Galen’s Remedies Beyond the Renaissance
Galen's Remedies
Beyond the Renaissance
Early Modern Traditions and Theories of Materia Medica
Fabrizio Bigotti
John Wilkins
21 July 2026 – 5 PM (CEST)
Surviving the demise of its humoral pathology and anatomy, Galen’s works on simple and compound remedies—the so-called galenicals—formed the backbone of Western pharmacology until the Industrial Revolution.
Over almost two millennia, it absorbed new remedies, ingredients, methods of preparation—including chemical ones—and new ways of understanding how medicines worked. Yet, despite its extraordinary longevity and geographical reach, the history of Galenic therapy after the Renaissance has received surprisingly little attention.
In this talk, we will explore why Galenic pharmacopoeia proved so remarkably resilient and how it adapted to radically different intellectual, cultural, and commercial contexts, drawing on the contributions to the recently published Galen’s Remedies in the Early Modern Period (Palgrave–Springer Nature, 2026).
Rather than presenting Galenism as a tradition in decline, we will argue that Galenic pharmacology remained a dynamic body of knowledge, continually reshaped through encounters with new medical practices, theories, substances, and modes of production.
About the Speakers ...
Fabrizio Bigotti (PD Dr.) is director of the Centre for the Study of Medicine and the Body in the Renaissance (CSMBR) and lecturer at Julius-Maximilians-Universität Würzburg, where he was also awarded the venia legendi in the history of medicine, science, and medical ethics. He has published widely on premodern medicine, science, and technology. He is editor of the series Ars Longa: Texts and Traditions of Medicine from Antiquity to 1800 (Brepols) and co-editor of the Palgrave Studies in Medieval and Early Modern Medicine (PSMEMM) and the Journal Sudhoffs Archiv.
John Wilkins is Professor Emeritus of Greek Culture at the University of Exeter, in the UK. He is a recognised expert in the history of Greek food and diet and is currently preparing an edition of Galen’s Simple Drugs I-V for the Cambridge Galen Translations (forthcoming 2028).
