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The elk, the ass, the tapir, their hooves, and the falling sickness: a story of substitution and animal medical substances*

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  14 February 2018

Irina Podgorny
Irina Podgorny*
Affiliation:
Museo de la Plata, Paseo del Bosque s/n, 1900 La Plata, Buenos Aires, Argentina E-mail: [email protected]
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Abstract

This article presents a preliminary survey by which to track, in the longue durée, the path of the nail of the Gran Bestia (great beast), a remedy that appeared in therapeutics on both sides of the Atlantic. The Gran Bestia is mentioned in the natural histories, books of remedies, and medical handbooks that proliferated in the Old World and European settlements from the seventeenth century onwards. From the point of view of global history, it is a revealing case from which to investigate, first, how the transfer of a name between continents involved the associated transfer of medical virtues and properties and, second, long before Linnaeus, how the commerce in medicines, skins, and other animal products contributed to associating different animal kinds from different cultural worlds. Far from human universals, the history of the great beast seems to refer to common meanings created by commerce. This article therefore argues for a new investigation into the global and transdisciplinary dimension of objects that is not limited to exclusively local traditions, and may instead reflect the living remains of a long history of exchanges, translations, and transfers that de- and re-functionalized nature in evolving geographies over several centuries.

Keywords

animal-based remediesearly modern periodelk and tapir hoovesLatin America
Type
Articles
Information
Journal of Global History , Volume 13 , Issue 1 , March 2018 , pp. 46 - 68
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2018 

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Footnotes

*

Stefanie Gänger, Isabel Martínez Navarrete, Patrick Manning, Abigail Owen, Christopher Duffin, Margaret Lopes, Adriana Miranda, Eric Buffetaut, Sylvie Michel (Musée François Tillequin), Alejandra Gómez Martín (Museo de la Farmacia Hispana), and Liliana Gómez-Popescu provided materials for and made useful suggestions on the different stages of earlier drafts of this article. I am very grateful to Lais Viena de Souza (University of Bahia, Brazil), who shared information that she had gathered in the Portuguese archives for her still unpublished book on Jesuit pharmacies. The article benefited much from the comments and suggestions from the Journal’s editors, as well as those coming from two anonymous reviewers. I also acknowledge the support of PIP 0153, GI-CONICET: ‘La burocracia, la comercialización de la naturaleza y el carácter transaccional de la ciencia (siglos XVIII–XIX)’, and PICT 2015-3534: ‘La fauna marina del Atlántico Sur en la ciencia, el derecho y el comercio de los siglos XVIII y XIX’. The article was completed while on a John Carter Brown Library ‘Maria Cassiet’ Fellowship in the autumn of 2017 but it has accompanied me through several countries and institutions. The ILL service from the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science (Berlin) was, as always, a key actor in accessing the bibliography used here.

References

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72 Gade, Nature and culture, p. 4.

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