World: Acquisition and Dissemination of Healing Knowledge from Brazil (c. 1580 – 1800),’ Social History of Medicine, 26.3 (2013): 403 – 431.

Anna E. Winterbottom, ‘Of the China Root: A Case Study of the Early Modern Circulation of Materia Medica,’ Social History of Medicine, 28.1 (2015): 22 – 44.

 

Modern:

Stuart Anderson, ‘Pharmacy and Empire: The "British Pharmacopoeia" as an Instrument of Imperialism, 1864 to 1932,’ Pharmacy in History, 52.3/4 (2010): 112-121

William Beinart, ‘From Elephant’s Foot … to Cortisone’: Boots Pure Drug Company and Dioscorea Sylvatica in South Africa, c. 1950 – 1963,’ South African Historical Journal, 71.4 (2019): 644 – 675.

Ryan Johnson, ‘Tabloid Brand Medicine Chests: Selling Health and Hygiene for the British Tropical Colonies,’ Science as Culture, 17.3 (2008): 249 – 268.

Markku Hokkanen, ‘Imperial Networks, Colonial Bioprospecting, and Burroughs Wellcome & Co.: The Case of Strophanthus Kombe from Malawi (1859 – 1915),’ Social History of Medicine, 25.3 (2012): 589 – 607.

James H. Mills, Cannabis Britannica: Empire, Trade, and Prohibition, 1800 – 1928 (OUP, 2003): 17 – 47.

Laurence Monnais and Noémi Tousignant, ‘The Values of Versatility: Pharmacists, Places, and Place in the French (Post)Colonial World,’ Comparative Studies in Society and History, 58.2 (2016): 432 – 462.

Tom C. McCaskie, “The Art or Mystery of Physick”: Asante Medicinal Plants and the Western Ordering of Botanical Knowledge,’ History in Africa, 44 (2017): 27 – 62.

Abena Dove Osseo-Asare, ‘Bioprospecting and Resistance: Transforming Poisons Arrows into Strophantin Pills in Colonial Gold Coast, 1855 – 1922,’ Social History of Medicine, 21.2 (2008): 269 – 290.

Hans Pols, ‘European Physicians and Botanists, Indigenous Herbal Medicine in the Dutch East Indies, and Colonial Networks of Mediation,’ East Asian science, Technology and Society, 3.2 (2009): 173 – 208.

Timothy Yang, A Medicated Empire: The Pharmaceutical Industry and Modern Japan (Cornell University Press: 2021): 185 – 207.