Extractions at the Intersection of Chemistry and History

Extraction Conversations

Two professors—a historian and a chemist—and two students sit in an office, down the hall from a chemistry lab at a liberal arts college.¹ The students are nervous, each ready to give a presentation on how to isolate a new chemical from a plant. On the bookshelves are copies of Medical Botany, a reference for medicinal plants, and The Evolution of Drug Discovery, alongside texts on cancer, natural products, and an astounding array of colorful work by the scientist’s young artist daughter.² As the students launch into their overview of how new alkaloids (melokhanines A–J) had been isolated from the twigs and leaves of the Melodinus khasianus, a plant found in the western Pacific, Indomalaya, and Meganesia, the professors sit at the edges of their seats.³ Both flit between excited listening and opening their browsers to check references in databases well known in their discipline, but opaque to the other. The chemist blurts out his questions: What kinds of compounds were isolated? Are they structurally similar to other known compounds? What was the process of isolation? If these alkaloids have been shown to have antibacterial activity, against what have they been tested? The historian asks hers: How long have people known about these plants? Where did they grow, and where are they today? Who has defined them botanically, and what relationship does that have to the communities to which they are most proximate? Have other plants evolved to produce these same compounds?

This article discusses how the disciplines of natural product chemistry and history can and should be put into conversation around historical pharmacopeias and the potential for that exchange. In so doing, we turn, as do other essays in this special issue, to the Historical Pharmacopeias (HP) data set. From that corpus, we adopt an expanded definition of the term “pharmacopeia”: a list of substances with bodily effects. Long before an official state apparatus sought to determine what medicaments were sanctioned, how they ought to be prepared, and in what quantities, various groups of experts created, organized, and recorded these substances in lists. Scholars contributing to HP move away from the strict, legalistic, and modern definition of a pharmacopeia. Some of these lists are “herbals,” but because that term emphasizes botanical materials to the exclusion of the many animals, minerals, and other objects believed to affect health, we find “pharmacopeia” to be more comprehensive. Sometimes these documents contain explicit preparation methods, such as the Pharmacopoea Fennica 1816 (referenced in what follows), but often they focus predominantly on ingredients.

Back to the office. Our goal in meeting that day was not to master any corner of the natural history or chemistry of Melodinus but to reflect on two interlocking phenomena. The first was a wonder of nature: radically different plants could evolve the same chemical defense against invasion in very different landscapes, and that defense could be known to local peoples in disparate regions who used the plants for similar applications for generations. The second was that the methods of extraction (as modern chemists would call it) mattered. Whether one left some part of a medically potent plant in water at room temperature, in boiling water, in methanol, or in chloroform, the resulting access to the compounds in it could be radically different. Just as practitioners of Galenic pharmacy in the early modern period sought to draw out a plant’s virtue, making it stronger or weaker, we sought to understand the range of a replicable means of accessing the bioactive potential in living plants.⁴

Perhaps it was a shared fascination with Youyou Tu (1930–) that gave our collaboration a leg on which to stand. In 2015, Tu received the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine, along with William C. Campbell, famed parasitologist, and Satoshi Ōmura, acclaimed for his discovery and development of hundreds of pharmaceuticals from microorganisms. Tu is best known for her work discovering and harvesting the antimalarial artemisinin by following the extraction method of Ge Hong, as described in a 1574 Ming dynasty text, A Handbook of Prescriptions for Emergencies.⁵ In traditional Chinese medicine, in which Tu trained from 1959 to 1962, practitioners used the qinghao (the Chinese name for Artemisia annua L.) plant to treat intermittent fevers. When reading these historical texts with modern medicine in mind, what if one saw those fevers as potentially caused by malaria, a life-threatening disease induced by Plasmodium falciparum? To come to the answer, Tu turned back to past experts’ reckoning with what worked in medicine. Reading between the lines of more than 2,000 Chinese herb preparations, Tu read these symptoms as potentially malarial, noting 640 hits that had “possible antimalarial activities.” From there, her research group of phytochemical and pharmacological researchers evaluated “more than 380 extracts from about two hundred Chinese herbs . . . against a mouse model of malaria.”⁶ If Tu could look to the past for ideas about how to improve future medicine, what might be learned from other traditions of medicine?

In what follows, we journey through the process of thinking about history with chemists and thinking about chemistry with historians. Over the course of the interchange, we follow research processes for both disciplines when engaging with material and textual sources. Whether for teaching a course on drug discovery, “Organic Synthesis toward Improved Human Health,” or a whirlwind tour of “Bioprospecting and Ecologies of Medicine,” we imagine a classroom that connects scientific and humanistic data sets and analyses.⁷ In sum, we posit how scientists might use the HP data set and how it might need scientists for further study.

Old Wine in New Bottles? Traditions of Reevaluating Traditional Medicine

While novel at Hamilton College, where some faculty rarely cross the physical bridge connecting what students call the “light side” of science buildings to the “dark side” of the social sciences and humanities, we knew well that our approach was far from unique. Tu’s Nobel Prize reflected the exciting research in this field and the growing impulse to turn to “natural” solutions for medical problems. In writing about Dioscorides, historian John Riddle has noted that what appeared to be a haphazard ordering of substances was often rooted in the physician’s understanding of what today we might read as active ingredients that elicited similar reactions regardless of their natural origins.⁸ Paula De Vos had developed a guide for how ethnopharmacologists might make use of European materia medica in historical texts, arguing that while the oral traditions on which much medicinal knowledge rests are unstable, textual sources provide “clues to further bioactive compounds that have not as of yet been fully exploited for their potential, but were clearly of great use in the past.”⁹ She argues that historical texts have been employed in two main areas: “regional surveys of local materia medica that show correspondence between textual and present-day folk traditions” and as “sources to guide [ethnopharmacologists] to new potential medicines through the study of their historic use.”¹⁰ This pattern still holds, as new research into the Byzantine pharmacy text in John the Physician’s Therapeutics develops a protocol of correlation to local plants,¹¹ while other methods seek to harness generated data via artificial intelligence to predict the discovery of bioactive natural products.¹²

Database use has been key to conversations between chemistry and history. The names of plants, their attributes, and their chemical components have all become nodes of data that can be connected in new ways by diverse communities of researchers. In 2014, natural ingredients supplier ChromaDex established a distinctive collaboration with St. Jude Children’s Research Hospital. Billed as an effort to advance research in pediatric cancer, ChromaDex advertised that it would provide St. Jude with access to its comprehensive ingredient library. The hospital could evaluate these ingredients using biological assays and tumor models to discover those with potential therapeutic benefits, as well as those that might be eligible for patent protection.¹³ In the world of botany, Kew Gardens’ “Plants for Heath” has created “a global reference for enabling regulators, industry, health practitioners and researchers to reliably access and exchange information concerning health products derived from plants or fungi.”¹⁴

Building on the collaborative potential of databases, the work of John Richard Stepp and Brent Bauer demonstrates how biodiversity and traditional medical knowledge can inform cutting-edge scientific research. As part of his research on biological and cultural diversity, Stepp has developed maps of biodiversity organized by highest biodiverse density hot spots of plants and languages worldwide.¹⁵ By linking linguistic and botanical diversity, these maps serve as a crucial tool for exploring the intricate connections between cultural and biological systems. Similarly, Bauer’s research at the Mayo Clinic underscores the pressing need to document ethnophamacological knowledge as traditional medicinal practice and biodiversity face significant decline. He notes that “while the promise of using ethnopharmacologic data is exciting, there is generational loss of traditional medical knowledge and the loss of biodiversity from source species. This makes work to document the ethnopharmacologic use of natural products time critical.”¹⁶ When it is possible to connect recipes and actual living tradition with living processes, observers can make new connections.¹⁷ These efforts highlight the importance of creating connections—between molecular analysis, historical uses, and traditional practices—to foster interdisciplinary insights. By integrating data from diverse fields, researchers can deepen their understanding of natural products and their historical, cultural, and chemical dimensions. How might access to such data facilitate the study of extractions at the intersection of chemistry, history, ethnobotany, and other disciplines? Alternatively, what form might more systematic collaborations between history and chemistry take—both at the level of undergraduate institutions and among elite researchers?

It is hard not to be inspired by the success of interdisciplinary teams aiming to “prospect” for drugs in ancient texts as a means of accelerating the search for new medicines. Scholars in the 1990s contended that “it would be cheaper and perhaps more productive to re-examine plant remedies described in ancient and medieval texts,” because at that point the state of high-throughput screening was in its infancy. Today drug discovery processes are much more powerful, expansive, and efficient, generating less waste in the process.¹⁸ Nevertheless, those earlier observers were correct in noting that “there is an extremely large and readily accessible body of traditional medicine” that has not been systematically evaluated as a source for new drugs.¹⁹ A lingering effect of winnowing down viable knowledge through the Scientific Revolution and its aftermath in the West, however, was the dismissal of premodern medicine as inherently flawed. This caused some valuable and effective remedies to be overlooked. For example, Harrison et al. demonstrated the enduring value of historical remedies through their study of a 1,000-year-old medieval eye salve. By carefully analyzing a tenth-century Anglo-Saxon leechbook and recreating the salve’s recipe, they confirmed its antibiotic properties and the necessity of its specific combination of ingredients. Such efforts underscore the value of integrating historical knowledge with modern scientific tools to unlock new therapeutic possibilities.²⁰

In assessing the “traditional uses” of herbs, the importance of competent historical research becomes evident in scientific projects that investigate the deeper past. Teams have carefully considered the concept of tradition as drawn from historically verifiable records.²¹ European attempts to foster the designation of “proof of tradition,” that is, verifying long-standing traditional use, help consumers evaluate claims about the different types of natural products. However, such verification alone does not guarantee a drug’s efficacy. In some ways this parallels the US system on herbal supplements, which are not regulated by the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) in the same manner as pharmaceutical drugs. This comparison also underscores the differences between EU and US regulatory policies and practices. Ultimately, it highlights how historical evidence, when combined with modern scientific evaluation, is crucial for determining whether traditional medicines are both therapeutic and safe.

Natural Products and Historical Knowledge: Bridging Science, Medicine, and Tradition

To understand the role of natural products in both historical and modern contexts, it is important to begin with definitions. In contemporary medicine, “natural products” encompass any materials derived from living organisms that elicit a biological effect. However, understanding and use of these materials have evolved significantly over time. While historians might discuss simples, materia medica, and compound medicines, chemists speak of natural products in terms of their molecular structure. The term entered scientific parlance by the Enlightenment period, when some scholars insisted on adding the term “naturali” to “prodotti,” clarifying the importance of nature to the making of unseen medicinal forces.²² Long before they used the term, premodern apothecaries, natural philosophers, and alchemists had impressively sophisticated insights into critical variables that could render a natural substance therapeutic, such as extraction techniques and dosage concentrations. Being derived from a natural source does not inherently make a natural product therapeutic or even safe. While nature has provided a wealth of materials, it also harbors dangers—poisons alongside cures. Premodern healers operated under the belief that “the dose makes the cure,” often using small amounts of poisons to treat infections. Rather than dismissing these remedies as hazardous, there is significant value in examining the original written sources. Retracing these historical practices enables modern observes to identify both their therapeutic potential and their inherent risks.

Natural products may be used as a single compound, as in morphine for pain relief, or as a mixture of compounds, as in an extract of St. John’s wort (Hypericum perforatum) for moderate depression. Most medicinal natural products have been derived from plant sources, but other living species such as microorganisms (e.g., penicillin from the bacterium Penicilliium rubens) or animals (e.g., ziconotide from cone snails) serve as rich resources for an array of natural products targeting a broad range of biological processes. In the context of natural product remedies, one must also consider the formulation and method of delivery. Traditional formulations, such as an herbal tea, contain mixtures of many different bioactive compounds, and their efficacy may depend on the combination of ingredients, acting on several biochemical pathways, instead of a single active agent. Conventional medicine, which includes natural products, evokes images of single-ingredient pills or injections, though many modern medicines also exist as drug combinations. These therapeutics generally have a well-understood mechanism of action in terms of what biological pathway is targeted by the drug.²³

Scientists can isolate different kinds of natural products from their source by subjecting them to a range of processing conditions such as solvent-based extraction, distillation, recrystallization, and chromatography.²⁴ Similarly, in folk medicine, the significant variation in processing conditions, including how the plant is cultivated, explain how one plant can target many different diseases. While any given medicinal plant might have the same (or mostly the same) collection of bioactive molecules, processing techniques vary in what portion of these compounds are isolated in the final therapeutic concoction (e.g., distillation in a water bath may yield only volatile, low-molecular-mass compounds like those found in essential oils). In terms of bioactivity, medicinal plants have an advantage as drug candidates because they have been subject to natural selection over billions of years of evolution, resulting in bioactive molecules that are optimized for medically important features, like the ability to penetrate cell membranes or selective binding to its biological target. This makes them prime candidates in drug discovery and development and explains why one-third of drugs approved by the FDA are naturally derived.²⁵

As ever in the history of natural products, there remains a dynamic tension between research and regulation. Though historians engage more systematically with natural product–based lists of medicaments, and the capabilities of chemical analysis are continuing to advance, the FDA’s approval of natural products has stagnated.²⁶ There are many reasons for this, ranging from the difficulty in isolating, characterizing, or synthesizing complex natural product structures, or, as in the case of antibiotics, discovering new compounds with distinct mechanisms of action to combat antibiotic resistance. Many of the efficacious remedies and tried-and-true formulation methods lie dormant in historical pharmacopeias awaiting the use of modern scientists. While modern experimental protocols are readily available in scientific databases like PubMed or SciFinder, comparable systems are lacking for tapping into, for example, traditional medicines, material sources, and historical extraction methods which may be critical for identification of the therapeutic agent(s) of a particular remedy.

Historians have developed spaces to think through premodern experiential knowing, often by creating laboratory environments in which people can physically reenact the processes of knowledge-making from the past. Initiatives like the Recipes Project have spaces to publish the result of experiences and analyses at the intersection of food, magic, art, and science.²⁷ Many essays published there combine historical primary sources with reflections on the act of making. Likewise at the crossroads of scientific knowing and craft making, the Making and Knowing Project has facilitated hands-on research and reconstructions in order to understand the nature of artisanal knowledge.²⁸ Through a study of texts such as the BnF Ms. Fr. 640 at Columbia University, researchers created aquafortis, medicinal plasters, and engravings on stones. This groundbreaking initiative has produced a remarkable group of scholars and experiences that go beyond the written histories of science to embrace a broader spectrum of knowledge. Committed to sharing their findings, on the “Sandbox” of resources from the project, collaborators have shared syllabi, complete with experiments and reconstructions protocols.²⁹ In sum, these dynamic initiatives have established laboratories that are “past-curious,” deeply engaging with the materiality of premodern history and reimagining how it is studied and understood.³⁰

We hope these spaces will spark enthusiasm within the scientific community, inspiring researchers to view such experiments not only as opportunities to reflect on premodern epistemologies but also as a way to reimagine historical methods of healing. Naturally, the stakes of experimental engagement with medicine are higher than the making of paints and molds. Medicine-making was one of the earliest sites of systematic experimentation, driven by the high stakes of life and death, health or illness, with individuals often testing remedies on their own bodies, on the sick and disempowered, and on animals. A laboratory component for historical pharmacopeias would not be best placed re-creating and testing concoctions for theriac. Rather, it might investigate the specifics of extraction techniques and explore the questions raised by tracing a natural product’s origins. The goal here is informational rather than purely experimental. Following in Tu Youyou’s footsteps, we wonder if ready access to repositories of historical pharmacopeias and a broader appreciation of historical artifacts as research resources could create new pathways for therapeutic discovery. What if this wealth of information, along with the textual sources that document it, could be made just as accessible as modern scientific databases?

Thinking Historically with Chemists

An increasing number of researchers are drawing on historical motivations to inform their interest in specific plants and their medicinal properties. Understanding these aspects of nature has been considered important to understanding the historical forces that drove exploration and trade. For example, a 2006 article examining the biosynthetic pathway of isoeugenol and eugenol from petunia petals, rich with fragrance molecules, highlighted the role of scent as a key motivator in the spice trade. The researchers emphasized this connection, writing:

The food-preserving and analgesic properties of eugenol-rich cloves lured explorers like Ferdinand Magellan and Christopher Columbus across the seas in search of new routes to the Far East, which was, at the time, the sole source of cloves. Although Columbus never reached India, he did discover the Americas and, incidentally, found the source for a new spice, allspice (Pimienta dioica, Myrtaceae), which contains the beneficial phenylpropene compound isoeugenol.³¹

The chemical function of spices and their underlying importance inspired global connectivity, even conquest, in the argument of these authors. To know the chemistry of natural products was to venture into a new chapter in the history of discovery, now in the laboratory instead of foreign seas.³² This assertion is more than a framing device: it reflects an effort to engage in the study of physical nature with early modern roots.

For many researchers today, the origins and historical position of discoveries from the deep past is simply not on the radar, even if they might play a role in their work. Distanced by a labyrinth of archives, challenging handwriting, and diverse and antiquated languages, historical pharmacopeias and traditional plant knowledge are hard to access. Likewise, disciplinary conventions turn to different standards of proof in chemistry versus history, one specializing in showing underlying materialities, the other in written texts in different traditions. To show the conventions of engaging with past-drawn evidence, one could look to many different publications. We turn to one team’s citation of the extraction of alkaloids from Melodinus khasianus (Shan chen shu), which was implicated in traditional Chinese medicine (TCM). By analyzing a citation of a primary source in what is otherwise a compelling chemistry paper, and building on other arguments, we aim to suggest disciplinary proclivities and potentially missed opportunities of connecting historical information to material analysis.

In several recent natural product studies involving isolation, characterization, and bioactivity testing, researchers have found M. khasianus to contain a number of monoterpenoid indole alkaloids, which provide neuroprotective action against oxidative stress damage or antimicrobial activity against several bacterial and fungal pathogens.³³ Rich with potential, in 2016 an article in the Journal of Natural Products waded into the literature, reporting the isolation and characterization of ten alkaloids from M. khasianus. In framing their argument, the chemists cite the use of the plant for treatment of pediatric rheumatic heart disease and meningitis in TCM. Unlike many other papers that do not cite their sources, this article does: they had turned to an encyclopedic website called efloras.org that holds digital copies of Flora Reipublicae Popularis Sinicae, otherwise known as the Flora of China. While this secondary source contains the physical description, location, and native name of more than 31,000 species, it does not include any details regarding how these plant extracts were prepared and used in TCM.³⁴

Often in the literature, scientists noted M. khasianus’s status as a medicinal plant but without context of its origins or traditional uses. Because of the different disciplinary standards, and the tendency to cite full articles instead of page numbers, the promise of historical evidence sometimes leads one down a rabbit hole of scientific articles, each citing some vague evidence of traditional medicinal uses. The historical basis of the natural products journal comes from a review article, rather than primary historical sources. While citations of recent reviews and meta-analyses may be standard practice and even appropriate, they risk obscuring or oversimplifying key information about the subject. For example, in a 2014 review article about Melodinus plants and their chemical makeup and pharmacological potential, the review describes the use of Melodinus henryi and Melodinus suaveleons for treating the aforementioned diseases, not M. khasianus.³⁵ In turn, this review article cites a historical basis of two more articles. Upon further analysis, neither of these establish the historical position of this discovery. The first article was a preliminary communication showing the antibiotic efficacy of alkaloids.³⁶ The second article cited the physical copies of the Flora of China books. Born of other research questions and a hand wave toward other contextual arenas, the result is a loop of scientific citations, which ultimately never leads to a primary source.

To be sure, historical origin is a subsidiary point to these studies, meant to offer context rather than cited as an argumentative lynchpin. Still, what might the scientists have found if they could look at those earliest records themselves, with ease? How might the Journal of Natural Products improve their citation standards, taking seriously the origins of sociocultural evidence on the history of medicine? Even if they had wanted to, these scientists would have struggled to access the original documents mentioning Melodinus. To do so would have required expert knowledge to locate the documents, read the language, and draw concordances between plants, bioactive compounds, Chinese names, and modern botanical terms. A new generation of resources—created through interdisciplinary collaboration between technically trained historians and scientists—has aimed to fill this gap. In the case of TCM, Michael Stanley-Baker’s Polyglot Asian Medicine will help make this corpus accessible, connecting mentions of premodern natural products to descriptions from the Kew Gardens’ Medicinal Plant Name Services.³⁷ Through Stanley-Baker’s award-winning data set and platform, it is possible to observe “the intersection of traditional medical systems and languages” in Southeast Asia and Singapore, as well as China, Malaysia, and East Timor. By enabling scholars and scientists to access texts for close reading, synonymies to translate across languages and epistemes, tools for future research, and ethnographic videos of modern practice, Polyglot Asian Medicines offers a path ad fontes, or to the textual sources themselves. How might historians of the Galenic pharmacopeia tradition—and its interaction with global indigenous traditions—take a leaf out of this book?

Artemisia Bioprospecting

Might a tool like HP be used to identify candidate herbal plants and other substances for scientific assays? To achieve this, researchers must be able to perform comparative searches across pharmacopeias, examining how a single substance with bodily effect appears in different sources. Candidate matching relies on cross-referencing. As other articles in this special issue demonstrate, comparing several pharmacopeias simultaneously allows researchers to uncover patterns in the popularity of substances through a frequency analysis. This approach might also correlate these patterns with the availability of specific natural products. If pharmacopeias sought to preserve knowledge of proven substances, repeated mentions of these substances should be interpreted as reflecting their enduring significance, legibility, and accessibility.

To envision these connections, we turn to look again at Artemisia, this time not in the TCM tradition but as it appears in Historical Pharmacopeias. Artemisia has interested an array of researchers focused on the cross-cultural context of medicinal plant use and its scientific exploration. In 2024, a team of scientists aimed to advance the “bioprospecting of the Artemisia genus.” Notably, their article is one of the few scientific publications to use the term “bioprospecting” not only as a descriptor of plant-based exploration, but as a verb with positive connotations—a stark contrast to its frequent use in humanistic and development contexts to denote revenue-generating extraction or employed as a critique. Focusing on the Italian countryside, the researchers identified five Artemisia species that appear in the ethnobotanical tradition (A. absinthium, A. alba, A. annua, A. verlotiorum, and A. vulgaris), all of which can be found growing around Verona, Italy.³⁸ While the researchers’ primary goal was to document terpenoids derived from A. alpha, their work situates itself within a broader trend—exemplified by Tu Youyou’s methodology—where the discovery of new plant-derived drugs has historically relied on ethnobotanical insights. By integrating ethnobotanical, phytochemical, and molecular phylogenetic data, they aim to develop predictive models for medicinal plant applications. This raises compelling questions: How many Artemisia species contain biochemically active components? How many have played active roles in medical traditions? Given the prominence of Artemisia in Mediterranean pharmacopeias, a more profound exploration of these plants, both temporally and geographically, seems ripe with potential.

What is Artemisia? This is a thorny issue. For our purposes, it is a botanical category for a medicinally virtuous plant. By taking the Linnean botanical category and reading it backward in time, dynamically interacting with the local historical terms for this plant, we see the biochemical impact of Artemisia consumption as consistent across time when prepared similarly. Of course, social context shapes the efficacy of the medicine, but we take these natural designations and human reactions to biochemistry as consistent. In regard to the medicinal virtues of specific Artemisia subtypes, practitioners praised A. abrotanum for its ability to destroy worms, act as an antidote to poisons, and wound-healing properties.³⁹ A. vulgaris was known for its birth-inducing, menstruation-inducing, and fever-reducing properties.⁴⁰ It was given in decoctions for joint pain and was used in treating hysteria and epilepsy.⁴¹ A. absinthium and A. cina were used to destroy worms and treat intermittent fevers and gout.⁴² Taxonomic certainty is a slippery art, and species of Artemisia were able to substitute others, as A. vulgaris and A. pontica were commonly used as a substitute for A. absinthium. A. vulgaris L. is also given in decoctions to reduce fevers and to apply to the skin for rheumatic and arthritic ailments. Both the variety of artemisias and the variety of vernacular names for this plant make it difficult to identify in historical sources.

The generic name Artemisia drifts into and out of the HP corpus, as suggested in Table 1. It appears in the inventory of Gabriellus Maurelli, an apothecary in Marseille. Upon his death in 1428, the Old Provençal inventory that recorded Maurelli’s stores included Artemisia (referred to as arthemizie).⁴³ Given wormwood’s prominence in Dioscoridean medicine, it was mentioned using a variety of common names. By comparing iterations of the Ricettario Fiorentino published from the 1490s to the 1780s, alongside price lists from Rome, we observe Artemisia plants used in many remedies. Notably “artemisia” was not mentioned in the Ricettario in the 1498, 1550, 1567, 1627, 1670, or 1696 editions. However, in the 1789 Ricettario it appears prominently, listed as a variation of “Abrotano maschio” (Southernwood) by Mattioli, Abrotanum in the Officinarum, and “Artemisia Ambrotanum” in the Linnean system. What had been Southernwood in English, Auronne in French, and Stabwurtz in German was gradually standardized under the genus Artemisia as the Linnean nomenclature gained traction.⁴⁴ This shift toward standardization and binomial nomenclature epitomized the Enlightenment project. Previously, simples had been characterized alphabetically or by environmental context. By the Enlightenment, they were classified according to the “three kingdoms of nature, that is mineral, vegetable, and animal.” Names also evolved. While earlier Mattiolian names were retained “for the facility of our apothecaries” (reflecting their provincial priorities) the official Latin Linnean names were added, being considered “more secure, and universally embraced.”⁴⁵ Medical plants could now be identified, scientifically named, and linked to their origins in living nature. This shift was accompanied by a new section featuring chemical characters to indicate principal substances and a conversion chart for measures.

A series of Roman medicinal price lists published from 1609 to 1803 also includes mentions of artemisia. Artemisia appears by name from 1609 under the types of “siroppo rosado solut,” or the rose syrup, valued at “ba. 10 l’onc.” ⁴⁶ “Ba.” stands for a “baiocco” [plural baiocchi], a small silver coin in wide circulation throughout the Papal States. One baiocco was worth 1/100 of a scudo. “L’onc” means oncia or ounce. By 1617 the price was again listed at “b 10 l’onc,” where it stayed through 1627. Then the medicine makers seem to have stopped carrying it altogether; it is absent from the 1638 and 1647 price lists.⁴⁷ In a price list from Rome in 1673, Artemisia appeared as a “Sali di Coralli,” available at twenty drams.⁴⁸ In 1674, it appeared as a salt again (b. 20 la dram). Other sources, written in Italian, cited the syrup as a helpful way to stimulate menstrual flow and urine, as well as acting as an antispasmodic and antihysteric; by one description it was composed of salts, the extract of an artemisia varietal and other substances.⁴⁹

Artemisia varietals grew far from Italy. Beyond that, European travelers were interested in finding natural products they could substitute for familiar, Old-World medicines. Artemisia flowers appear in many translations of sixteenth-century Nahua writings on medicine and culture. In describing the ceremonies of sacrifice, the collaborators of Bernardino de Sahagún, working on what would be called the Florentine Codex, noted in the Spanish text that

all those who were present at this sacrificial offering would hold in their hands that herb that they call iztauhyatl, which is almost like Castilian wormwood, and they would keep fanning themselves with them, like one who is swatting flies away from one’s face or away from one’s children; and they said that by doing this they would keep away the worms, so that they would not get into their eyes and cause that eye disease that they call ixocuillohualiztli. Others would put this herb inside their ears. Also out of superstition, others would carry this herb in their fist or hold it tightly with their fist.⁵⁰

In their critical edition, Arthur Anderson and Charles Dibble identified this plant as Artemisia mexicana (Figure 1) and translated the scene as one where the herbs were not present as a medical solution but were part of the ceremony. The Nahua collaborators wrote the scene with an emphasis on how, “when there had been the killing, all the bystanders who had been watching continually, all went with their hands continually filled with their artemisia flowers. They went thrusting them, they went lunging with them to and fro, they went fanning themselves. It was said that they frightened away the worms.”⁵¹ Insects ran from iztauyahtl. The natural historical section of the text On Earthly Things again collated it to Castilian wormwood (Figure 2). It could be ground and crushed. In Nahuatl, the authors noted that it could be crumbled in the hands, and its branches were ashen, the foliage slender. In Spanish, the collaborators noted that “ground up in water and drunk, it expels choler and phlegm. When drunk, it is also good for those who have indigestion. It also relieves fever. And it also purifies urine. And it is also good for someone who has a burning headache.” In Nahuatl, it would settle phlegm, noting that “one who has a relapse drinks it; it throws off the fever which is within one.”⁵²

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Figure 1.

Artemisia ludoviciana, Mexicana subspecies, featured on Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew, Plants of the World Online.

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Figure 2.

Iztauhyahtl. Available at Digital Florentine Codex/Códice Florentino Digital, edited by Kim N. Richter and Alicia Maria Houtrouw, “Book 11: Earthly Things,” fol. 157v, Getty Research Institute, 2023. https://florentinecodex.getty.edu/en/book/11/folio/157v.

Some pharmacopeias offer a valuable resource for deeper exploration of preparation methods, especially for A. ludoviciana and A. absinthium. As discussed, Nahuas suggested that one should crush itzauhyatl in one’s hands and apply it in a various ways. In his notes on Mexican medicine, Dr. Francisco Hernández described finding a variant near the mountains of Tepoztlán. He thought that “the properties are unknown to Indian doctors, with leaves like wormwood or iztáuhyatl.” He characterized its leaves for their hairy sprouts, the thickness of a finger, and its aromatic taste, and its “hot and dry qualities Galenic terms.”⁵³ Other texts describe this herb fluently in Nahuatl, suggesting that Hernández’s understanding was not as unique as he implied. For instance, remedies in the Libellus medicinalibus indorum herbis, a text produced in Mexico in 1552, document its use in treating sore hands.⁵⁴

Currently, the dominant argument is that before the tenth century, Mediterranean society did not use the Artemisia species for treating malaria.⁵⁵ Leading historians have shown how challenging it is to retrospectively diagnose a malady like malaria and the profound historical influence of malaria-carrying mosquitos.⁵⁶ How might the examination of pharmacopeias from different geographical regions provide a more complete story of the Artemisia plants? Because the Artemisia genus consists of a variety of plants having similar natural product compositions, and antimalarial, antiparasitic, and antioxidant properties, can a wider semantic field associated with these plants point toward other associated antimalarials? Using the National Center for Biotechnology Information Medical Archives database, we noted that various sources, dated between 1600 and 1850, describe the virtues of the Artemisia species and indicate their use as a treatment for malarial fevers. Physicians and botanists of France, Italy, and the Americas noted the Artemisia species’ ability to stimulate menstruation in women and fight intermittent fevers.⁵⁷

These observations align with later accounts such as those in Francois Victor Merat De Vaumartoise’s nineteenth-century dictionary of materia medica, where he praised the Artemisia species for its emmenagogue and digestive properties. More interestingly, he cites its febrifuge properties, that although inferior to other plants with this property, are very successful in combating intermittent fevers characteristic of malarial agues. Before the 1890s, malaria was not associated with Plasmodium falciparum, the protozoa responsible for the progression of this disease. Instead, people believed that bad air caused malaria and characterized it by fevers that would “come and go.”⁵⁸ Physicians noting that the Artemisia species was commonly used against intermittent fevers might be read as reflecting that it was used to treat malarial fevers. This claim finds support in the documented use of Artemisia in tandem with other therapeutics undoubtedly used for malaria, such as cinchona bark.⁵⁹

Other approaches combining historical and chemical study have addressed this need.⁶⁰ Studies of malaria in the Renaissance and antimalarial remedies have shown that as tropical malaria continues to be endemic in equatorial countries, we can look at past European remedies, specifically a German book of herbals or Kräuterbuch, used in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. These Renaissance books of herbals (which our project would define as pharmacopeias) were popular recorders of medieval folk medicine with Greek, Latin, and Arabic influences. In research led by Adams et al., 314 plants with an association with malarial fever were found in eight original herbals, all located at the Swiss Pharmaceutical Museum and then cross-searched in scientific databanks for more recent phytochemical discoveries. Only 11 individual plants of the hundreds noted by the researchers are currently used to treat malaria. One such previously explored plant for treatment is cinchona bark. Overall, European plants are underrepresented in antimalarial research.

As this study draws on a German corpus, a broader investigation is worth pursuing. By expanding the category of pharmacopeias to many different types of lists of medicaments, some sanctioned, others functional, from around the world, new patterns in botanical substances might be located. There are different kinds of malaria, each caused by parasites that prefer different temperature environments. If we focus on historical texts or herbals from a specific location, our list of potential plants to explore remains restricted to a subset of plants that will most likely be effective against a particular parasite. Given that malaria tropica (caused by P. falciparum) is the most prevalent and most lethal, it would make sense to explore an expanded set of pharmacopeias and other engagements with substances with bodily effects from warm regions such as South America, Central America, South Asia, and Southeast Asia.

By examining at the HP data set through the lens of a scientist, the question of why not create a more global one that transcends local cultural differences becomes harder to dismiss. Historians often emphasize the expertise required to navigate a single temporal, linguistic, and geographic source base. In contrast, scientific methodologies tend to encourage more universalistic hypotheses. If the HP data set were connected to other projects on regional medicines, remedies from one region might be compared to or isolated from other practices farther away. Throughout our collaboration, the scientists on our team emphasized the importance of studying and connecting pharmacopeias from every geographical area and location. When it comes to malaria, the value of such an analysis is evident. Different regions, exposed to varying environmental conditions, likely developed pharmacopeic knowledge of unique substances tailored to specific types of fevers, including those caused by distinct forms of malaria. This highlights the potentially significant cost of perpetuating metageographic categories by limiting the historical corpus. There is an advantage of to projects that strive to build expansive ontologies that enable comparisons across vastly different regions, as much could be gained from globalizing the field of study. TCM, ayurvedic medicine, and the European apothecary tradition all share commonalities in their historical collections of medicament names and recipes. While historians often find it challenging to think beyond the cultural specificity of their own region of expertise, the potential benefits of a truly global source base is clear from a scientific perspective.

Today, the six Artemisia species are known to have diverse effects on the body and remain present in both herbal and mainstream medicine, as indicated in Table 1. Their bioactive compounds primarily include terpenoids, sesquiterpenes, flavonoids, and alkaloids, which exhibit a wide range of bioactivities. Some act as enzyme inhibitors that block pain channels, while others aid in cholesterol biosynthesis by mitigating oxidative stress. These compounds also promote cellular responses such as inducing apoptosis (cell death) in cancerous cells and producing free radicals that damage harmful bacteria and parasites, disrupting their biological processes and leading to their death.⁶¹ The medicinal efficacy of some plants often depends on the synergistic action of their natural products, rather than the effects of individual compounds. This is exemplified by A. abrotanum’s activity against Candida albicans. While davanone, which is suspected to be the active natural product, showed weak in vitro activity against the pathogens, extracts containing the full spectrum of the plant’s natural products yielded much stronger results.⁶² Additionally, A. pontica remains understudied and shows potential for future exploration, particularly for its antimalarial properties, ability to combat worms, and neuroprotective effects against Alzheimer’s disease.⁶³

Through research into natural products, scientific databases, historical records, and early modern pharmacopeias, we suggest that that practitioners of the Galenic pharmaceutical tradition valued and consistently employed the Artemisia species for the treatment of a wide range of maladies, possibly including malaria. Although the plant was known by different names, it seems likely that medical practitioners in the Americas and Europe used it for distinct yet overlapping purposes. Because malaria was not identified as being caused by parasites until the late nineteenth century, confidently diagnosing the fevers in question as malarial is challenging. However, malaria’s consistent characterization by “intermittent fevers” lends credence to this interpretation. Today, there is growing interest in revisiting the medical virtues of Artemisia species to explore their potential in treating old diseases that have grown resistant to conventional treatments, as well as new and emerging illnesses.

Artemisia Extracts: Directions for Further Research

A. absinthium appears to be more prominent in historical pharmacopeias than in modern research journals, highlighting a potential disconnect between historical knowledge and contemporary scientific inquiry. Whether intentional or not, researchers often follow the strands of inquiry laid centuries ago, perpetuating patterns of interest while neglecting others. While A. absinthium has been investigated for fever-reducing properties, other subtypes—also historically used as fever reducers—have received far less attention. For instance, to our knowledge, A. abrotanum has not been extensively investigated for its alexipharmic and wound-healing qualities and A. vulgaris has yet to be adequately researched for its applications in treating emmenagogue disorders, hysteria, epilepsy, or rheumatic fever. Moreover, it would be valuable to trace when A. ludoviciana and Artemisia genus more broadly began to feature explicitly in global pharmacopeias of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.

To better understand the interaction between modern medical research and A. absinthium, we conducted a literature search using PubMed. Surprisingly, only 287 results showed up, with only 16 articles related to A. absinthium’s anti-inflammatory and anti-insecticidal effects. Of these, only four explored A. absinthium’s anti-inflammatory properties, while the rest investigated on anti-insecticidal properties against various mosquito vectors, including those responsible for avian plasmodium (Culiseta longiareolata), dengue, malaria, and filariasis.⁶⁴ Despite the limited number of publications, existing studies affirm the historical validity of A. absinthium’s medicinal uses. For instance, Amrollahi et al. (2014) demonstrated the nociceptive and anti-inflammatory properties of A. absinthium essential oil and aqueous extracts, showing greater efficacy in inhibiting writhing response in mice compared to established non-steroidal anti-inflammatory drugs like aspirin.⁶⁵ Similarly, Neagu et al. (2023) provided molecular and biological evidence that A. absinthium extracts can inhibit lipoxygenase (LOX), a key enzyme in the inflammatory process.⁶⁶ Human clinical studies also reinforce these findings. Basiri et al. (2017) conducted a double-blind study in which they provided ninety outpatients aged thirty to seventy years, comparing the effects of A. absinthium ointment with piroxicam gel. Remarkably, the A. absinthium ointment alleviated pain as effectively as the standard treatment.⁶⁷

Recent biochemical studies conducted have further validated the anti-insecticidal properties of A. absinthium, confirming its historical uses as described in pharmacopeias. In 2022, Bouabida and Dris showed that the leaf extracts of A. absinthium exhibited larvicidal activities in interactions with Culiseta longiareolata parasites.⁶⁸ Similarly, Mihajilov-Krstev et al. (2014) highlighted the insect repellent properties of the A. absinthium essential oil, showing its ability to disrupt the development of Drosophila melanogaster.⁶⁹ Another study examining leaves collected in Sweden found that the essential oil of A. absinthium demonstrated strong tick-repellant properties.⁷⁰ Most notably, research has shown that the essential oil exhibits larvicidal activity against six malaria vectors, underscoring its potential for combatting mosquito-borne diseases.⁷¹

While these studies affirm the validity of A. absinthium’s historical use for anti-inflammatory, anti-insecticidal, or antimalarial purposes, they also show its limitations as a medical treatment. For example, Amrollahi et al. found that A. absinthium essential oil did not significantly decrease abdominal twitches in mouse models—indirect measures of pain and inflammation.⁷² Moreover, the highest doses produced the greatest inhibition, contrasting sharply with the performance of morphine, which achieved 91 percent and 95 percent inhibition in the early and late phases, respectively. In a follow-up study comparing the anti-insecticidal efficacy of A. absinthium with R. graveolens and R. montana, A. absinthium extracts were less effective. While they significantly reduced the parasite’s protein reserves, they had no impact on carbohydrate and lipid content, enabling the parasite to maintain its biological mechanisms.⁷³ Unlike the other plants, A. absinthium extracts failed to induce 100 percent mortality, even at its highest dosage. These findings underscore the importance of conducting phytochemical screenings during natural product extraction. Most studies in our literature review failed to perform such screenings, and among those that did, only two successfully identified the active secondary metabolite responsible for Artemisia’s medicinal effects. Without these analyses, the specific metabolites driving A. absinthium’s bioactivity remain unidentified, limiting its potential as a precise therapeutic agent.

Studies have sought to compare the anti-insecticidal activity of A. absinthium with the repellent for Aedes aegypti, the mosquito vector of malaria, by using acetone, methanol, and chloroform extracts. Acetone extract of the A. absinthium leaves has been considered the best natural insecticide against this vector. Such studies provide valuable models for future research aimed at optimizing extraction methods to maximize the medicinal effects of natural products. However, the absence of comprehensive phytochemical analyses, which examine secondary metabolites across different extracts and compare their profiles, often leaves the specific compounds or artifacts responsible for the observed medicinal effects unidentified. Acetone can be quite reactive toward certain compounds (e.g., alkaloids containing a primary amine), so it may produce a non-natural bioactive product. An analysis larvicidal activity of different solvent extracts of A. absinthium against six mosquito vectors found that the most effective extracts were the root and leaf extracts.⁷⁴ They suggested this effect is due to secondary metabolites (E)-β-farnesene, (Z)-en-yn-dicycloethe and (Z)-β-ocimene, which are usually present in essential oil extracts. Once again, the collaborators were unable to narrow the effect down to one secondary metabolite and only speculated about the primary natural product without conducting a phytochemical study.

Building on the historical and scientific insights into A. absinthium, we expanded our inquiry to A. ludoviciana to assess its antinociceptive, anti-inflammatory, and fever-fighting properties. A literature search revealed a surprising scaricity of studies: only two articles (published in 1998 and 2016) addressed its antinociceptive and anti-inflammatory effects, while six articles focused on its anti-parasitic properties. Despite this limited research, the existing studies highlight the historical parallels to these to these modern medical uses. In 2016, Anaya-Eugenio and colleagues demonstrated that A. ludoviciana essential oil could decrease the first and second phases of formalin-induced nociception in mice at the highest dosage, acting through opioid receptor inhibition.⁷⁵ Similarly, Liu and colleagues identified another mechanism for its anti-inflammatory effects, showing that leaf extracts target the nuclear family kappa B class of proteins, a key regulator of pro-inflammatory gene expression.⁷⁶ Anti-parasitic activity was also confirmed in a 2014 study, which found that A. mexicana (ludoviciana) extracts strongly inhibited epimastigote growth.⁷⁷ Similarly, a 2021 study by Espinosa et al. identified eupatilin and estafiatin in extracts of dichloromethane, ethyl acetate, n-butanol, and other residual extracts and showed that the dichloromethane extract and ethyl acetate extract could induce a protective effect that is similar to carbenoxolone. Though these studies validate the historical efficacy of A. ludoviciana, they fail to isolate the primary active metabolite responsible for its medicinal qualities out of the constellation of active constituents.

In light of these findings, A. absinthium and related species such as A. ludoviciana remain underexplored in contemporary research despite their historical prominence and demonstrate potential in addressing a range of medical challenges. Future studies should prioritize phytochemical screenings and rigorous extraction analyses to identify the specific bioactive compounds responsible for their therapeutic effects. Such investigations could bridge the gap between historical pharmacopeic knowledge and modern scientific practices, paving the way for more targeted applications in treating diseases and combating vectors of global health concern. By integrating historical insights with contemporary methodologies, researchers may unlock new possibilities for rediscovering and optimizing the medicinal potential of Artemisia species.

Natural Product Searching in and beyond Historical Pharmacopeias

The interplay between historical knowledge and modern biochemical research underscores the importance of revisiting natural product extraction methods, especially when addressing the inconsistencies and limitations observed in current studies. Mihajilov-Krstev and colleagues best explained the reason behind issues of low efficacy, inconsistent results, and inability to identify the primary natural product causing these medicinal effects.⁷⁸ A major reason behind these complications is that the characteristics of the essential oil of the plant differ across regions, seasons, environmental conditions, and extraction conditions. A degree of standardization of different extraction methods, and knowing the secondary metabolite profile that characterizes it, and whether it causes differences in efficacy are imperative.

In some cases, it is possible that historical sources would improve the efficacy of extraction methods by providing information about a plant. Some pharmacopeias provide information about the region from which plants should be collected, the duration of the extraction period, the temperature, and what parts of the plant to select. In a prospective study, one could prepare these different extracts with differing conditions, conduct experiments assessing whether it is an effective treatment against the disease it has been used against historically, and conduct phytochemical studies on the different extracts to assess what metabolites could explain differences in degrees of efficacy. Combining biochemical tools with historical information would help researchers determine the optimal extraction method for a plant in treating different ailments. To demonstrate, we investigated the HP database and identified extraction methods and conditions for A. absinthium and A. ludoviciana and proposed possible ways to improve the extraction methods and conditions outlined in various studies. We focused on the Pharmacopea Fennica, an official published reference pharmacopeia. Unlike many other vernacular pharmacopeias, it included a wide array of information, including details of extraction methods.

Pharmacopoea Fennica catalogued a diverse array of medicinal substances circulating Finland in the early nineteenth century (1819). The authors encouraged three different preparations of Artemisia, labeled as “Pharmaceutical preparations:” extract (extractacum absinthii), essential oil (aetheroleum absinthium), and tinctures (tinctura absinthium and tinctura absinthii composita). Pharmacopoea Fennica also provides definitions and detailed information about the extracts, tinctures, and essential oils, describing extracts as preparations made with a sprinkle of alcohol and kept in well-warmed earthen vessels while being stored in a cold place. The text described essential oils as being distilled in underground cellars and covered with papyrus. Pharmacopoea Fennica outlines many of the ways one could extract the natural product from Artemisia. For example, to produce and make the essential oil, Pharmacopoea Fennica advised one to boil the herb in a large volume of water and collect and keep separate the oil that drips. To prepare an extract of absinthium, one must cook the herb in boiling water for a quarter of an hour, and then boil it again under the same conditions. The pharmacopeia provided instructions regarding the preparation of tinctures, advising placing tinctures in corn spirit and allowing it to soak for three days before using. It outlined the process for producing another form: tincture absinthium complete. The process involved crushing and digesting two ounces of the top parts of absinthium, blessed thistle herb, unripe orange fruit, and galangal root in two pounds of rectified aqueous alcohol and then filtering the resulting substance through paper. The Pharmacopoea Fennica was highly informative as it explains the experimental conditions necessary for performing an effective phytochemical analysis of A. absinthium, along with the conditions necessary for constructing essential oils and extracts.⁷⁹ For modern studies to achieve these historically optimized extraction methods, they must have a large ratio of solvent to solute, a short extraction time, and an alcohol-based extraction. By reconstructing the experimental conditions outlined in historical pharmacopeias that offer such information for extracting natural products, modern studies might mirror the experimental approaches from history and might achieve greater success in their effort to extract natural products from plants.

Some scientists have already taken on such methods, harkening back to the model of Tu Youyou discussed earlier in this article. In a study by Molina-Garza and colleagues, crushed aerial parts (i.e., all of the parts of a plant grown above the soil in contact with the air) of A. ludoviciana were extracted with an alcohol-based solvent (methanol) for an extended period of time (40 hours) via a Soxhlet extractor, resulting in an extract with an epimastigote growth inhibition of 83 percent.⁸⁰ Although this study reveals the benefits of using a hot extraction method for a long time with an alcohol solvent, it would be worthwhile to examine the effect on the extract’s efficacy by performing an extraction on only the leaves of A. ludoviciana, as outlined in historical texts, rather than all aerial parts. Ezeta-Miranda and colleagues show the benefits of adhering to extraction methods outlined in these historical texts.⁸¹ This group had conducted four different extractions in solvents by air-drying them at a hot temperature (60°C) for three days and then macerating them, which is another heat-based extraction method, with hexane, ethyl acetate, and methanol in a proportion of one to five plant material and solvent solution. Despite having completed different extractions, all of their fractionated extracts obtained 100 percent efficacy rate at twenty-four or forty-eight hours of exposure to the Fasciola hepatica. In conducting their phytochemical studies, they were able to detect and identify artemisinin in the Artemisia ludoviciana. The plants were also harvested in Mexico, which is where the sixteenth-century Spanish-Nahua pharmacopeias likewise situated them.

In some cases, historical pharmacopeias, such as the Pharmacopoea Fennica, provide more than lists of substances with bodily effects—they offer valuable insights into the methods and conditions under which natural products like A. absinthium and A. ludoviciana were historically prepared and used. While modern studies often diverge from these historical techniques, revisiting and adapting them could help address current challenges in natural product research, such as inconsistent efficacy and incomplete phytochemical profiling. By aligning historical knowledge with contemporary research, scientists may enhance their understanding of plant-based medicines and improve extraction methods, paving the way for more effective applications of these medicinal plants. Although historical practices may not always translate directly into modern contexts, they offer a useful foundation for exploring alternative approaches to the study of natural products.

Reflections from the Goop Era

In this article we have shown the value of using the HP corpus in tandem with a biochemical literature review and preliminary investigations in the lab. In accessing historical mentions of medicaments through HP, we considered how the mention of a specific medicament suggested its value, preparation method, and treatment profile. When the pharmacopeia format trickled into natural history and remedy, we moved beyond searching for terms into considering passages that included particular discussions of locating the substance, whether that was growing on the hillside of Tepoztlán or being processed into ointments. Pharmacopeias provide qualitative information such as the description of the plant, its uses, and how to prepare it, allowing us to identify methods for optimizing extraction methods and a new path for natural product exploration. This new approach to drug development asks scientists to investigate and determine the extraction method that would best produce efficacious results and compare the different extractions’ phytochemical profiles to then determine the principal natural product responsible for a plant’s medicinal effect.

HP is committed to ensuring public access to information about what goes into substances with bodily effects and the long history of their use. We live and research in a “goop” era, to use the name of actress Gwyneth Paltrow’s controversial wellness and lifestyle company.⁸² American consumers are interested in exploring the medicinal qualities of the plants they can grow in their gardens and those that live on the pages of historical pharmacopeias. We see evidence for this as people swallow honey to ease the pain of sore throats and passengers on flights slurp ginger ale to soothe motion sickness. Around the world, a growing number of people rely on herbal remedies and phytonutrients, aptly called “nutraceuticals.” This surge marks a sea change in our approach to health management, as people across various national healthcare landscapes increasingly turn to these natural offerings to supplement their treatment, often alongside Westernized healthcare treatments. Experts note that “up to four billion people (representing 80 percent of the world’s population) living in the developing world rely on herbal medicinal products as a primary source of healthcare and traditional medical practice which involves the use of herbs is viewed as an integral part of the culture in those communities.”⁸³

Far from being a transient fad, this newfound interest in botanical solutions reflects a thoughtful and progressive pivot in our collective approach to well-being. However, the interplay between nutraceuticals and prescriptions have been little studied, not least because the world of herbal remedies lingers beyond the traditional purview of Western pharmacy and is fraught with issues of deregulation and comparative lack of rigorous clinical trial studies. We hope that HP will leave the medical conclusions up to the experts in these respective fields, but our platform will enable a wider access to the historical origins of these remedies, contributing to the knowledge culture around medicines as regulated by the FDA and beyond its purview. Due to this importance, we are eager to make responsible access for a wider public’s engagement with natural products. As historians we aim to present information but let scientific and medical researchers draw conclusions about health.