Historical Pharmacopeias (HP) presents an array of sources for understanding how natural products and pharmaceutical preparations were used in past societies. The products featured in the collection derive from a variety of distinct source types, including apothecaries’ inventories, price lists, household stores, reference pharmacopeias, and other lists of medicaments. Taken together, these lists reveal how communities understood, labeled, and deployed an array of substances with bodily effects.

HP is designed to make these records accessible to historians of medicine, science, and pharmacy, as well as medical researchers and biochemists, as structured datasets that support close comparison across languages, regions, and traditions of healing. By treating these lists as pharmacopeias in a broad sense, the project highlights the lived practices of making, storing, and valuing remedies that existed alongside the norms determined by medical and political authorities. HP supports team-based transcription, annotation, and semantic parsing, enabling connections across languages, spellings, and conceptual categories.

Based at Harvard and Hamilton College, HP brings together a growing network of scholars studying global pharmacopeias and the histories of healing, substances, and knowledge.