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. Pablo Gómez has even expanded the term to “social pharmacopeias,” encompassing oral and practical traditions of medicine beyond texts.
Our approach to pharmacopeias targets lists of medicaments rather than isolated references or recipes. We are well aware of some of the problematic aspects of this choice, though, and we hope to discuss what is lost or silenced by it with workshops on "substantive bioprosperities," a broader category for materials with bodily effects used to improve health across societies. When it comes to these written lists, into 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 many simple medicaments, such as sassafras, hellebore, guaiacum, gold, and bezoar stones. Many of the pharmacopeias, especially price lists and apothecary inventories, also include compound medicines, which combine multiple simples into a remedy that is more than the sum of its parts. For example, there are many recipes for mithridate, house-made elixirs, and patented remedies. As the project develops, we're interested in breaking down this expansive category.
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.