Extractions at the Intersection of Chemistry and History

<h3>Abstract</h3> How do and might practicing scientists researching natural products engage with historical pharmacopeias? This article builds on our expanded definition of pharmacopeias to follow a series of interdisciplinary conversations around the study of medicaments at Hamilton College and how that experience has informed the Historical Pharmacopeias (HP) project. How might scientists use old approaches to healing in modern drug development? Written to convey research and foster accessible interchange, this article builds on a tradition of interdisciplinary overlap to combine the work of historians and the HP database with the concrete research of scientists to uncover remedies from the past and proposes methods for using historical sources as a knowledge base for modern pharmaceutical development. We chart the presence of <i>Artemisia</i> in the HP corpus, a species of plant with a long history of medical use, most notably as a treatment for malaria, and propose turning to historical sources to optimize modes of extraction of <i>Artemisia</i>’s natural products. By parallelling this search with attention to <i>Melodinus khasianus</i>, cloves, allspice, St. John’s wort, cinchona bark, eugenol, and isoeugenol, we explore how the HP data set facilitates conversations and dialogues across disciplines, revealing new connections and possible collaborations. By combining historians’ expertise in paleography and the context in which medicaments were used with chemists’ expertise in material analysis, how might new insights about animal, plant, and mineral remedies spur new scientific and pharmaceutical investigations?