Historical Pharmacopeias: Measurement and the Making of Medicine

“Historical Pharmacopeias” is a collection of historical sources listing natural products and pharmaceutical preparations used in past societies. More specifically, the term pharmacopeia has been understood by Matthew James Crawford and Joseph Gabriel to be a “genre of medical writing that lists simple and compound medicaments as well as the techniques for preparing and administering these medicaments according to a specific medical tradition.” The Historical Pharmacopeias project’s dataset is, as of now, composed of pre-modern apothecary inventories from across Europe, with robust subsets from Meso and South America. Collecting these documents requires visiting archives and snappy photography, but the process for transcribing them on the project website is not so fast or straightforward. This disparity led to an abundance of untranscribed documents requiring both more effort to be dedicated to their processing, as well as a narrowing of which ones were a priority. This led to the eventual creation of three sample regions, those that had the most documents to their name, to make polished datasets: Rome (1600-1800), Barcelona (1350-1600), and Provençe (1300-1700). My work primarily focused on the transcription of the Provençal documents, a process that both honed my paleographical skills and engendered a deep understanding of the contents and trends in these pharmacopeias.

A practice that I picked up at the start of every new document, given that the script was not easily decipherable, was to make for myself an alphabet of every way a letter might be written. Obviously there were differences between capital and lowercase letters; the letter ess was often written differently when at the start, middle, or end of a word; some letters were easily confused with each other; in Spanish documents ni and co had special ligatures with the former resembling an en and y being merged, and the latter looking like an unconnected infinity sign. All of this led to my understanding of cross-document trends, as mentioned previously, the primary one being the inclusion of measuring tools in all of the Provençal documents. The balances and weights, hidden in the folds of long lists of medicaments, represent so much more than their apparent utility. Using the 1432 inventory of Johannes Cambarelli I reconstructed a possible system of measurements for how his scales were pre-weighted along with the incredibly specific choices in weights to accompany them so as to make creating his base units of measure as simple as possible. This work not only sheds light on the material practices in these apothecaries, but also on the surrounding systems of oversight and adopted measuring systems. This system used in Cambarelli’s shop comes after its introduction a few decades prior by the French government at a time when Provençe was not directly under its control. Much can be gleaned from this, and my poster presentation aims to paint the picture of precision and its evolution throughout history using the lens of ancient pharmaceutical practices.