Pharmaceutical worlds of knowledge in the past and present

In November 2024 and April 2025, the Institute of Pharmacy at Martin Luther University Halle-Wittenberg, the Research Unit and the Friends of the Francke Foundations are organizing two joint lecture evenings on “Pharmaceutical Knowledge Worlds in the Past and Present”.

On the first evening, the focus will be on herbal medicine knowledge that has been or is being acquired and exchanged in different contexts in the past and present. The cooperation project “Tri-Sustain”, which researches the pharmaceutical use of African plants, will be presented - it is an association of researchers from several sub-Saharan African countries and MLU Halle. This will be set in relation to practices of pharmacological knowledge production in missions of the 17th/18th century.

On the second evening, current findings from pharmacy history research on alchemical practice at Halle's orphanage, now the Francke Foundations, will be presented. These will be introduced by an overview of the laboratory technique of distillation since antiquity. A project will also be presented that makes an outstanding manuscript source of alchemical knowledge digitally available to researchers and the general public for the first time.