Clare Griffin, Mixing Medicines: The Global Drug Trade and Early Modern Russia

Abstract

For over two centuries, historians have examined the records of the Muscovite Apothecary Chancery of the seventeenth century to uncover the history of medicine in premodern Russia. Most scholarship has focused on the foreign practitioners employed by the Chancery. By shifting attention to the medicines themselves, Clare Griffin makes a novel contribution to long-standing discussions. Griffin takes inspiration from two current areas of scholarly investigation: the history of material things in a global context, and post-colonial critiques of the dissemination of medical knowledge. Through these lenses, she educes important information from sources previously neglected, most notably the prescriptions doctors wrote and the records of medicines purchased and stocked in the Muscovite state-run pharmacy. These documents consist of little but lists of materia medica, lacking even notations of the illnesses the medicines were expected to treat. Yet Griffin ably analyses them to provide new insights on Muscovy’s place in the world and on the functioning of the Apothecary Chancery itself.