The simple drugs listed in works on materia medica and pharmacy were long considered until the 18th century as the basic materials composing the three kingdoms of nature. Also during this same long period, a continued discussion was held on the elementary principles that gave rise to such basic materials.

Extant sources seemingly indicate that the notion of material principles and the quest to establish the origin of materials walked together inasmuch as the latter gave the necessary weight to the former. As concerns laboratory work, both notions were operative also in the processes currently known as analysis and synthesis.

Along the 17th and a large part of the 18th century, chemical analysis sought to identify the elementary principles of the investigated materials, while a tendency developed to multiply the number of such principles or “virtues” (a common name then applied to the ultimate principles that allegedly characterised materials). In time, some of these principles and particularly the one obtained from the organised kingdoms became what today we call active principles.

A common idea among scholars maintains that the history of modern, essentially experimental pharmacology started at the beginning of the 19th century, when the first alkaloids were isolated. Indeed, in addition to the transformation it induced within the realm of pharmacology, the notion of “alkaloids” made a significant contribution to the development of organic chemistry and more particularly, to the studies on the active principles of drugs.

A closer look into the history of the isolation of alkaloids, however, shows that it belongs with a much wider context full of ups-and-downs, and where the isolation of active principles, as a fact, effected a radical transformation of the idea of simple drugs and consequently, also of the corresponding literature.

The present symposium aims at discussing the transition between the traditional notions about simple drugs and material principles, and the modern idea of active principles as reflected in the specialised literature, namely the works on materia media, pharmacy, pharmacopoeia, pharmacology and therapeutics.