Therapeutic Commodities: Trade, Transmission and the Material Culture of Global Medicine (360G-Wellcome-205520_Z_16_Z)

Therapeutic commodities – goods considered valuable for the improvement of health – have local as well as global histories. This project aims to understand the history of therapeutic commodities by using a material culture approach, meaning a focus on socio-cultural contexts in which humans assign meanings to commodities, as well as analysis of their materiality: the qualities and meanings assigned to substances, the ways in which substances came into being, including technologies that created, developed and produced the commodity. I propose to view these two as mutually constitutive aspects of a material approach to medicine. Studies of trade and the transmission of medical knowledge tend to reduce therapeutic commodities either to unchanging goods that move in line with supply and demand, or to characteristic features representing separate systems of knowledge. Instead, this project seeks to bring together scholars who work on therapeutic commodities across time (from the early modern to the contemporary) and space (Eurasia, South Asia, Africa and the Americas), and in different academic environments, to challenge existing narratives about the circulation of therapeutic commodities. The ultimate aim is to write a new history of therapeutic commodities, mapping their global socio-political and cultural lives across time and space.