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SUMMARY:Extracting the exotic: global chymical medicine in the seventeenth
  century - Hjalmar Fors (Uppsala University)
DTSTART:20160128T153000Z
DTEND:20160128T170000Z
UID:TALK63497@talks.cam.ac.uk
CONTACT:Marta Halina
DESCRIPTION:While Galenic medicine provided the main framework for diagnos
 e and prescription that made use of exotic substances\, the second half of
  the seventeenth century saw chymical medicine emerge as the prefered medi
 cal school of the elites of northern and central Europe. Simultaneously\, 
 the period saw a marked and largely elite-driven increase of consumption o
 f exotic substances both as medicine and food. This is something of a conu
 ndrum. The present essay discusses how exotic substances could become a _l
 ocus_ for the merger of Galenic and Chymical medical traditions. It does t
 his by contextualizing and analyzing the medicine of Herman Nicolai Grim (
 1641–1711). Grim was a ship's surgeon and physician who worked for the D
 utch East India Company in (among other places) Ceylon and Java. After his
  return to Europe\, Grim also worked as a physician in a number of towns a
 round the Baltic Sea. His publications\, as well as the medical practice t
 hat he pursued in Europe\, is used as an inroads into wider issues concern
 ing the relationship between on the one hand knowledge of medicine and med
 ical substances garnered in the East Indies\, and on the other European me
 dical practice. To what extent could Grim use his East Indian experience b
 ack home in Europe? How did apothecaries\, chymists and medical practition
 ers deal with the problem that chymical refinement processes might destroy
  the very sensible qualities for which exotic plant substances were apprec
 iated as spice\, and from which they ultimately derived their value as tra
 ding goods?
LOCATION:Seminar Room 2\, Department of History and Philosophy of Science
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