‘One of the Best Medicaments’: Opium, Slavery, and Medicine in Early Modern Italy

This paper explores early modern medical debates on opium. A long-term medicinal ingredient, in early modern Italy opium became the object of renewed medical interest. Described by the apothecary Diacinto Cestoni as “one of the best medicaments,” opium was widespread in Ottoman medicine where it was used as a remedy for pain and various ailments like headache. In early modern Italy, opium consumption was also associated with the presence of large communities of captives from the Ottoman world and beyond who came to be viewed as the bearers of valuable knowledge on the substance and its use. This paper considers opium as a point of entry into the entanglements of slavery, medicine, and natural inquiry in early modern Italy. It draws attention to how savants turned captives into experimental subjects while, at the same time, employing them as sources of sought-after knowledge and expertise.

Speaker

Lucia Dacome is Associate Professor and Pauline M.H. Mazumdar Chair in the History of Medicine at the IHPST, University of Toronto. Her research focuses on themes at the intersection of the social, cultural and material history of health and medicine, the history of the body, the histories of women and gender, and the histories of slavery and race in early in early modern Europe and the Mediterranean world. She is currently at work on a project on slavery, medicine, and natural inquiry in early modern Italy.