ABSTRACT

By the dawn of the Enlightenment, European medicine had become strikingly international.2 It is not so much that physicians went abroad to learn about foreign healing techniques, to dabble in non-European medical practices, or to study those exotic illnesses lately contracted by their Old World countrymen stationed in the tropics – all of which was in fact the case. It is more that the geographic range of medical study back in Europe and the interest European practitioners took in exotic pharmacological materials expanded vastly in this period and did so owing in no small measure to the escalating European presence overseas. From the late seventeenth century, European medical practitioners began more intensively than ever before to observe, describe, assemble and ultimately incorporate into their systems of knowledge – into their medical texts, working apothecaries, supplies of simples, stores of minerals, flora and other natural specimens – materials and methods imported from abroad. Above all, the habit of collecting exotic naturalia surged in this period, stimulated by the hands-on practitioner and armchair collector alike. ‘I humbly entreat that all practitioners, who travel to foreign countries, will be pleased to make collections ... of whatever plants, shells, insects, &c they shall meet with.’3 Thus advised the London apothecary, James Petiver, a stay-at-home correspondent

1 Research for this essay was done, in part, at the Huntington Library, Pasadena, and the Koninklijk Instituut voor de Tropen (Royal Tropical Institute), Amsterdam; and I would like to thank the helpful curators at both of these institutions and to acknowledge the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, the W.M. Keck Foundation, and the Royalty Research Fund of the University of Washington for support of that work. I would also like to thank Susan Legêne, Catherine Fisher, Roy Ritchie, Louise Townsend, Paul White, and the editors of this volume for their generous suggestions.