Galen's Remedies in the Early Modern Period

Surviving the demise of his humoral pathology and anatomy, Galen’s works on simple and compound remedies (the so-called ‘galenicals’) formed the backbone of Western pharmacology up until the Industrial Revolution. Over its long and multicultural tradition—spanning the Roman Empire and Byzantium, through Islamicate societies, India, and China, to the New World and even Japan—Galenic pharmacopoeia evolved to incorporate new remedies, foods, philosophical rationales, and modes of preparation, including chemical ones. Despite its

endurance, a systematic exploration of the use of galenicals beyond the Renaissance remains overdue.

Addressing this gap, the contributions in this volume bring together leading scholars who illuminate how this medical tradition unfolded in the early modern period and its underlying dynamics, often drawing on new or overlooked archival material. Challenging the prevailing narrative of decline, they examine how pharmacological knowledge was transmitted across languages and medical traditions. Each contribution highlights an aspect of the various conceptual adaptations this process entailed, including textual transmission, debates over the structure of matter, occult qualities, dosage quantification, apothecary regulations, patient treatment, and the integration of galenicals into household medicine. Special attention is also given to the commodification of materia medica in Atlantic trade, while a comprehensive introduction contextualises the main themes of Galen’s post-Renaissance legacy and explores the reasons for its enduring vitality.

Fabrizio Bigotti is the Director of the Centre for the Study of Medicine and the Body in the Renaissance (CSMBR) in Italy, DFG Research Fellow at Julius Maximilian University of Würzburg, Germany, and Honorary Fellow at the University of Exeter, UK.

John Wilkins is Professor Emeritus of Greek Culture at the University of Exeter, in the UK. He works on the history of drama, food, and medicine, with an emphasis in recent years on nutrition and pharmacology in the ancient world.