“Historical Pharmacopeias” is a collection of historical sources listing natural products and pharmaceutical preparations used in past societies. The collection features assemblages of products found in apothecaries’ inventories and other lists of medicaments in use from Europe, European imperial dominions, and other regions from antiquity to 1900. The goal is to present this collection in a form that is accessible to historians of medicine, science, and pharmacy, as well as medical researchers and biochemists studying natural products, that is to say medicinally powerful substances extracted from nature. While we will be publishing a webpage centered on the HP project in the future, for the time being, we hope you enjoy peeking through the window of the apothecary shop through DALME.
Definition
We use the term pharmacopeia as an access point to a genre of written documents recording information about medicaments. It is an intrinsically ambiguous term. As Matthew James Crawford and Joseph Gabriel have pointed out, it has been understood to refer to 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” More broadly, though, Crawford and Gabriel suggest that “the term pharmacopeia has been used to refer to the collective knowledge of medical cultures and therapeutic preparations of different substances as held by any society, culture, or group of specialists within a society or culture.” Pharmacopeias, then, are lists of medicaments that are always more than lists of medicaments. Pablo Gómez has even expanded the term to “social pharmacopeias,” encompassing oral and practical traditions of medicine beyond texts.
Our approach to pharmacopeias targets lists of medicaments rather than isolated references or recipes. We are well aware of some of the problematic aspects of this choice, though, and we hope to discuss what is lost or silenced by it with workshops on "substantive bioprosperities," a broader category for materials with bodily effects used to improve health across societies. When it comes to these written lists, into the category of medicaments we include substances that have been referred to in the Dioscoridean tradition as simples (aka materia medica, or what scientists since the Enlightenment have called "natural products" ) and compound medicines. The existing sample includes many simple medicaments, such as sassafras, hellebore, guaiacum, gold, and bezoar stones. Many of the pharmacopeias, especially price lists and apothecary inventories, also include compound medicines, which combine multiple simples into a remedy that is more than the sum of its parts. For example, there are many recipes for mithridate, house-made elixirs, and patented remedies. As the project develops, we're interested in breaking down this expansive category.
By reading across pharmacopeias-as-lists, we hope to gain a sense of the rich material culture of medicine in early historical societies. In addition, the records will reveal the ontological systems of those who made the records. Some records, for example, appear to group medicaments by physical location in the shop, with no other discernible organizational strategy. In other cases, the principle of organization may have been the part of the body treated, provenance, substance type, spelling, or even value.
Ontology
Like all digital projects, HP needs to be structured through an ontology, that is, a set of rules that determine the nature of entities and their attributes. Provisionally, we have determined that the top-level distinction categorizes every pharmacopeia as reference or functional. Reference pharmacopeias, like the Ricettario Fiorentino or the theoretical writings of Mesue (explored in this DALME essay), present an idealized or normative set of medicaments, such as those that a practitioner should or could have on hand. Within this category, we divide the pharmacopeias into theoretical or pragmatic texts, the latter of which includes price lists and official pharmacopeia. Functional pharmacopeias, including apothecaries' inventories or shopping lists, describe existing or aspirational stores or collections. In functional pharmacopeias, we can see what people actually had, or wanted to have, on hand, such as what one could buy at a particular shop, or what a military operation might need (more leeches!). Within the category of functional pharmacopeia, we classify documents as inventories (leases, sales, postmortem, debt repayment, aggregate prescriptions), consumer shopping records (including normative start-up costs), and catalogs.
Analysis
In addition to supplying a collection of pharmacopeias, many of which are not already available in libraries, the HP team is working to convert records into an actionable dataset. This dataset will consist, on the one hand, of record attributes and metadata (date, location, type), and, on the other, fully parsed text in which each word is associated with a higher order lexical entity and, ultimately, a supralinguistic semantic concept. By way of example, the inventory of Batrona Maurella (Marseille, 1428), includes an entry for "azafetida."
This is one of the local spellings of "asafoetida." Through a series of database linkages, the instance recorded in Batrona Maurella's shop inventory can be linked to the lexical headword "asafoetida." Since other languages have different ways of referring to the conceptual entity we call "asafoetida," all the relevant headwords can be ultimately be connected under the supralinguistic concept for the drug. Inter alia, these data relations will make it possible for scholars to search for a concept and identify all instances in the corpus, regardless of language or spelling.
We hope that the dataset will enable these forms of analysis, along with others that may emerge during discussion:
- Relative Frequency. The frequency of appearance of simples and compounds will vary over time and space, as products enter the medical marketplace or fade in importance.
- Geographic Distribution. The distribution of products, at least for functional pharmacopeais, is made possible by georeferencing the location of record. This technique makes it possible for researchers to trace phenomena such as the rising popularity of New World medicaments in Europe or the transregional movement of indigenous American medicines.
- Co-occurrence. This approach considers durable patterns that may emerge in assemblages as one considers which medicaments that systematically co-occur in lists of products.