1 General Introduction: Features of Eighteenth-Century Pharmacology The foundations of modern pharmacology are generally thought to have been laid during the first half of the nineteenth century. In 1805, Friedrich Wilhelm Sertürner published his isolation of morphine from opium, i.e. the discovery of the first plant alkaloid. In 1821, François Magendie’s Formulaire pour la Préparation et l’Emploi de Plusieurs Nouveaux Médicamens, the first textbook on chemically pure drugs, came out. And in 1847, Rudolf Buchheim of the University of Dorpat created the first laboratory for experimental pharmacology. Improved methods of analytical chemistry and the emerging discipline of experimental physiology contributed considerably to the new pharmacological research. 1 Moreover, increasing use of clinical statistics led to the rise of modern therapeutics. In his Recherches sur les Effets de la Saignée (1835), the Paris hospital doctor Pierre Louis famously applied the “numerical method” to evaluate bloodletting and drug treatments for pneumonia and other inflammatory diseases. 2 Customary focus on these milestones in the history of pharmacology and therapeutics has resulted, however, in a relative lack of appreciation of important changes within the materia medica of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Gernot Rath for example, in a by now classic paper on this subject, argued that the transformation of pharmacology from a part of therapeutics to an experimental science did not originate from materia medica itself, but was induced by the development of pathology and physiology. 3 The history of modern pharmacology was thus firmly linked with the nineteenth century, the age of the natural sciences in medicine. By contrast, this book attempts to show that experimental pharmacology was not a nineteenth-century, but essentially an eighteenth-century creation. It will demonstrate that the basic methodology of the field was developed through critical examinations of key drugs of the period, such as opium and Peruvian 1 Andreas-Holger Maehle - 978-90-04-33329-1 Downloaded from Brill.com01/01/2022 11:50:57AM via free access