Historical Pharmacopeias (HP) seeks to illuminate the material worlds of healing by examining how past societies described, stored, and valued substances with bodily effects. HP assembles inventories, medicament lists, price schedules, and pharmacopeias created by apothecaries, clerics, householders, healers, merchants, and others from antiquity to 1900. At present, we have with particular depth in Western Europe, especially Provence, Rome, and Barcelona. One of the major goals of the project is expanding coverage in the Americas, the Ottoman world, and Latin America, as well as connections to Asia and Africa.
Although the sources themselves are abundant, they remain little used by scholars in the field. The reasons of this are not hard to find. Lists of medicaments, such as those found in the apothecaries’ inventories that inspired the project, are often difficult to locate, decipher, and compare. Their vocabularies vary considerably across languages, dialects, and technical traditions; their handwriting and formatting resist easy transcription; and their relationship to surviving material culture is rarely straightforward. These challenges have long impeded systematic comparison across time and region.
HP addresses this gap by treating medicament lists as pharmacopeias in a capacious sense—as assemblages of substances with bodily effect, embedded in daily practices of healing, commerce, and expertise. Rather than privileging official, state-sanctioned, and medically-approved pharmacopeias alone, HP brings together reference pharmacopeias (theoretical treatises, official price lists, normative compilations) and functional pharmacopeias (inventories, shop lists, travel kits, household stores, shipboard medical lists). The project treats them as equally informative, although they address different aspects of medicinal culture. This approach expands the cast of historical actors and highlights the lived realities of medicine-making, from mortar-and-pestle grinding to decisions about what to stock, label, sell, or preserve.
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, since they are necessarily informed by a tacit body of medical knowledge. Pablo Gómez has expanded the term to “social pharmacopeias,” encompassing oral and practical traditions of medicine beyond texts. Once one recognizes that the tangible list is necessarily informed by an intangible body of knowledge, one is eventually invited to question the assumption that pharmacopeias have to be written down at all in order to qualify as pharmacopeias.
Our approach to pharmacopeias targets lists of medicaments rather than isolated references or recipes. In 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 references to many simple medicaments, such as sassafras, hellebore, guaiacum, gold, and bezoar stones. Many of the pharmacopeias, especially price lists and apothecaries' inventories, also include compound medicines, which combine multiple simples into a remedy that was understood as being more than the sum of its parts. For example, there are many recipes for mithridate, house-made elixirs, and patented remedies.
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.
Building on the documentary archaeology methods shared by all projects within the IDA framework, HP uses a structured data pipeline to convert handwritten and printed pharmacopeias into open, machine-actionable datasets. These datasets preserve temporal and geographic metadata while enabling rich lexical and semantic encoding: each term is linked to normalized headwords and ultimately to supralinguistic concepts, allowing comparison across languages and spellings. Thus, an entry like azafetida in a Marseille shop can be connected to assa foetida, “devil’s dung,” or variants appearing in Latin, French, Spanish, Nahuatl, or Ottoman Turkish.
This system allows researchers to trace substances across cultures, track the spread of remedies, compare local and global practices, and analyze changes in therapeutic repertoires over time. Because HP captures both simples and compounds, tools and texts, it helps bring to the surface patterns in the organization of medical knowledge: distinctions between simples and complex drugs; grouping by body part, provenance, potency, or value; shifts in naming conventions; and the emergence of new substances or preparations. HP’s ontology, built atop CIDOC CRM and adapted to the needs of historical pharmaceuticals, ensures interoperable representation of complex records across periods and traditions.
The project also reflects a commitment to understanding pharmacological knowledge comparatively and globally. Expanding the meaning of pharmacopeia beyond institutional norms reveals connections across Ottoman pharmacology, Indigenous American knowledge systems, Iberian colonial pharmacology, and European household medicine. HP’s structure allows these diverse materials to be brought into dialogue while retaining cultural and linguistic specificity.
Finally, Historical Pharmacopeias is a laboratory for teaching and collaborative research. Its workflows engage students and early-career scholars in transcription, translation, semantic markup, and historical analysis, helping them understand how medical knowledge was made, circulated, and contested. From reconstructing the contents of an apothecary shop to building glossaries and visual catalogs, HP foregrounds the interplay between word and object, language and substance, record and remedy. As HP grows, it aims to offer researchers a window into the evolving pharmacopeias of past societies—revealing how people across centuries described, prepared, and imagined substances that shaped health, healing, and embodied experience.