Matthew James Crawford; Joseph M. Gabriel (Editors). Drugs on the Page: Pharmaco- poeias and Healing Knowledge in the Early Modern Atlantic World. ix + 374 pp., notes, bibl., index. Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2019. $50 (cloth); ISBN 9780822945628. E-book available. What is a pharmacopoeia? Some recent work has used the term in a broad sense to include oral and em- bodied knowledge of healing substances, as in Pablo Gomez’s concept of the “social pharmacopoeia” (The Experiential Caribbean: Creating Knowledge and Healing in the Early Modern Atlantic World [North Car- olina, 2017]). In contrast, most contributors to Drugs on the Page interpret the genre in the narrower sense of a pharmaceutical text. “Pharmacopoeia” is a Latin neologism coined in 1548, and the genre reflects early modern preoccupations with collecting and classifying. As Matthew Crawford and Joseph Gabriel illustrate in their introduction, parallels can be drawn with the cabinet of curiosities or, as Antoine Lentacker shows, with dictionaries and grammars. However, as Paula De Vos details, the pharmacopoeia had deeper roots, developing out of earlier forms of pharmaceutical writing, including materia med- ica focused on simples, Islamic formularies on compound medicines, and procedural and pedagogical works. Pharmacopoeia were used to create and assert medical and political authority. The official pharmaco- poeias discussed here were composed by physicians but intended for apothecaries. Their use was enforced by the city, beginning with the 1498 Ricettario Fiorentino studied by Emily Beck, or by state authorities, be- ginning with the 1618 London Pharmacopoeia discussed by Stuart Anderson. European pharmacopoeias were also transplanted to colonial settings: for example, both De Vos and Crawford note that the Pharma- copoeia Matritensis, published in 1739, was enforced by royal decree on apothecaries throughout the Spanish Empire. Pharmacopoeias were also used to assert authority against competitors in the medical marketplace. Many official pharmacopoeias justified their existence by arguing that the public was endan- gered by quackery and variable or secret remedies. As Justin Rivest details, in early modern France pro- prietary medicines, which were often family secrets, existed as a parallel, state-sanctioned form of medical knowledge. William Ryan shows in his discussion of Hans Sloane’s editorship of the Philosophical Trans- actions that for the Royal Society’s correspondents disclosing a recipe was a way to distinguish oneself from a quack or empiric but also risked exposing valuable secrets. As Gabriel details, opposition to secrecy was one way in which “orthodox” American medicine defined itself by the nineteenth century. Secret reme- dies were also considered the hallmark of medical “others,” including African and Native American prac- titioners. As Gabriel and Benjamin Breen both note, European physicians were keen to dissociate them- selves from these healers, despite overlaps and similarities in practice. How was the Atlantic World represented in pharmacopoeias? In contrast to recent discussions of med- ical exchanges in the Atlantic, this volume emphasizes the conservatism rather than the cosmopolitanism of early modern medicine. The chapters by De Vos, Beck, and Crawford collectively suggest that the im- pact of substances from the Atlantic on pharmacopoeias was relatively minor. For example, of the “exotic” simples in the Pharmacopoeia Matritensis (1739), nineteen (11.6 percent) were from the Americas and eighteen (11.2 percent) from Africa, compared with fifty-nine (36 percent) from Asia (Table 3.2). Timothy Walker discusses some deliberate eighteenth-century attempts to acquire medical knowledge from Brazil as well as India. While requests for information generated several detailed herbals, efforts to integrate this knowledge into Portuguese imperial practice were less successful than earlier and more informal medical mingling. Kelly Wisecup’s discussion of Samson Occom’s list of fifty-two “roots and herbs” compiled in 1754–1756 shows how he drew on both Mohegan and European forms of knowledge. But she contrasts Occom’s way of situating the plants he describes in their environmental, pathological, and spiritual con- texts with the decontextualized listing of plants in both botanical works and pharmacopoeias. Breen dis- cusses the reasons that African medical knowledge was largely absent from pharmacopoeias, arguing persuasively that a complex of trading networks focused on slavery, suspicion of African remedies as con- nected to poisons, and the weaker knowledge networks of Europeans stationed in Africa created this gap. When substances from the Atlantic did enter European pharmacopoeias, they did not necessarily carry Isis—Volume 111, Number 4, December 2020 877