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July 2022 - June 2023
Barbara Di Gennaro Splendore received her PhD at Yale University in 2021. Her dissertation focuses on the medicines culture and market in early modern Italy, using theriac—the most famous compound drug in the Western world up to the nineteenth century—as a case study. The dissertation received the Santorio Award honourable mention (2021). In 2015, she was awarded the Jerry Stannard Memorial Award for the History of Pharmacy and the Annals of Science Essay Prize for Craft, money and mercy: an apothecary’s self-portrait in sixteenth-century Bologna. Her work has also been funded by the MacMillan Center for International and Area Studies and the American Institute of the History of Pharmacy.
She holds a degree in Early Modern History from the University of Bologna. Her book-length thesis, Naples and the Turks in the Eighteenth Century, analyzed diplomatic sources from an ethnological perspective. Before coming to Yale, she worked as an editor for the two major educational publishers in Italy—Zanichelli and Mondadori Education—and helped publish some of the best-selling history textbooks in Italy.
My project is to revise my dissertation into a book manuscript. My dissertation, The Reinvention of Theriac. Pharmacy, State, and the Market in Italy (1490-1640), analyzes the history of a specific medicine, theriac, both as a scientific object and as a commodity. Theriac enjoyed exceptional popularity from antiquity until around 1800 in Europe and the Middle East. It was made of seventy-some ingredients, amongst which was opium and viper flesh. Considered a panacea, physicians used it to treat a wide variety of ailments, including bubonic plague. I argue that in early modern Italy, governments and institutions, such as apothecary guilds and health boards, used theriac as a political tool. Across the peninsula, princes and rulers—among the many political actors invested in theriac—used theriac in public pageantries as a way of displaying their efforts to protect subjects from the plague. By the seventeenth century, apothecaries capitalized on scholars and rulers’ investment in theriac, transforming theriac in a successful business. The dissertation traces medical debates about theriac, the creation of new pharmaceutical regulations, and conflicts between apothecaries and the medical establishment, as well as the consumption of theriac by ordinary people.
My book project The State Drug: Theriac, Pharmacy and Medicine in the Global Age expands upon the dissertation. The book examines theriac’s global diffusion and its demise in the eighteenth century, showing the merging of Galenic pharmacy and chymistry in Northern Europe, the use of theriac on the cargo ships transporting enslaved people across the Atlantic, and the political use Jesuits, colonizers, and even the Chinese emperor made of theriac in South America and in Asia. The global success of theriac offers the occasion to assess the role of Galenic pharmacy in the formation of colonial empires and identity. Concurrently, in Europe, physicians put pharmacological theories under scrutiny, harshly revising traditional polypharmacy. My book shows that at the time theriac’s sales actually increased. Patients’ use of theriac was entrenched and among the lower classes that physicians and state officials did not dare to get rid of it. Only epochal political changes (such as the French Revolution) could divorce theriac from the medical establishment.