ABSTRACT
How did the apothecaries who lived during these eras shape the practice of American pharmacy?
One of the main motivations for the Age of Exploration was for the nationstates of Western Europe to find new trade routes to the Far East. By doing so, the Western Europeans found routes that were able to break the Italian city-states’ long-standing monopoly on products (spices, herbs) coming from Asia, Africa, and the Middle East. When Christopher Columbus and other European explorers searched for these new trade routes they stumbled upon the Americas, and for them, had discovered a New World laden with new resources, especially materia medica. So, the “discovery” of the Americas became an unintended consequence of the Western Europeans’ desire for better access to products from the East and represented a vast new territory ready for them to exploit commercially, which they did. The bounty of flora and fauna found in the New World offered the Europeans a seemingly endless supply of new materials that would dramatically expand materia medica in Europe and elsewhere in the Old World. Potatoes, tomatoes, corn, cotton, turpentine, peanuts, tobacco, ipecacuanha, cinchona, sarsaparilla, and other plants were shipped back to Europe.1
