From Plant Press, Vol. 10, No. 2 from April 2007.
In 2002, Alain Touwaide and Emanuela Appetiti joined the Department as Research Associate and Scientific Collaborator, respectively, to launch a research program dealing with the history of botany, ethnobotany and ethnopharmacology of the ancient Mediterranean world. The main focus of the program consisted of preparing a Flora of Classical Antiquity for which they have been collecting material for more than 30 years. One aspect of their research—the therapeutic uses of plants—was funded in 2002 by the National Center for Complementary and Alternative Medicine of the National Institutes of Health. The Medicinal Plants of Antiquity program aims at making the ancient documentation—duly translated into English and analyzed—available to botanists, pharmacologists and historians through Web site presentations.
Datura, from “Trattato della historia, natura, et virtu delle Droghe Medicinali, & altri Semplici rarissimi, che vengono portati dalle Indie Orientali in Europa ...” by Cristóbal Acosta. In Venetia, Presso à Francesco Ziletti, 1585. (Courtesy of Smithsonian Institution Libraries, Washington, DC)
However rich they might be, ancient texts need to be complemented by other sources as they are not as explicit as contemporary researchers would wish. To compensate for this limitation, a complementary program was launched on Renaissance herbals. Supported by the Earthwatch Institute, research was conducted from 2003 to 2006 at the National Library of Rome and in 2006 at the Library of Padua, in the most ancient Renaissance botanic garden. The research consisted of making a census of the herbals and of their content, reproducing plant representations in a digital form, and analyzing all of the material from a historical and a botanical viewpoint. All gathered material will be searchable on a Smithsonian Institution Libraries Web site, which is currently in development.
In spite of their apparent diversity, all of these programs have the same objective: bringing light to the documentation of botanical knowledge of the Old World from Antiquity to the Renaissance, and adding new data to the knowledge of plants and their uses before the development of modern botany, particularly from Linnaeus on. The research program complements current botanical research by explaining its origin, including Latin terminology. Furthermore, by analyzing the history of botany in the different cultures that flourished around the Mediterranean, the research program follows the continuous transmission of knowledge from the most remote antiquity to the birth of modern science.