Exotic Plants in the Crisis of the Galenic System and the Eighteenth-Century Medical Debate

In early modern times, a considerable increase in the knowledge of the exotic medicinal plants enriched the European pharmacopoeia. The introduction and presence of new medicinal botanical species coming from the East and the Americas is testified by their inclusion in the various treatises of medicine, natural history and systematic botany, in the pharmacopoeias, in the apothecary’s shops, and in the European botanical gardens of that period. During the entire sixteenth-century, under the influence of Galen’s theories, a difficult attempt was made to fit these new plants into the pre-existing taxonomy. The Galenic system, which had accommodated both the therapeutic use of the plants whose efficacy had been proved and the mechanical explanation of living bodies, during this century began to be affected by a progressive separation between the two hypotheses. On the one hand, the increasingly substantial natural history treatises that introduced unknown botanical species and, on the other hand, the mechanistic explanations of nature, all became the object of medical studies in the seventeenth and eighteenth-century. The claim that only by experimenting on the bodies of cavies could it be possible to attain the knowledge of the operation of living organisms was agreed upon by most physicians. The effort to find new remedies for old epidemic diseases gave rise to a growing interest in research, in the use of exotic plants, and in the verification of their therapeutic powers.