Russian Empire in the System of Global Trade in Medicinal Herbs in the Late 18th – Early 19th Century and the Problem of Proportion Between “Scientific” and “Traditional” Pharmaceutics

Abstract

This article examines Russian imports of medicinal plants in the late 18th – early 19th centuries and the attempts to reduce these procurements by using home-grown plants instead in the context of a general crisis in European trade during the Napoleonic wars. It attempts to estimate the volumes of imported medicinal materials, analyzes the range of medicinal plants, and compares the trades in exotic medicinal plants in Russia with the known data about their circulation in various European countries. The article demonstrates the dependency of Russian state-run apothecaries and hospitals on both the imported exotic plants and species native to the Russian Empire in the late 18th – early 19th centuries, and examines the available data concerning the apothecary gardens and wild medicinal plants harvesting for state-run apothecaries in Russia. It highlights the lack of infrastructure for a steady supply of native plants to state-run apothecaries and hospitals, the factor that accounted for the futility of attempts to reduce the dependency on imported medicaments in the early 19th century. At the same time, the paper emphasizes the continuing presence of local potion and herb shops trading in medicinal plants long before the transfer of European pharmaceutical institutions and practices to the Russian empire. These shops were not restricted to trading in indigenous plants only but could also sell the exotic ones. This fact undermines the simple binary model of European and “indigenous” or “folk” pharmaceutical traditions co-existing in Russia in the late 18th – early 19th centuries, arguing instead for their entangled histories.