We are excited to highlight the Historical Pharmacopeias project, a groundbreaking initiative featured in the article “A ‘Big Tent’ for the History of Pharmacy” in the newest issue of History of Pharmacy and Pharmaceuticals (HoPP). The Historical Pharmacopeias project, spearheaded by Mackenzie Cooley (Hamilton College), Daniel Smail (Harvard University), and Gabriel Pizzorno (Harvard University), is reshaping how we understand the history of pharmacy.
The Historical Pharmacopeias project compiles and digitizes lists of medicaments from archival, manuscript, and published sources across Europe and its empires, spanning from antiquity to 1900. These lists, drawn from pharmaceutical texts, apothecary inventories, prescriptions, and more, are treated not as static documents but as dynamic “substances with bodily effect.” The data is transcribed, edited, and made publicly available through an open-access, multilingual, and searchable platform, The Documentary Archaeology of Late Medieval Europe (DALME), in the Historical Pharmaceopeias Collection.
