Abstract

This dissertation studies the role of the investigation of drug properties in Dutch medicine from the sixteenth to the end of the seventeenth century. This subject naturally belongs to the history of pharmacology, but studying it in its sixteenth- and seventeenth-century context requires an approach unrestricted by disciplinary boundaries. Historians have been pointing out for some time that the early modern histories of medicine, philosophy and the study of plants, animals and minerals should not be considered in isolation from each other.