In early modern China, natural history and medicine were shifting along with the boundaries of the empire. Naturalists struggled to cope with a pharmacy's worth of new and unfamiliar substances, texts, and terms, as plants, animals, and the drugs made from them travelled into China across land and sea. One crucial aspect of this phenomenon was the early modern exchange between Islamic and Chinese medicine. The history of theriac illustrates the importance of the recipe for the naturalization of foreign (...) objects in early modern Chinese medicine. Theriac was a widely sought-after and hotly debated product in early modern European pharmacology, and arrived into the Chinese medical canon via Arabic and Persian texts. The dialogue between language and material objects was critical to the Silk Road drug trade, and transliteration was ultimately a crucial technology used to translate drugs and texts about them in the early modern world. (shrink)

My purpose here is to point out a use of the Greek word κλῖμαξ, lit. ladder, which has not been recorded in the lexica of ancient and medieval Greek. To be specific, the term is found twice in the Therapeutics, a work by the sixth-century a.d. author and practising physician Alexander of Tralles, in reference to a particular kind of composite drug. In the first case, the author refers to the so-called ‘ladder of Hermes’ without providing any recipe. According to (...) him, this is an antidote for the treatment of epilepsy and similar in action to the well-known theriac. However, in the second case referring to an antidote for the treatment of gout, the ‘so-called ladder’, he provides the following recipe : ἀντίδοτος ποδαγρικὴ ἡ καλουμένη κλῖμαξ.ἀγαρικοῦοὐγ. α´φοῦοὐγγ. β´πετροσελίνουοὐγγ. γ´μαίουοὐγγ. δ´ὑπερίκουοὐγγ. ε´γεντιανῆςοὐγγ. ς´ἀριστολοχίαςοὐγγ. ζ´κενταυρίουοὐγγ. η´χαμαίδρυοςοὐγγ. θ´μέλιτος τὸ ἀρκοῦν. As evidenced, the term denotes a unique category of composite drugs in which the quantity of each subsequent ingredient is increased by one unit, thus metaphorically alluding to an ascending scale. (shrink)

Capitalizing on the data presented in the three papers in this issue, the comments and conclusions here elaborate on the concept of transfer of knowledge in the field of materia medica and pharmacy. They evidence different mechanisms in three contexts, the Holy Roman Empire, the Western world and China, and trace the possible ancient roots of the phenomena under consideration. In so doing, they contextualize the processes under study in the three essays, and suggest also a possible new interpretation of (...) the practice of science from the Late Middle Ages to the Scientific Revolution. (shrink)