ESHS/HSS Annual Meeting

‘One of the Miraculous Medicaments’: Opium, Slavery and Health in Early Modern Italy

• In Event: Bodies in Bondage: Medical Knowledge, Regimes of Health, and Resistance in the Early Modern Mediterranean

English Abstract

This paper explores the entanglements of opium, slavery and health in early modern Italy. A long-term medicinal ingredient, in the early modern period opium became the object of renewed medical interest. Commended by the apothecary Diacinto Cestoni (1637–1718) as ‘one of the miraculous medicaments,’ opium was widely used in Ottoman medicine where it was administered as a remedy for pain and various ailments, including headache. In early modern Italy, opium consumption was also associated with the presence of large communities of captives from the Muslim Mediterranean world who came to be viewed as the bearers of valuable knowledge on the substance and its use. This paper considers opium as a point of entry into the place of slavery in early modern Italy’s medical and health-related pursuits. It draws attention to how savants turned captives into experimental subjects while, at the same time, employing them as sources of sought-after knowledge and expertise. On the one hand, I consider how opium catered to the interests of Italian savants as a remedy that was rife with commercial and medical promise. On the other hand, I explore how opium ended up being fashioned as marker of the Ottoman other in general, and the Ottoman enslaved subject, in particular—a substance that connected distant and local geographies and participated in shaping and re-shaping views of the familiar and the foreign alongside medical ideas about what was beneficial and what was harmful.

Author

• Lucia Dacome, University of Toronto