Alain Touwaide: Visiting Scholar in Botany

From Plant Press, Vol. 5, No. 3 from July 2002.

By Robert DeFilipps

A drawing of Artemisia from Herbarius Patavie, 1485, f. 12 recto.

You don’t need to understand ten languages including Arabic, and maintain a personal library of 12,000 volumes, but they sure help to facilitate work. Especially if you are, like Alain Touwaide, deeply interested in the plants of antiquity, and the classical times in which botany first emerged as the study of medicinal plants, incorporating the early history of pharmacology and medicine. Alain Touwaide is a Visiting Scholar in Botany, and he is accompanied by his wife Emanuela Appetiti, an independent scholar, botanical historian, and ethnobotanist specializing in medicinal plants of the Australian Aborigines under a grant from the Italian Institute of Philosophical Studies based in Naples. She is currently compiling a bibliography on traditional uses of medicinal plants among aborigines.

 Born in Brussels, Belgium, and demonstrating an early aptitude for languages, Touwaide received the Doctorate in Philosophy and Letters (Department of Classics) from the University of Louvain in 1981, having written a 5-volume thesis on toxicological treatises attributed to Dioscorides. He also holds a degree in Oriental Philology and History (Byzantium/Arabic World) granted in 1979, among several others, from Louvain. His previous academic appointments have demonstrated a rich international diversity, taking him for various periods of time to Dumbarton Oaks (Washington, D.C.), Nice and Marseille (France), Naples, Barcelona, Madrid, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, and Norman, Oklahoma, among many other places.

A specialization in classical botany has inspired Touwaide’s searches for ancient manuscripts in numerous libraries around the world. These include the Vatican Library; the Ambrosian Library in Milan; the Marciana Library in Venice; the Topkapi Library in Istanbul; the Mazarine Library in Paris; the library of the monks of Mt.Athos (Greece), and of several other monasteries; and the Bodleian Library (Oxford, England). At the Bodleian, some of the books are still chained to desks for student use, a lingering precaution from centuries ago, and at the Vatican, it is requested that even well-seasoned scholars prove their ability in Latin and Greek to a librarian, in effect to take a “codicological exam,” before being allowed access to the classical manuscripts.

The timeframe of botany encompassed by Touwaide’s research includes: Greece from Homer to the Roman conquest; the rise and decline of the Roman world as exemplified by the writings of Celsus, De Medicina in the early 1^st century A.D., of Seribonius Largus, Compositiones in 44 A.D, and of Pliny, Naturalis Historia, 23/4 to 79 A.D.; Islamic Medicine from the 9^th to the 13^th century and the early exchanges of medical knowledge between Islam and Europe; the Byzantine period which ends in 1453; the Renaissance from the end of the 15^th to the end of the 16^th century, which is also known as the Age of Herbals; and the Pre-Linnaeans of the 18^th century, the latter of which include several botanical writers who are commemorated in the names of well known plant families: Caspar Commelin (fl. 1701, Commelinaceae), Pierre Magnol (fl. 1720, Magnoliaceae), and Johann Kramer (fl. 1720, Krameriaceae).

Within this framework, Touwaide’s major areas of scientific interest include: the history of ancient, medieval and pre-modern sciences, including the bio-medical sciences; editing, translating, studying and indexing of scientific treatises; anthropological interpretation of ancient, medieval and Renaissance sciences and medicine; traditions of ancient sciences and medicine from antiquity to the Renaissance; assimilation of ancient science and medicine during the Renaissance; inventory and description of Renaissance scientific books; and the role of the classical heritage in the Scientific Revolution.

Those topics are reflected in his numerous recent endeavors such as co-authoring a book based on plants in Dioscorides’ De Materia Medica, entitled Healing Renal Diseases in Antiquity (2000, Editoriale Bios); contributing a chapter on “The Aristotelian school and the birth of theoretical pharmacology in ancient Greece” for a book edited by Regine Pötzsch entitled The Pharmacy: Windows on History (1996, Editiones Roche); and examining ancient texts to help explore the origin of the thorn apple, as contrasted to that of Physalis alkekengi and Atropa belladonna (all Solanaceae), published in an article entitled “Datura stramonium L.: Old or New World?”, Delpinoa 39-40: 29-43 (1997-1998).

A current magnum opus of Touwaide is the development of an enormous electronic database known as the Materia Medica Mediterranea, comprising information on the natural therapeutic substances quoted in ancient recipe books. The M.M.M. database already has a total of approximately 25,000 entries and is still growing, with 6,500 entries for Hippocrates already encoded. Both Touwaide and Appetiti are increasing it. As explained by Touwaide, by means of these ancient recipes we can explore the forgotten properties of plants, the effects, usages, and illnesses they cured, which were well known in earlier times but are currently lost in the mists of time. Reawakening interest in them can lead to new clinical trials, even by the Food and Drug Administration (FDA). This, by the way, would be quite a leap from the “clinical trials” of thousands of years ago in the time of Galen (129-post 216 A.D.), when, for example, lethal doses of the deadly nightshade (Solanum) were rolled up in bread balls and thrown to a chicken to see what happens.

In this direction, Touwaide has studied the Dioscoridean botany of the edible pistachio nut tree (Pistacia, Anacardiaceae), including the ancients’ ingestion of crushed pistachio seeds with wine to treat venomous bites. And, he points out that the negative side-effects of using the antidepressant St. John’s wort (Hypericum), now a very popular herbal, were known through antiquity. The result of all these recipes is a massive transference of knowledge about plants and the illnesses they cure, which the ancient people started and gave to successive civilizations. Various aspects of the study of these processes, says Touwaide, may be referred to as “Comparative Botany” or “Historical Cognitive Ethnobotany.”

And thus continues his quest, to place the contents of ancient texts at the disposal of modern pharmacologists, so that clinical trials can be encouraged on the forgotten properties of plants, while underscoring the scientific contents of ancient botanical works in a manner that can be assimilated by the physicians, pharmacologists and herbalists of today’s societies. This “Mediterranean” database will co-exist effectively with the current global phase of prospecting for medicinal and drug plants in the world’s diminishing tropical rainforests. Identifying the plants is often difficult, and he is pleased to be able to work in Smithsonian’s libraries and herbarium.

In the immediate future, Alain Touwaide is organizing a panel on “Medical and Intercultural Exchanges: Byzantium, the Arabic World, the Ottoman Empire,” for the 38^th Congress of the International Society for the History of Medicine to be held 3-6 September 2002 in Istanbul, Turkey. Later, in February 2003, he will be a discussant at a conference on Ancient Botanical Illustration at the College of Arts of America in New York.

Comments

[Martin Buuri Kaburia]

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