Paper short abstract:

Histories of science and empire portray the colonial adoption of indigenous medicine as a process of appropriation and extirpation. My account differs. I follow a single item of materia medica as it was swept into imperial communication systems, crossed empires, and traversed medical regimes.

Paper long abstract:

Histories of science and empire tend to portray the colonial adoption of indigenous materia medica as the appropriation of curative materials and the extirpation of social and cultural meaning.

My work complicates that familiar story. This paper follows a single item of materia medica over time, as it was swept up into imperial communication systems, crossed empires, and moved into and out of medical regimes. I show how medical meanings—ways of reasoning about medicine and the body—were stickier than we tend to think. The plant currently labeled Crossopteryx febrifuga first found its way into the European medical imagination at a market in Takrur near the Upper Guinea Coast in the 1480s. Already a staple of materia medica among free and enslaved Africans in the region, it became important as well to Portuguese and Spanish colonial medical practice in the Gulf of Guinea from the sixteenth to the late eighteenth centuries. British interest brought it to the UK's Royal Botanical Gardens at Kew in the middle of the nineteenth century, where dried specimens of it remain today. What did this curative item mean in the context of fifteenth century encounters? In what ways did that meaning change among slaves and settlers on São Tomé (under the Portuguese) or Fernando Pó (under the Spanish)? And what meaning was it invested with when British imperial agents brought it to Kew? No single medical community, and no single empire, ever managed to monopolize the medical meaning of this common tropical plant.