ESHS/HSS Annual Meeting

Searching for Alkaloids in a Shortage Society: Bioprospecting and Vernacular Materia Medica in the Early Soviet Era

• In Event: Roots and Remedies: Global Histories of the Pharmaceuticalization of Herbal Knowledge II

English Abstract

In the interwar period, the Soviet state had to reinvent its pharmacopoeia and build the pharmaceutical industry from scratch. Although the Russian Empire had been a leading exporter of plant raw materials, it had also depended on import of German pharmaceuticals and crude drugs, which put the USSR in a difficult situation, worsened by the diplomatic isolation. In line with the principles of an autarkic economy, the state tried to catch up with chemical synthesis and searched for alkaloids in domestic species, while also trying to introduce tropical plants.

Vernacular medicine was approached by the state scientists as yet another source of pharmacological knowledge. While exercising the tropes of “filtering”, “rectifying” and “cleansing” applied both to ballast chemical components of local plants and to “irrational” elements of local knowledge, they depended on local guides, herbalists, and practitioners. The paper examines publications of pharmaceutical research institutions to reveal the interaction between the scientific and indigenous knowledge, and the mechanisms of research aimed at industrial-scale production. It challenges Mary Conroy's argument that the “folk nostrums” were used as an emergency solution due to planning and supply failures. We argue that the use of vernacular materia medica was a deliberate strategy for the search of new alkaloids that also prompted researchers to revise materials of imperial expeditions. In doing so, Soviet pharmacologists relied on the ideas of the 18th-century cameralism that had inspired the Russian academic expeditions to Siberia and the Far East. This approach validated practices deemed “irrational” and transformed them into clues for bioprospecting.

Authors

• Olga Belichenko

• Maria Pirogovskaya, LMU, Munich