Well into the 19th century, pharmaceutical knowledge belonged to the realm of craftsmanship. It was generally classified as practical rather than scientific knowledge. It developed into an academic discipline only gradually. When pharmacists were finally able to study and teach at universities or at academies or schools, the sciences were generally orienting themselves towards experimental and practical knowledge. Today, pharmacy is regarded as an interdisciplinary and applied science with a number of sub-disciplines linking pharmacy to botany, medicine, chemistry and other sciences.

Knowledge about medicinal substances has been contested over many centuries, and in different perspectives. Academic physicians, pharmacists, botanists and chemists, along with members of other professions, struggled over the access to pharmaceutical knowledge, and over the legitimation to produce and administer drugs. Especially in the late 18th and early 19th centuries, the professions fought over legal regulations of the drug market, and tried to enforce the exclusion of lay persons, quacks and interlopers, thereby trying to corroborate their own professional identities.

Yet, the discourses were by no means only about the exclusion of untrained practitioners. The many adjoining fields of knowledge opened up possibilities of communicating and transferring knowledge across disciplines, across regions and across cultures. The trade with medicinal substances from the New World or from China or India, for example, had an impact both on European knowledge systems and on the local and regional agricultures. In Early Modern Europe, exotic drugs started out as highly effective, costly and therefore exclusive medicines, but in the 19th century, they became objects of investigation for analytical chemistry and experimental physiology.

Many plants from the New World were transferred to Asia; they were cultivated extensively, often devastating the agricultural equilibrium and sometimes even provoking wars. They were transformed into medicinal substances and exported to Europe on a large scale.

The papers of this symposium will focus on the transfer of pharmaceutical knowledge across time and space in the following areas:

• from therapeutic practice to clinical and physiological concepts;
• from one geographical region to another;
• from the laboratory to the clinic;
• from natural history to pharmacology and toxicology;
• within networks of trade and knowledge.

The papers will analyse medicinal substances within a wide range of topics, namely the practice of colonisation, the fields of traditional, new and contested pharmaceutical knowledge within a network of communication, classification and boundary objects as means of knowledge transfer, synthetic drugs, and the transfer from the laboratory to the clinic and back.