Bioprospecting and the Ecologies of Medicine

Over the summer of 2022, our research focused on the supply of and demand for medical ingredients.

On the demand side, we developed methods to compare lists of medical simples - the raw ingredients from which one produced medicines in the premodern world. We find these in drug tariff lists, natural history contents, apothecary inventories, and published pharmacopoeias that were updated, tweaked, and altered throughout the early modern period. We started by comparing materia medcia in different editions of the first published pharmacopoeia - the Ricettario Fiorentino. The Ricettario’s long publication history across the early modern period offers a window into the changing lists of viable medical substances as winnowed down by an evolving group of experts with shifting priorities. We then compared these to 30 Roman drug price lists from the Nobile collegio di farmacia e chimica.

On the supply side, we traced descriptions of bioprospecting in early modern texts. Bioprospecting is a modern term adopted as a framework for the action or process of searching for living organisms, specifically for plant or animal species from which commercially valuable genetic material, biochemicals, and medicinal drugs, can be obtained.