Organisation: Katarzyna Pękacka-Falkowska (Wrocław) & Bettina Wahrig (Braunschweig)
When researching the history of drug production, one continually encounters processes of translation: from practical recipes to theoretical discourse, from vernacular language to scholarly nomenclature, from transmitted craft knowledge to laboratory protocols – and often back again. The raw materials traveled from local markets to distant trade centers, acquiring changing names and varied attributions of origin. Translating history in transmission means overcoming temporal, spatial, and linguistic boundaries. It also means understanding contexts forgotten when materials and drugs traveled along trade routs and across cultural borders.
Historians decipher records in pharmacopoeias, vernacular medicine books, letters, and ego-documents, linking them to surviving objects in collections. Translating sources into experiments requires selecting appropriate units of weight, equipment, and procedures – often also substituting components that are no longer available. Should substitutes conform to historical concepts or meet the contemporary chemical understanding of the substances?
After reconstruction, a second translation between biomedical scientists and historians is needed. The first ask: Is a clinical trial safe? Can an active ingredient be isolated or quantified? Historical questions differ: Which criteria solidified the attribution of efficacy? Which cultural meanings shaped production/ use? How did application/ accessibility vary by social status, gender, or region – were there “poor versions”? What was pharmaceutical practice outside professional context? By consciously exploring these translation processes an interdisciplinary dialogue emerges and deepens both the empirical testing of historical recipes and the understanding of their cultural contexts. Thus, the complex pathways of premodern drugs can be traced.
Scientific re-enactment has its own, controversial history. Our case-studies aim at a deeper methodological understanding of “What we do when we do it”.