Transnational

Question 1

When did Columbus discover the new world?

Answer 1

1492, on a mission to discover a new route to the spice trades of the East.

Question 2

Two factors influencing search for medicinal plants

Answer 2

• colonization

- exploitation

Question 3

Define pharmacy

Answer 3

The administration, preparation and dispensing of drugs

Question 4

What does Wallis argues causes a ‘revolutionary shift in form practice and implications of healthcare’?

Answer 4

consumption

Question 5

Who benefitted from drugs from the silk road

Answer 5

Limited to rulers and elites- high prices or value.

Question 6

What was one of the driving forces of international commerce

Answer 6

European demand for drugs and spirces

Question 7

What does the volume of some common exotic drugs show?

Answer 7

Jesuit’s bark or cinchona- Wallis has shown that by the end of the 18th century they were available in such quantise that they could not have just been restricted to the elites.

Question 8

What has Wallis shown to be the impact of new medicines in England?

Answer 8

Sick began to look to the market rather than to ‘kitchen physic’ for cures, to the extent that by the late 17th century, demand for medicines outstripped supply

Question 9

Who conducted epice wide trade of South American medical plants?

Answer 9

Jesuit Missionaries from the 1580s - granted dispensation from Pope Gregory XII to perform as physicians in areas that lacked European medical care, began to systematically collect data about native plant use.

Question 10

What is Ipecacuanha

Answer 10

A reliable emetic and diaphoretic

Question 11

What was copaiba?

Answer 11

used for treating gonorrheoea

Question 12

What was cinchona bark?

Answer 12

used for treating malaria and fever

Question 13

Which country does Walker argue was most prolific in terms of remedies?

Answer 13

‘more than any other, Brazilian remedies circulated in the Atlantic world medicines trade.

Question 14

Who owned two important pharmacies in Lisbon?

Answer 14

Under Jesuit control- functioned as a network for Jesuit apothecaries, helping drive, direct and sustain local market.

Question 15

Describe the two way process the Jesuit missionaries were involved in

Answer 15

Transferring medical knowledge

• Sending new remedies back to the continent, in the form of detailed guidebooks
• Transferring European scientific paradigm to America.

Question 16

Why might new American drugs rarely appear in inventories of hospital apothecaries?

Answer 16

• unrecorded private exchange
• that the drugs were re-exported across Europe rather than used domestically
• that they may have been distributed outside recoded environment of learned elite, inc. for use as self medication.

Question 17

Which new drugs were most successful?

Answer 17

Those that replicated or appeared to have familiar effects to remedies already establish in the medical cannon.

Question 18

Why might new drugs not be trusted?

Answer 18

Products from the New World had no intellectual frame of reference in classical text and other trusted sources

Question 19

‘An avocado was nowhere to be found in Pliny or Aristotle’

Answer 19

Antonio Barrera ‘local herbs, global medicine’

-the experience gained in colonial exploration was not trusted in the same way classical Greek or Roman texts were.

Question 20

Why was the Santo Domigo Balsam

Answer 20

Hispaniola remedy that came to replace the classically celebrated Balsam traditionally supplied from Egypt

Balsam = all purpose medicine in high demand, used to cure a variety of health problems. Proved a solution to high commercial demand.

Question 21

What was the Triage Brazillica?

Answer 21

Popular panacea and second most important source of Jesuit revenue: marketed as an attempt to trade on popularity of and older Greek or Egyptian remedy known as Theriac, sold as a universal cure.

Question 22

What was the ‘De Materia Medica’

Answer 22

Dioscordides’s five volume Greek encyclopaedia about herbal medicine and medicinal pharmacopeia.

Translated into Spanish by Laguna, with explicit references to show how new American drugs were being assimilated.

Question 23

What were guaiacum and sarsaparilla used for?

Answer 23

new drugs for new diseases - assimilated into the Gaelic medical system as new medical substitutes for plants that had disappeared since classical times.

Question 24

What was rejected about American drugs?

Answer 24

the religious, spiritual or magical context the pants were used in by the indigenous peoples- rejected as superstition.

Instead incorporated into the Gaelic humeral system, most often as purgatives or emetics, quintessentially Gaelic medicines.

Question 25

What occurs in tandem with the extension of European trade?

Answer 25

• chemical medicine
• changes in the structure of the medical marketplace
• expansion of medical advertising.

Question 26

What does Wallis argue English demand for foreign drugs is further evidence for?

Answer 26

Radical expansion in medical consumption in the 17th century.

Question 27

What does Wallis argue is the most significant change in the type of drug imports?

Answer 27

Development of trade routes, not the result of a shift in medical theory or practice.

Question 28

Using port books and annual ledgers, how many treatments of Jesuits Bark were imported 1720-1750s

Answer 28

approx 200,000, though conceivably much larger than this.

Question 29

When was the Society of Apothecaries founded?

Answer 29

1617

Question 30

What changes were made to pharmacopoeia?

Answer 30

An expansion not a displacement

Question 31

Where did Portuguese colonial agents spread indigenous drugs and new healing methods?

Answer 31

Not just to Europe- also colonised territories in India, China, Africa and Indonesia.

Question 32

1970s consensus on exotic drugs

Answer 32

Slow, stumbling, slow to take off, hampered by conservatism and lack of confidence, with many species introduced but few accepted.

-perpetuated without much questioning of investigation.

Question 33

How did Laguna assimilate new drugs into Dioscorides’s Materia Medica?

Answer 33

Taken seriously when no similar drugs were available for common illnesses or when they were associated with the healing of new and dangerous diseases.

Those he did list were fitted into the Gaelic system as substitutes for plants described that had disappeared, or ‘gifts from God’

Rather than dismissing new plants, simply thought not all of them were necessary- didn’t list common New World purgatives, as there were plenty already known in Europe.

Question 34

Who was Chanca?

Answer 34

a physician who accompanied Columbus, took note of and wrote about new drugs from a financial point of view- economic interest in the plants from the New World.

Question 35

Monardes

Answer 35

Spanish account of widespread drug from the Americas- translated and sent across Europe- raised people’s expectations of the medical and scientific value of American plants.

Question 36

Hernandez

Answer 36

Sent to America by Phillip II 1570 to study American plants- P2 saw an opportunity to exploit natural resources- brought back 68 sacks of seed and roots.

Question 37

What were the two parallel markets?

Answer 37

Levant- silk road- more established- but more expensive [therapy practices of learned physicians, directed at the rich]

Altantic- cheaper - medical marketplace happy.

Question 38

What was Swietenia Febrifuga

Answer 38

A cinchona substitute found to treat intermittent fevers, discovered in India by Roxburgh, EIC surgeon.

Commercial incentive to break monopolies of trade not cure disease

Need to find cures for the colonies- more complicated than Atlantic back to Europe.

Britain had no colonial base in South America, and it was therefore imperative for them to locate alternative to cinchona in their own colonies.

Received pessimisticallyy in England- no enthusiasm for new knowledge- lack of proper scientific recognition.

Question 39

What explains the pre-eminence of cinchona?

Answer 39

Not its emergence as a panacea, but the general process of European science, through which problem of medical alternatives was resolved piecemeal [compare Swietenia Febrifuga]

Question 40

What did Portuguese Macedo plan to do?

Answer 40

Transplant key spices and drugs from the East India to Brazil, a move believed to cripple Dutch trade by circumventing their values monopolies

-new ways of theorising the tropics.

Question 41

Why were the Jesuits so receptive to new medical techniques?

Answer 41

Theological considerations made them receptive to indigenous medical lore and ready to learn from the natives- allowed them to discover new remedies- which they could then transfer to the European scientific paradigm- acted as a go-between.

Question 42

How did protestants view nature?

Answer 42

as filled with resources that were a providential gift- especially for Europeans, who were intelligent enough to put them to good use.

Question 43

How did paracelsus view new exotic drugs

Answer 43

With skepticism- told his followers to use German drugs instead- wanted local drugs to be known [taught in the vernacular- concerned about the accessibility of medicine

No straight forward link between increase of chemical medicine and support for exotic drugs therefore.]

Question 44

Nicholas Oelhafen Treatise 1643

Answer 44

Published a book about plants growing near his home in Danzig -> complained at the fascination with ‘strange’ natural objects brought from faraway regions at great expense, rather than gaining knowledge about local natural history.

Question 45

Paracelsus Biography

Answer 45

Military surgeon in Venetian army- Egypt, Russia, Arabia- learned in folk medicine.

Wanted to rival ancient medical authorities such as Galen and Celsus.

Rejected theory of the humours, instead focused on the study of alchemy/chemical substances (ie. mercury for syphilis).

Question 46

Iatrochemistry

Answer 46

Chemical medicine- ideas of Paracelsus systematised by his followers.

Question 47

Coelum philosophorum 1527

Answer 47

Most reissued chemical medicine book 16-17th century.