Event Description

The American Institute of the History of Pharmacy and the University of Wisconsin–Madison School of Pharmacy are pleased to host the virtual festival, A New Social History of Pharmacy & Pharmaceuticals. The Festival will be a free online streaming event. Among the panels:

Thursday, September 24

10:30–11:00am CDT – Invited Book Talk, Know Your Remedies: Pharmacy and Culture in Early Modern China (Princeton University Press, 2020)

He Bian, Princeton University

In Know Your Remedies, He Bian presents a panoramic inquiry into China’s early modern cultural transformation through the lens of pharmacy. In the history of science and civilization in China, pharmacy—as a commercial enterprise and as a branch of classical medicine—resists easy characterization. While China’s long tradition of documenting the natural world through state-commissioned pharmacopeias, known as bencao, dwindled after the sixteenth century, the ubiquitous presence of Chinese pharmacy shops around the world today testifies to the vitality of Traditional Chinese Medicine.

Saturday, September 26

9:30–10:30am CDT – Traditional and Early Modern Drug Knowledge

• Edoardo Pierini, University of Geneva: “Different People, Different Addictions: The Recognition of Different Cultures of Intoxication in Early Modern Medicine”
• Pedro Carlessi, University of São Paulo: “Neotraditional Medications: Ethnographic Contributions to the Conceptual Definition”
• Julia Nurse, Wellcome Collection: “The Healing Power of Colour: Pigments as Potions in the Early Modern Period”

Chair: Matthew Crawford, Kent State University

1:00–1:30pm CDT – Invited Book Talk, Compound Remedies: Galenic Pharmacy from the Ancient Mediterranean to New Spain (University of Pittsburgh Press, 2020)

Paula De Vos, San Diego State University

In Compound Remedies, Paula De Vos examines the equipment, books, and remedies of colonial Mexico City’s Herrera pharmacy—natural substances with known healing powers that formed the basis for modern-day healing traditions and home remedies in Mexico. The book traces the evolution of the Galenic pharmaceutical tradition from its foundations in Ancient Greece to the physician-philosophers of the Islamic empires in the medieval Latin West and eventually through the Spanish Empire to Mexico, offering a global history of the transmission of these materials, knowledges, and techniques.

Host: Petros Bouras-Vallianatos, University of Edinburgh

Source: https://aihp.org/new-social-history-festival/

Thursday, September 24 – Tuesday, September 29, 2020

 

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