Article ID: CBB923559206

Aphrodisiacs in the global history of medical thought (2021)

unapi

The study of aphrodisiacs is an overlooked area of global history which this article seeks to remedy by considering how such substances were commercially traded and how medical knowledge of them was exchanged globally between 1600 and 1920. We show that the concept of ‘aphrodisiacs’ as a new nominal category of pharmacological substances came to be valued and defined in early modern Latin, English, Dutch, Swiss, and French medical sources in relation to concepts transformed from their origin in both the ancient Mediterranean world and in medieval Islamicate medicine. We then consider how the general idea of aphrodisiacs became widely discredited in mid-nineteenth-century scientific medicine until after the First World War in France and in the US, alongside their commercial proliferation in the context of new colonial trade exchanges between Europe, the US, Southeast Asia, Africa, India, and South America. In both examples, we propose that global entanglements played a significant role in both the cohesion and the discreditation of the medical category of aphrodisiacs.

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Authors & Contributors
Vicentini, Chiara Beatrice
Mares, Donatella
Vannucci, Laura
Oszajca, Paulina
Pretto, Giovanni
Whitfield, Michael
Concepts
Pharmacy
Medicine
Trade
Botany
Therapeutics
Global history
Time Periods
19th century
18th century
17th century
20th century, early
16th century
Early modern
Places
Italy
Padua (Italy)
Africa
England
Turin (Italy)
Florence (Italy)
Institutions
National Health Service (Great Britain)
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