Testing Drugs and Trying Cures in Premodern Europe

Projects

• The Earliest Testing Protocols in the Medieval Universities

  Michael McVaugh (University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill)

  Among the Galenic texts attracting special attention at the end of the thirteenth century was De complexionibus, one of whose features was a crude protocol for determining experimentally the qualitative character and intensity of any given medicine. This protocol caught the attention of the medical faculty at Montpellier, especially in the somewhat more structured form given it in Avicenna’s Canon. Three generations of writers at that school (1300–1340) successively articulated this initial model and made it into an elaborate, carefully structured test-procedure for identifying the nature and extent of a drug’s effect on healthful function, a procedure they referred to as a via experimenti: they introduced a null point as the referent for their measurements (something not present in Galen or Avicenna), identified an increasing range of contingent factors that might affect the results and that the tester had therefore to control for, and devised ways to standardize the purity and weight of the sample to be tested. Their increasingly precise protocol was certainly designed to be used, yet there is no sign that it ever was systematically employed; in practice, the masters seemed to have preferred an alternative via rationis that inferred the nature and strength of a medicine from sensory attributes, such as taste and color, that were understood to be the necessary expressions of qualitative nature. They freely acknowledged that a taste test’s results were coarser and less certain than a structured experimental procedure, but it was far easier and quicker to perform than the elaborate alternative, and when it went wrong their mistakes would have no serious medical consequences for their patients as long as they ensured that the doses they prescribed were initially very small—yet another method of testing, of course, though not, for them, of the same sort.

• The Live Chicken Cure for Plague Buboes: Medical Experimentation in Late Medieval and Early Modern Europe

  Erik Heinrichs (Winona State University)

  This paper explores the character of medical experimentation through the long history of one seemingly bizarre remedy for plague buboes. Appearing often and in various versions between 1348 and the eighteenth century, the basic treatment involves placing a live chicken on a poisonous swelling, such as a plague bubo. This project explores physicians’ ideas on how the remedy worked, and more importantly, how the remedy changed over time from its roots in Avicenna’s Canon through the arrival of the “Black Death” and up to its full blossoming in early modern times. The project uncovers a long history of experimentation in the many extant versions of the remedy, drawing on the writings of physicians Jacme d’Agramont, Johannes Jacobi, Antonio Guarineri, Niccolo Bertucci, Caspar Kegler, Johann Reusch, and Ernst Reuchlin, among others. Focusing on the vernacular pamphlet literature of early modern German physicians, I also investigate physicians’ personal observations on the remedy’s efficacy as well as the minor changes that they recommend. Through such cases, I describe medieval and early modern medical experimentation amid changing relationships between theory and practice, ancient authority and personal experience.

• Renaissance Pharmacy, Testing, and the Language of Truth

  Valentina Pugliano (University of Cambridge)

  Probatum est. It has been tried, tested, and on average proven to work. This pithy sentence has come to encapsulate the view that modern historians have of artisanal practice in the medieval and early modern period. It is one of inquisitiveness and flexible learning, of testing matter and testing hypotheses by working through matter. Drug making is often considered a case in point. The Florentine apothecary Stefano Rosselli affixed the phrase to several of the recipes filling the three volumes of secrets that he compiled and illustrated between the 1570s and 1590s. Like many experimenters around him, through practice and annotation Rosselli built personal histories of success and failure around certain ingredient combinations and procedures. Occasionally, as the inventories testify, he followed the exploratory step of testing with the decision to offer the product in his pharmacy at the sign of San Francesco in Florence.

  But we also know not always to take the probatum est claim at face value. Some practitioners lied about their experiences and results. Others were simply content to rely on the experimental feats of third parties, whether acquaintances or famous doctors, who vouchsafed for a certain preparation and its effects. The latter approach is equally recurrent among Italian apothecaries. It was rooted in the long tradition and strict regulations of their art, which allowed for recipes to be tweaked but rarely substantially altered. Through the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, I argue, it received further support from the new faithfulness to texts and textual scholarship that humanism nurtured among all categories of medical practitioners on the peninsula.

  In this project I explore this tension in the workshop practice of Renaissance Italian apothecaries more closely. To what extent did testing actually take place in the workshop of the average pharmacy? What was a “drug trial” for the average apothecary? And how was testing evaluated in relation to other modes of validating opinions, supposed facts, and operative choices in the workshop? My contention is that rather than testing, tweaking reigned supreme. Wholly novel remedies instead were often frowned upon, and apothecaries relied on an established classical and medieval canon of remedies. Their efforts went into amending small details in existing recipes, updating old pharmaceutical knowledge while at the same time making it their own.

  I argue also that in Renaissance pharmacy the emphasis shifted from how remedies were made to what went into them. As a result, although testing occurred, it was as often and as easily supplanted by a “rhetoric of truth” that equated the use of correct, that is “true” ingredients with the effectiveness of the recipe. In part this development was related to a move away from the so-called medieval pharmacology of degrees. But the greatest push in this direction came from the period’s botanical renaissance, which sent apothecaries and physicians scouting for plants and flowers in the fields and poring over the descriptions of materia medica in Dioscorides and Pliny. Among these artisans emerged a fixation about identifying genuine and incorrect ingredients, which went beyond the problem of fraudulent substitutions that had always been rife among drug makers. I explore how this language of sincerity and falsehood was fashioned to define materials and substances and became paramount when dealing with complex compounds that relied on rare imports from the eastern Mediterranean and India, such as theriac. I ask how this language of truth circulated between natural history and pharmaceutical practice; how it came to replace experimentation; and how it may be connected productively to a wider discussion in the early modern period between art and nature, artificial and organic, and the discourse of fakes and forgeries.

• Anecdote, Experiment, and Trial: Poison Antidotes and Drug Testing in Early Modern Europe

  Alisha Rankin (Tufts University)

  This project calls attention to two different kinds of drug tests in sixteenth-century Europe: the use of a medicine on a person who was already ill, which I am calling an anecdote, and the testing of the antidote on a healthy subject whose bodily state has been changed artificially, which I am calling a trial. The vast majority of pharmaceutical testing was conducted through anecdote. Poison antidotes, in contrast, had long been tested through trials, in which an animal (usually a bird) was given poison and then administered the antidote. Prior to the sixteenth century, poison trials were mainly theoretical guidelines for testing the authenticity of the widespread antidote theriac, following a trial described in Galen. From the 1520s, however, court physicians began to test new poison antidotes experientially for their efficacy and were granted condemned criminals to use as test subjects. At the same time, they tested antidotes anecdotally on sick patients. Descriptions of these tests—both anecdote and trial—became increasingly detailed through the sixteenth century, a sign both of the increased sophistication in testing drugs and of the extensive interest in antidotes.

   

  Publications

  • “Gender, Poison, and Antidote in Early Modern Europe,” in Medicines and Poisons in European History, edited by Jon Arrizabalaga, Andrew Cunningham, and Ole Peter Grell (Ashgate Press, 2016).
  • “Natural Philosophy,” in The Oxford Handbook of the Protestant Reformations, ed. Ulinka Rublack (Oxford University Press, 2016).
  • “Chymistry for Ladies: Women and Medical Distillation in Early Modern Europe,” in The Physicians’ Stone: Alchemy and Medicine from Antiquity to the Enlightenment, ed. Jennifer M. Rampling and Peter Jones (2017).

• The Académie Royale des Sciences and the Evaluation of Mineral Waters in France, 1666–1778

  Michael Bycroft (University of Warwick)

  What was the role of expert chemists in evaluating medical cures in early modern Europe? The case of mineral waters in France is a rich source of answers to this question. Mineral waters were the subject of prolonged and manifold researches by members of the Académie Royale des Sciences, the main source of learned chemical knowledge in France the period. The Academy began analyzing and evaluating mineral springs soon after it was founded in 1666. The academicians thereby took on a role that had previously been the sole preserve of practicing physicians. In this project, I examine the effect that the increasingly sophisticated analyses done by academic chemists had on the way that non-academic physicians appraised mineral waters, and on the way that physicians and spa owners resolved disputes about the medical benefits of mineral waters. I find that physicians started studying the chemical composition of mineral waters, and not just their observed effects on patients, well before 1666. The academicians’ analyses nevertheless had a significant impact on the way waters were evaluated and on the fortunes of individuals spas—especially those at Passy, whose popularity from the 1720s onwards owed much to academic chemists.

• Trying Animals and Patients as Chymical Subjects in Seventeenth-Century Leiden

  Evan Ragland (University of Alabama Huntsville)

  Leiden University boasted one of the most popular and influential medical schools of the mid-seventeenth century, drawing hundreds of students yearly from across Europe. These students participated in the revival of frequent clinical instruction, anatomical and chymical experiments, and even tests of supposed disease-causing substances and remedies on living animals and humans. Students and professors treated their subject dogs as chymical apparatus, made alive and ill by the well-tempered or preternatural chymical mixture of acids and alkalies in their bodies. Into these living canine chymical laboratories, the students injected chymical substances suspected of pathogenic properties, then examined the cadaver for the lesions of disease. They also directly tested chymical remedies on animal subjects after introducing disease agents. Comparing records of cases from the clinic with the medical professors’ treatises and student disputations shows that old and new theories of disease and drug action were hotly contested and often tested, including the claims of the leading professors at the school. This was a clear site not only of the union of chymistry, postmortem autopsy, anatomical experiments, and clinical tests, all aimed at discovery—but also of thriving clinical medicine well before its supposed Foucauldian birth date.

• Testing Drugs for Monopoly Privileges and Military Contracts in Early 18th-Century France

  Justin Rivest (Johns Hopkins University)

  My paper "The Lost Secret of the Chevalier de Guiller’s Powder Febrifuge: Testing Drugs for Monopoly Privileges and Military Contracts in Early Eighteenth-Century France" follows the fortunes of a single drug—the poudre fébrifuge of the Chevalier de Guiller—through two successive regimes of royal patent medicine licensing and military testing in eighteenth-century France. Examining the case of the poudre fébrifuge and comparing it to other cases of familial medical monopolies in this period, I argue that by the 1730s an important coterie of vendors of proprietary medicines had forged reciprocal relationships with state power, first by supplying their medications in bulk quantities to the military, and later by expanding their operations to serve the Compagnie des Indes, foreign missions, and even for domestic poor relief efforts. These cases demonstrate that the state could become the most important consumer of drugs from those vendors that it favored with monopoly privileges.

  My project draws specifically on an exceptional collection of documents including account ledgers, correspondence, and medical reports surrounding the poudre fébrifuge, which have been preserved thanks to a rather vicious legal battle over the division profits between the two medical entrepreneurs (Pierre Brodin de Lajutais and Étienne Guérin) who “recovered” its medical secret and renewed the accompanying privilege in 1732. When compared to unfavorable reports on the results of hospital trials in 1714 and to the objections of the “secret remedies” commission in 1732, these sources raise important questions about the role of clinical testing in the allocation of medical privileges and military contracts in this period, as well as about the relative importance of trials overseen personally by the royal first physician as compared to those undertaken in naval hospitals distant from Versailles. I suggest that the commercial and military expediency of a drug such as the poudre fébrifuge, based as it was on a variety of tithymale (euphorbia) widely available in France, can in many ways be seen as a “pro-indigenous” (i.e., local) reaction to the cost and supply problems associated with drugs based on exotic foreign plants such as cinchona, however “proven” such foreign drugs might be.

• Playing God: Testing and Reproducing Blood Miracles in Eighteenth-Century Europe

  Francesco Paolo de Ceglia (University of Bari)

  Starting in the late Middle Ages, rumors spread throughout Europe about blood miracles. These concerned first the alleged relics of Christ, then those of the martyrs, and finally those of many other saints. Black blood, usually pulverized or solidified over the centuries, was said to return to its original bright red color, or it liquefied or bubbled in certain circumstances or on certain dates on the liturgical calendar. With the Reformation, in Protestant countries most of those relics were destroyed or simply forgotten, although for a few centuries there were cases of unspecified blood wonders or prodigies that would be much discussed in an attempt to interpret them in natural terms. In Catholic countries, in contrast, the blood miracles multiplied, reaching a peak between the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, when, even more than before (a fact never sufficiently emphasized by historians), they were used in apologetic literature.

  This project aims to reconstruct the procedures with which, in the most heated moment of the debate, the properties of the ancient blood were tested and ​​the results were made public, often not in publications but by staging highly theatrical demonstrations. These were initially semi-clandestine performances that then, in the century that saw the birth of modern conjuring, became actual touring shows, increasingly popular and illusionistic. I consider the time period from the last two decades of the seventeenth century, when problems arose regarding the identification of reddish substances found in newly discovered Christian catacombs, to the 1790s, when the first round of testing the behavior of the blood of Saint Januarius of Naples was completed.

  Particular attention will be paid to the miraculous Neapolitan bloods—St. Januarius, St. John, St. Stephen, St. Patricia, etc. In the eighteenth century, these were studied by many scientists, who, throughout Europe (even in very Catholic Naples), developed recipes and equipment replicating their “intelligent” behavior. In a period when canonization processes were undergoing a rapid evolution leading to medicalization, many asked a question that was very tricky from both the theological and the scientific points of view: Does demonstrating that a behavior similar to the miraculous can be produced naturally or artificially imply that it is non-supernatural? In other words, what role does analogy play in testing phenomena that are in some way unique and unrepeatable?

• Indian Doctors and Early Modern Science in the Atlantic World

  Antonio Barrera-Osorio (Colgate College)

  In the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, America’s Indigenous people provided, under different circumstances, information (or not) to Europeans and Americans about resources and commodities of the New World. Euro-Americans were particularly interested in medicinal plants. In the case of Mexico, they obtained medicinal plants and information in the markets of Mexico. In the case of Virginia and Peru, Euro-Americans had to find informants among reluctant Indigenous people. This project discusses the ways in which information about medicinal plants circulated in the Atlantic World, and how this information shaped the emerging empirical practices of early modern science.

• Recipes and Experiential Knowledge in the Seventeenth-Century Epistemic Exchange between China and Europe

  Gianna Pomata and Marta Hanson (Johns Hopkins University)

  This project investigates the medical recipe as the vehicle for the transmission of experiential knowledge between cultures. We start by describing the bifurcation of pre-modern pharmacology into two main forms, formula and recipe/prescription, which are found in both European and Chinese medical cultures. We then analyze the early modern exchange of information on materia medica between Europe and China, with particular attention to the transmission of Chinese pharmacology to Europe in the second half of the seventeenth century. Our main sources are the medical formulas and list of materia medica included in Specimen Medicinae Sinicae (1682), edited by Andreas Cleyer and presumably written by the Jesuit Michael Boym—a text that played a fundamental role in the introduction of Chinese pulse medicine to Europe. We examine how Boym adapted the Chinese formula structure for a European audience, in his effort to find a common ground between European and Chinese medicine. An important part of this common ground was, for Boym, a strong appreciation of experience-based knowledge.