Book contents
- A Singular Remedy
- SCIENCE IN HISTORY
- A Singular Remedy
- Copyright page
- Contents
- Illustrations
- Acknowledgements
- A Note on Source Material
- A Note on Language and Translation
- A Note on Weights, Currencies and Measures
- Introduction
- 1 Origin Stories
- 2 The Demands of Humanity
- 3 Community of Practice
- 4 Febrile Situations
- 5 Harvests of Change
- Conclusion
- Bibliography
- Index
5 - Harvests of Change
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 02 October 2020
- A Singular Remedy
- SCIENCE IN HISTORY
- A Singular Remedy
- Copyright page
- Contents
- Illustrations
- Acknowledgements
- A Note on Source Material
- A Note on Language and Translation
- A Note on Weights, Currencies and Measures
- Introduction
- 1 Origin Stories
- 2 The Demands of Humanity
- 3 Community of Practice
- 4 Febrile Situations
- 5 Harvests of Change
- Conclusion
- Bibliography
- Index
Summary
Chapter 5 frames the book’s narrative in the style of a lengthy coda. It is concerned with how the bark’s prevalence, wide fame and general ‘usefulness’ in therapeutic practice among geographically disperse and socially diverse societies affected its natural habitat in the central and northern Andes. The bark’s very ‘mobility’ and the popular demand that arose for it, the chapter argues, altered the harvest areas’ landscape of possession, commerce and demographics, the distribution and abundance of vegetation, and the livelihood, health and fate of the men and women implicated in harvesting, processing and conveying the bark. The chapter reminds readers, at parting, how plant trade, therapeutic exchange and epistemic brokerage are not extricable from time and space. Consumption and the imaginaries, therapeutic practice and medical understandings attendant to it invariably begins with changes to the material world, to physical nature and society.
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- A Singular RemedyCinchona Across the Atlantic World, 1751–1820, pp. 147 - 178Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2020