From the Greek Medical Manuscripts of the Ottoman Empire to the Pharmacopoeia I of the Greek State: Pharmacy and Political Change in Southeastern Europe

Abstract

The article studies the transition from the medical manuscripts that circulated
as a means of knowledge preservation and professional regulation in the early modern
Greek world to the first edited pharmacopoeia of the Greek state in 1837. The transition
is examined in parallel to the changes in the political, scientific and professional domains
attested in southeastern Europe from the eighteenth to the middle of the nineteenth
centuries. After an overview of the Greek state’s legal interventions in the pharmaceutical
trade, in the context of which the pharmacopoeia was promulgated, and of the efforts to
translate the pharmaceutical terms by court physicians and pharmacists, the article compares
the materia medica of the Ελληνική Φαρμακοποιΐα (Greek Pharmacopoeia) with that of two
medical manuscripts that circulated in the period before the formation of the Greek state. By
studying the process of incorporation and/or exclusion of pharmaceutical ingredients during
the establishment of a new legal culture and of a more formal way of regulating pharmacy in
the southeastern Balkans, the article discusses important issues in the history of pharmacy,
especially its relationship to politics, ideology and professional rivalries.