A “Big Tent” for the History of Pharmacy

New Pharmacy History

Despite its origins in schools of pharmacy, however, the field of pharmacy history has drawn increasing interest from historians—chiefly historians of science and medicine, but also social and cultural historians, among others. This growing interest is due to a number of relatively recent developments in different areas of history, including study of artisanal know-how, craft technologies, and recipe literature from the ancient to the early modern eras; exploration of consumerism and the rise of an increasingly globalized trade in medicinal and recreational drugs from the Mediterranean and Indian Ocean to the Atlantic world; documentation and discussion of concerns with regard to bioprospecting and proprietary knowledge of medicinal plants, particularly in the Global South; and examination of the politics and profits of Big Pharma and the manufacture of drugs in the modern age. Researchers delving into these varied areas have broadened the scope of traditional pharmacy history to include global subject matter, drawn from a variety of perspectives, places, and times, and approached in a diachronic manner.

These developments have led to the debut of a new kind of pharmacy history. The “new” approach was initially called for and reflected in the pages of this journal through the publication of Elizabeth Siegel Watkins’ widely cited 2009 article, “From History of Pharmacy to Pharmaceutical History.”⁷ Watkins “recommended a more expansive approach for the field” and called for a “new pharmaceutical history,” a call that was answered in the form of a 2019 special issue of Pharmacy in History organized by Richert. That issue featured more than a dozen scholars presenting perspectives on the future—and the past from which it developed—of the field of pharmacy history. Richert’s specific aim was to mark the 10-year anniversary of Watkins’ article in a wide-ranging evaluation of the state of the field, and several of the contributors and scholars underscored this new direction. Richert followed up by assigning a new title for the journal—now History of Pharmacy and Pharmaceuticals—in 2021 and inviting Paula DeVos, an early modernist, and Tanja Pommerening, an Egyptologist (as well as a pharmacist and historian of science, discussed below), to join him as editors-in-chief. In this way, the editorial staff of the journal reflects innovation in the field: Richert’s tenure as editor-in-chief, beginning in 2019, reflects the growing influence of “the new drug history” and its linkages with pharmacy, and the same is true with regard to the research interests of Jamie Banks, the journal’s managing editor.⁸ As we argued in the introduction to our first co-edited issue in 2022, it was “the beginning of an exciting new chapter at HoPP. With more capacious global and temporal expertise at our disposal, we are in a better position to revamp our intellectual agenda and provide a more holistic coverage of the pharmacy history field, as well as adjacent fields.”⁹

At the same time, however, by no means did we or the contributors to the “Future” special issue aim to exclude the contributions of pharmacists to the journal or to the field. Indeed, Pommerening, who is the Director of Marburg’s Institute for the History of Pharmacy and Medicine in the university’s Department of Pharmacy, is a trained pharmacist as well as a historian of science. The “Future” special issue itself, moreover, included strong calls—by William Zellmer, Joseph Gabriel, and others—to keep this unique and vital aspect of the field very much alive.¹⁰ As Gabriel argued and Watkins concurred in a 2020 response to that special issue, however, innovation in the field does not necessitate the choice of one path or the other. Rather, as Watkins argued, “both approaches can (and should) be incorporated as the field moves forward,” and to do so “means building a big tent to include a wide diversity of topics, approaches, sources, and formats to convey the rich significance and relevance of pharmacohistory to as wide an audience as possible” that would specifically include pharmacists and students of pharmacy as well as “historians of all stripes.”¹¹

A Big Tent and Historical Pharmacopeias

In this way, we have two basic models for the development of the field—a traditional one associated with modern, professionalized, scientific pharmacy largely in the developed world, and the “new pharmacy history” aligned with the “new drug history” that reflects a strongly historical orientation and consciously promotes ecumenical, wide-ranging approaches from a variety of times and places. Yet, as Gabriel and Watkins pointed out, these paths are not mutually exclusive, and the editors of HoPP fully support and participate in both, and firmly believe in building and maintaining a “big tent” that is inclusive and capacious enough to encourage and accommodate what innovation the future may hold. In that regard, we are pleased to introduce here in this 66.2 special issue of HoPP a key project related to historical pharmacy that we believe will be extremely consequential for the field—the Historical Pharmacopeias (HP) project headed by Mackenzie Cooley of Hamilton College, Daniel Smail of Harvard University, and Gabriel Pizzorno, also of Harvard.

This project, which was introduced to the AIHP/HoPP audience at last year’s annual address, consists of compiling data from lists of medicaments from historical sources—archival, manuscript, and published—of Europe and European empires from the ancient period to 1900.¹² The lists derive mainly from pharmaceutical texts and apothecary inventories, though any listing of medicaments, from recipe collections, prescriptions, or other sources, is considered, as the organizers see them not as fixed or regulatory documents but rather as “assemblages of products” or of “substances with bodily effect.” The lists are transcribed and edited by collaborative teams and the resulting data made available to the public through online, open-access publishing, searchable across multiple languages and scripts and even taking into account varied spellings of substances. The idea for the project is to make these listings accessible and searchable to a wide range of practitioners, from “historians of medicine, science, and pharmacy” to “medical researchers and biochemists studying natural products.”¹³ Each of the related articles in this special issue utilizes in some way data gathered for the HP Project, which is also described in much greater detail in Cooley’s introduction to the special issue and in the Visual Pharmacy piece co-authored by Cooley and Smail.¹⁴

The Historical Pharmacopeias project certainly represents innovation in the field and will allow future scholars to utilize the database in myriad ways to trace commonality and difference across time, space, language, and script. The possibilities it offers reflect prescient comments by Anna Greenwood and Hilary Ingram, who in the 2019 “Future” issue of HoPP stated that: “As we look forward to the future, we eagerly anticipate that pharmacy history, aided by open access and a wider digital reach, will increasingly welcome research that moves beyond national borders, engages with non-elite perspectives, and promotes even more opportunities for collaboration.”¹⁵ These kinds of possibilities are evident in this special issue, which includes a co-authored article on indigenous pharmacopeias that explores in depth the issues related to indigenous medicine and proprietary rights. Several articles in the issue, moreover, utilize the database to shed light on medieval and early modern pharmacy and its social, cultural, and economic significance. Ryan Low, for example, examines notarial practices and apothecary expertise in 15th-century Provence; Lara Barreira explores the transactions of an apothecary shop in 16th-century Valladolid run by a widow; and Emma Tomlins studies the globalized nature of substances in early modern French pharmacies. The special issue also illustrates the kinds of interdisciplinary and laboratory-based collaborations fostered by the use of the database: Cooley discusses in her introduction to the special issue the collaborative processes of collecting data with colleagues and students, and her co-authored piece, “Extractions at the Intersection of Chemistry and History,” describes laboratory analysis of artemisia carried out with a colleague, Max Majireck, in natural products chemistry.

While these practices certainly represent innovative practice and potential, however, they also serve to reaffirm a scientific model and purpose for the field. The processes of building the database include a massive effort at data collection, and the practices the project entails and allows for, further, reflect a scientific laboratory model of interdisciplinary collaboration between senior, mid-career, and junior professors, graduate students, and undergraduates that is similarly reflected in the authorship of these articles: Barreira and Cole Wassiliew are undergraduate students at Hamilton College; Tomlins is a doctoral student at Cambridge University; Low is a teaching assistant professor at University of North Dakota; Majireck is an associate professor of Chemistry at Hamilton College; Cooley is associate professor of History at Hamilton; Naima Akter works at the Scott Keeney Lab at the Sloan Kettering Institute; Annie Kennedy is a Bristol Fellow working on biomass and waste; and Smail is the Frank B. Baird, Jr. Professor of History.

The articles here also demonstrate the practical applications to be gained from the database, making historical texts, knowledge, and uses of medicinal substances available to a wide range of researchers in pharmaceutical, medical, and scientific fields. The database and its uses also have much in common with other interdisciplinary, laboratory-based historical projects, including Pamela Smith’s “Making and Knowing Project” in the Center for Science and Society at Columbia University; Lawrence Principe’s alchemical experiments and demonstrations at Johns Hopkins University; the re-creation of Ancient Egyptian, Greek and Coptic pharmaceutical recipes with pharmacy students at Marburg University¹⁶; and Anna Greenwood’s work on Boots pharmacy and cosmetics at the University of Nottingham. Also centered in the UK is the AncientBiotics Project, which utilizes ancient and medieval recipes to identify possible antidotes to today’s antibiotic-resistant “superbugs.”¹⁷ Finally, the database may also be used fruitfully in conjunction with other similar types of digital database projects, including historian and medical humanities scholar Michael Stanley-Baker’s Polyglot Asian Medicines, a database that documents the historical uses of traditional ethnopharmacological knowledge and “links out to databases across a range of modern sciences: plant chemistry and pharmacology, biodiversity mapping, and biodiversity heritage.”¹⁸ Additionally, Alain Touwaide and Emmanuela Appetit have established a database of Greek medical manuscripts, early herbals, and medicinal plants used in antiquity.¹⁹ And in Marburg, Tanja Pommerening has created a database on Ancient Egyptian recipes,²⁰ and Maximilian Haars has created another database of medicinal plants and herbal drugs in the Galenic corpus.²¹

The Historical Pharmacopeias project also brings to light an important issue regarding basic definitions that are relevant to new versus traditional approaches in the history of pharmacy field. That issue involves the definition of the term “pharmacopeia” and what it means to researchers, whether they come from the sciences or the social sciences and humanities, whether they focus on modern or pre-modern eras, or whether they deal with developed or developing societies, imperial or colonized actors, or something else altogether. In essence, pharmacopeias in the modern era in the West and beyond are generally seen to have a regulatory role, backed by law, to standardize and insure the systematic and safe preparation of pharmaceuticals. According to David Cowen, a pharmacopeia is “a compendium of drugs and formulas which is intended to secure uniformity and standardization of remedies, and which is made legally obligatory for a particular political jurisdiction.”²² Scholars in this vein recognize the Ricettario fiorentino (1498) or the Nuremburg Dispensatorium of Valerius Cordus (1546) as the first to represent the modern genre in the West, and several contributors to the pathbreaking Drugs on the Page: Pharmacopoeias and Healing Knowledge in the Early Modern Atlantic World, edited by Matthew Crawford and Joseph Gabriel, trace the development of pharmacopeias in the early modern Atlantic world with an eye toward the uses of this genre in the establishment of urban or regional authority that would broaden to the scope of the nation-state in the 19th and 20th centuries.²³ In addition, the International Society for the History of Pharmacy (ISHP) has a Working Group on the History of Pharmacopeias that is organized mainly according to modern nation-states.²⁴

Yet, as Crawford and Gabriel argue in their introduction to the volume, the genre—and the term used to represent it—is inherently ambiguous, and not all pharmacopeias (indeed very few of them) ever gained officially sanctioned legal or regulatory status. In this way, while the term pharmacopeia may refer “specifically to a genre of medical writing,” at the same time it has also been used “to refer to the collective knowledge of medical virtues and therapeutic preparations of different substances as held by any society, culture, or group of specialists within a society or culture” in the sense of a “social pharmacopeia” as described by Pablo Gomez.²⁵ Thus Crawford and Gabriel “take a broad view of what counts as a pharmacopoeia’” in the volume, and this is the same view adopted by the creators and users of the HP project and in the articles of this special issue. Indeed, as Cooley and Smail note in the “Visual Pharmacy” piece, they take the many lists used to create the database to be “pharmacopeias: assemblages of substances with bodily effect in a standardized format.” They divide these pharmacopeias into two types—”reference pharmacopeias . . . [that] present an idealized or normative set of medicaments,” and “functional pharmacopeias . . . [that] describe existing or, in some cases, aspirational stores or collections.”²⁶

That the matter is not settled, however, became highly evident over the course of the past several months, in lively discussions that took place during a workshop on the HP project organized by Cooley, Smail, and Pizzorno in February 2024; throughout the peer review process for this special issue that took place over the course of the summer and fall of 2024; and during a November 2024 meeting of the Consortium for History of Science, Technology, and Medicine (CHSTM) in which DeVos commented on a book chapter of Duygu Yildirim, assistant professor of history at the University of Tennessee, who is preparing a monograph on Ottoman pharmacopeias and what they reveal about the epistemological and methodological nature of Ottoman science. In each case, participants and reviewers questioned the meaning of pharmacopeia and what it represents as a genre—whether a definition that prioritizes legal regulation and standardization betrays a modernist, Western perspective that potentially excludes as much as it explicates, or whether a more capacious definition becomes so generalized as to become largely meaningless. This special issue, as noted above, adopts an inclusive, broad view as part of the “big tent” sensibility, while also recognizing the need to refine expectations and definitions depending on the era, the geographical area in question, and the types of participants located within various medical marketplaces and healing regimes.

This debate about the nature and purpose of pharmacopeias will no doubt continue to enliven and enrich ongoing and future discussions in the field, and it is certainly representative of the larger questions in the field regarding traditional versus new approaches. As time passes, we will continue to endorse an inclusive approach at HoPP—one that includes and blends tradition and innovation, the sciences and humanities, and historical research for the purposes of history and for the purposes of pharmacy. And we would argue that such areas have been and will continue to be combined very fruitfully, as evident in the HP project as a whole, and in the different articles and emphases of this issue. We see here the opportunity for an inclusive synthesis of the traditional and the new, the scientific and the social. We hope you see the exciting possibilities as well in what is to follow.