Abstract Summary
Examining the recipes of Noël Vallant (1632–1685), private physician of Parisian nobility, this paper focuses on non-European substances used in medical therapies in seventeenth-century France. The question of what happened to ‘exotic’ remedies entering the European market has been previously neglected. The example of Vallant, who was well-positioned to access and prescribe newly arriving drugs of all kinds, promises particularly valuable insights into how an early modern French physician approached these substances and sought to employ them. I will open with a brief overview of the seventeenth-century Parisian medical marketplace, followed by an illustration of Vallant’s strategies in acquiring non-European remedies and associated knowledge and an analysis of his recipes, where non-European and European substances met and interacted. These cross-cultural encounters reveal that imported remedies like clove, ginger, or turmeric were not uncommon among the Parisian nobility around 1650 and became frequently entangled with magic or traditional European therapies in processes which produced novel forms of therapy.
