ESHS/HSS Annual Meeting

Trade, politics, and ideology: Making plant medicines ‘official’ in British India, 1860-1960

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

English Abstract

The inclusion of indigenous medicinal plants in the official pharmacopoeias of colonial powers was an important goal for many in authority in European colonies. Yet the journey of Indian plant medicines from indigenous remedy to imperial pharmacopoeia was often a tortuous one. Initial support for the substitution of imported western medicines with local items was soon replaced with concerns about a lack of evidence for efficacy and their impact on trade. In the mid-nineteenth century Bengal and Indian pharmacopoeias were published, but with publication of a British Pharmacopoeia in 1864 efforts were made to include Indian medicinal plants. But once some were added, Indian pharmacopoeias were banned and the British one imposed - a move that was vehemently opposed by medical officers and others in India. A call in 1892 to make the British Pharmacopoeia “better fitted to the needs of India and the colonies” led to an Indian and Colonial Addendum in 1900, and when the British Pharmacopoeia was published in 1914 it was claimed to be “suitable for the whole Empire”. Yet the call for reinstatement of a separate Indian pharmacopoeia never waned, and inquiries in Britain and India in the 1930s and 1940s failed to reconcile indigenous medical philosophies with western scientific methods. This presentation presents new insights into the interplay between indigenous knowledge and scientific enquiry, into the role that trade played on the perceived value of plant medicines, and into how some plants but not others underwent a global journey from one part of an empire to another.

Author

• Stuart Anderson, London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine