Bioprospecting eighteenth-century Asia: A case study in the circulation of scientific knowledge

Abstract

Prospecting in compendia of traditional medical knowledge is a worthwhile enterprise to address the pressing need for more effective drugs. A dramatic instance is artemisinin, an anti-malarial re-discovered by Tu You You in ancient Chinese texts, a discovery that won her a 2015 Nobel Prize in medicine. Similarly, John Gerard’s Herball (1597) and Georg Rumpf’s Herbarium amboinense (1741; authored in 17th c. in Ambon) yielded twenty-seven plants of pharmaceutical importance that had gone unnoticed in the modern era (Buenz et al., 2004). If even only one of these were to produce an important infection-fighting substance, that could be highly significant. Other research indicates that even when medicinal usages are not mentioned in by early-modern treatises, the plants reported should nonetheless be presumed potentially medicinal unless proven otherwise. This has recently been shown to be the case for Maytenus emerginata (Willd.), which while reported in Rheede’s 12-volume Hortus malabaricus (1678 - 1693 ), was not indicated to be medicinal (Sagwan et al. 2011). Hence it can be presumed that Laurent Garcin (c. 1681-1751), a ship’s surgeon in the East Indies with a declared interest in plant-based therapies, collected plants considered by local informants to have therapeutic uses.