Clare Griffin, "Mixing Medicines: The Global Drug Trade and Early Modern Russia" (McGill-Queen's UP, 2022)

Summary

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Podcast Summary

Podcast: New Books Network

Episode: Clare Griffin, "Mixing Medicines: The Global Drug Trade and Early Modern Russia" (McGill-Queen's UP, 2022)

Host: Erica Monahan

Guest: Claire Griffin

Date: January 11, 2026

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Overview

This episode features historian Claire Griffin discussing her book Mixing Medicines: The Global Drug Trade and Early Modern Russia, which explores the medical, cultural, and global forces that shaped the pharmaceutical practices of early modern Russia. The conversation delves into how the Russian court sourced, regulated, and conceptualized medicines, highlighting the surprising global networks that brought African and American ingredients to Muscovy. Griffin also addresses complex intersections of religion, culture, and science, offering insights into the documentation and authority surrounding medical practices of the time.

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Key Discussion Points & Insights

1. Claire Griffin’s Path to History

• Griffin shares her accidental journey into Russian history, sparked by the random availability of Russian language at her state school in the UK.
  • “It was very much kind of a series of coincidences, which turned out to be happy coincidences, I hope.” (03:47, Griffin)
• She credits her interest in history and research to encouragement from professors and a fortuitous academic environment.

2. Origins and Motivation for the Book

• The project began with Griffin’s fascination for archival documents, particularly the unusually detailed lists of ingredients in the Apothecary Chancery records.
  • “My particular process is to look at various documents… and I stumble across things and think this is interesting and kind of weird. And I don't know immediately what to do with this.” (05:24, Griffin)
• These lists led her to question why ingredient details were more meticulously recorded than intended medical outcomes.

3. The Apothecary Chancery: Russia’s Medical Powerhouse (08:10)

• Griffin details the role of the Apothecary Chancery, a central institution responsible for court, military, and broader public health in Russia.
• Comparison to modern equivalents: Simultaneously acted as CDC (disease control), FDA (regulation), and CVS (dispensing medicines).
  • “One of the interesting things about the Apothecary Chancery is it kind of does everything about official medicine in the 17th century.” (10:58, Griffin)

Who Worked in the Apothecary Chancery? (11:53)

• Initially, foreign physicians (mainly from Protestant Europe) dominated due to concerns about loyalty and the dangers of poisoning.
• Gradually, Russians were trained as medics and pharmacists, but the diplomatic aspect persisted.
  • “It really does seem to be fitting into a diplomatic exchange of trust, actions of various kinds, rather than being solely about expertise.” (15:34, Griffin)

4. Ingredients: Botanical, Chemical, and Flesh-Based Medicines

Botanical and Chemical Worlds (16:22)

• The Muscovite worldview saw the universe as purposefully created, with plants and chemicals classified according to perceived functions—helpful, harmful, or neutral.
• Botanicals were widely used; reactions to chemicals like mercury were cautious due to their powerful effects.
  • "We kind of have to be more careful with chemicals. We're not quite sure where they might go, given how powerful they can be." (19:44, Griffin)

Flesh-Based Medicines and Religious Taboos (20:27)

• Russians were explicitly opposed to “mummy powder” (ground mummified flesh, often from Egyptian mummies) and other flesh medicines common in Western Europe.
• These prohibitions were rooted in Orthodox Christianity’s dietary codes and religious anxieties about consumption of human remains.
  • “We are not to use…mummy powder or to use evil snake poison… If you haven't read early modern medical documents before, where snakes are coming from in Moscow is unclear.” (21:18, Griffin)
• Western European practices, like using human fat and blood, were far more widespread, sometimes even prestigious, as attested by ornate pharmacy jars.
  • "You also get rather fabulous storage jars for displaying in pharmacies… and they say in Latin, human fat." (31:42, Griffin)

5. The Global Drug Trade: African and American Commodities (33:55)

• The presence of African (mummy powder) and American (sassafras, sarsaparilla) ingredients in Russian medicine highlights Russia’s surprising entanglement in early modern global trade.
• Notably, American botanicals appeared in Russian prescriptions decades before Russian colonization in North America or acceptance of products like tobacco or potatoes.
  • “From the early 17th century onwards, we see sassafras… something which are very specifically American. And this is actually useful to historians because we can track where this thing is from.” (35:14, Griffin)

6. Surprises and Expectations in Research (38:06)

• Most surprising: The casual and early use of uniquely American ingredients (sassafras) in Muscovy, which contrasts modern assumptions about when and how global commodities circulated.
  • “Sassafras in 17th century Moscow is the thing I found most surprising.” (39:44, Griffin)
• Expected: The meticulous documentation of who made what medicine in the court, reflecting the culture of paranoia about poisoning and the importance of traceability for assigning blame.
  • “These recipes… are about who to blame if someone gets ill.” (41:04, Griffin)

7. Textual Authorities & Material Culture (43:00)

• Griffin reflects on the importance of books and lists as “objects” through which both historical actors and modern scholars access the medical world.
  • “We are not actually accessing the object itself. We are accessing it via a text… So we want to consider all of these aspects of the text itself as object because it's so important for us to access other objects.” (44:12, Griffin)

8. New Research Directions (46:06)

• Griffin previews her next project: examining how the Apothecary Chancery handled battlefield injuries—focusing on the bureaucratic, less empathetic attitude towards pain and physical trauma.
  • "There is almost no mention of pain in what are some really gnarly descriptions." (46:39, Griffin)
  • “I'm going to move on from the cheery subject, subject of ground up human body parts into the much nicer subject of people being shot.” (48:29, Griffin)

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Notable Quotes & Memorable Moments

• "The past is a foreign country. But honestly, I think possibly 17th century Muscovy is just a different planet." (38:13, Griffin)
• “It totally makes sense… that you want to know who put the thing together in case it all goes horribly wrong.” (41:48, Griffin)
• “If you are the physician of the Tsar, you are in an unparalleled position of poisoning the guy if you feel like it.” (12:09, Griffin)
• On unexpected American imports: “Something that's really surprising to us, sassafras in 17th-century Moscow seems totally normal to them.” (38:56, Griffin)
• “The past—not rated PG, is what I always tell my students.” (48:35, Monahan)

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Timestamps by Topic

• Claire Griffin's Academic Path – 03:23–04:57
• Motivation for the Book – 05:06–07:19
• The Apothecary Chancery Explained – 08:10–11:12
• Personnel & Diplomatic Concerns – 11:53–15:41
• Botanical vs. Chemical Ingredients – 16:22–20:02
• Flesh-Based Medicines and Religion – 20:27–32:34
• African and American Commodities in Muscovy – 33:55–36:46
• Most Surprising Findings – 37:56–40:01
• Court Paranoia and Documentation – 40:01–42:31
• Textual Authorities and Materiality – 43:00–45:06
• Next Research Project – 46:06–48:35

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Conclusion

This episode offers an in-depth look at the surprising ways early modern Russia engaged with the global drug trade, navigated medical and religious taboos, and constructed medical authority. Griffin’s research demonstrates how historical medical practices were deeply intertwined with global commerce, religious beliefs, and court politics—pushing listeners to rethink the boundaries of Russia’s early modern world. The conversation also highlights the challenges and fascinations of working with archival material that is as strange to us today as it was routine for Muscovites nearly four centuries ago.

Transcript

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[Claire Griffin]

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[Marshall Poe]

See Terms hello everybody. This is Marshall Po. I'm the founder and editor of the New Books Network and if you're listening to this, you know that the NBN is the largest academic podcast network in the world. We reach a worldwide audience of 2 million people. You may have a podcast or you may be thinking about starting a podcast. As you probably know, there are challenges basically of two kinds. One is technical. There are things you have to know in order to get your podcast produced and distributed. And the second is, and this is the biggest problem, you need to get an audience. Building an audience in podcasting is the hardest thing to do today. With this in mind in mind, we at the NBM have started a service called NBN Productions. What we do is help you create a podcast, produce your podcast, distribute your podcast, and we host your podcast. Most importantly, what we do is we distribute your podcast to the NBN audience. We've done this many times with many academic podcasts and we would like to help you. If you would be interested in talking to us about how we can help you with your podcast, please contact us. Just go to the front page of the New Books Network and you will see a link to NBN Productions. Click that, fill out the form and we can talk.

[Claire Griffin]

Welcome.

[Marshall Poe]

Welcome to the New Books Network.

[Erica Monahan]

Hello, New Books Network audience. My name is Erica Monahan and I am your host today. Today I have the great pleasure of interviewing the historian Claire Griffin. Claire Griffin is a professor of history at Indiana University, where she has recently published a new monograph. The monograph is called Mixing the Global Drug Trade and Early Modern Russia. And it is my great pleasure to have the chance to talk to her about this fascinating book today. So, Claire, thank you so much for joining me and our New Books Network audience today.

[Claire Griffin]

Well, thank you for having me here. It's great to talk to you.

[Erica Monahan]

Super well, Claire. So we'll just jump right into things. And typically I start out all New Books Networks interviews with this question for our listeners. And that's a question about you. You get interested. How did, how did you become a historian? Tell us a little bit about your path into the profession of history, an entirely haphazard one.

[Claire Griffin]

So the. I grew up in a village with and went to state school. And the state school that I was assigned to, which was in the next village over, had Russian as one of the languages you could take, which is extremely random and unusual for British schools at all, let alone the state schools. And so some Russian. And when I was looking at university applications, I happened to have picked up the University College London booklet and found the School of Slavonic and East European Studies department, which became the place I did all of my degrees and just, you know, kind of randomly ended up finding this place, having randomly ended up studying Russian. And I got there and some of the professors were kind enough to say, you're good at researching things. And so I thought, okay, I mean, I guess I will go to grad school and we'll see how it goes. So it was not at all intentional at any point along the way. It was very much kind of a series of coincidences, which turned out to be happy coincidences, I hope.

[Erica Monahan]

Yeah, well, super speed. I mean, reading this there leaves no doubt that you are good at researching things.

[Claire Griffin]

Thank you.

[Erica Monahan]

Being an early modern historian, early modern historian of Russia myself, it's quite an impressive achievement. So I want to congratulate you on that. And I also want to ask, why did you write this book?

[Claire Griffin]

I mean, I think that's a question everyone asks themselves at a certain point in the process of finishing a book. Like, why did I pick this? Why am I writing this? I will briefly note if you hear a strange jingling sound in the background, that is the cat, who also likes to guest on podcasts, so she may say hi at some point. Why this book? I always start with being interested in documents. So I know some people kind of start with theory or with questions or something like this, but my particular process is to look at various documents, whether published or in the archives, and I stumble across things and think this is interesting and kind of weird. And I don't know immediately what to do with this. In the case of this book, I came to find the Apothecary Chancery records and saw that there were lots and lots of lists of things. So there are the import records and there are the inventories of the department, and there are lots and lots of prescriptions. And a lot of these documents give very little detail other than huge, huge lists of the ingredients. And so this immediately pushes us in a specific direction. Why are we so interested in lists of things? And why are we so interested, even in prescriptions, in what is in the recipe, over even basic things like what is this being used to treat? So having found this particular source base that I found to be intriguing, I then went from there and said, okay, well, what is in this? Why is this interesting? How does this fit into other things we know about medical drugs in this time period?

[Erica Monahan]

Okay, and you. And actually for. So you talk about. So you started from reading all these documents of the Apothecary Chancery, and the Apothecary Chancery plays a big role in this book. So could you please tell us, tell us a bit more. What was the Apothecary Chancellery? Who worked in it? What did it do? And if I could cast a really kind of crude generalization or make a probably really bad contemporary analog, revealing also my American vantage point, should I think of this, the Apothecary Chancellery as the CDC center for Disease Control, Is it kind of like the fda, the Food and Drug Administration administration, or is it sort of like a CVS for court nobility in early modern Russia? Tell us about it.

[Claire Griffin]

Sure. So if you look at pre modern courts of kings and emperors and Princes. What you're looking at there are these very privileged people who are also in these very important political positions. And so it is a priority, not just for them and their families, but for the country as a whole, that they remain healthy. If you are working within a monarchy, you need the monarch to be healthy. And so the Apothecary Chancery is the Russian equivalent of this. It kind of develops in the 16th century, but really takes on its form as the Apothecary chancery in the 17th, and then kind of gets pulled apart in the 18th century into a series of different departments. In the 16th century, it is more like a personal position for someone rich and famous. Like, this is kind of a part of their entourage. It's really across the course of the 17th century that it starts taking on some of these other roles. So it then takes on the role of USO treating and providing supplies to the army, so takes on some kind of. Presumably there's a military department in the US Military that also provides this kind of thing. So it's kind of a field medic system. It then also takes on, first of all in the court and later, more generally, something like the FDA in terms of permitting and banning certain kinds of medicines. Certainly in the 17th century, it takes on something like the CDC. The quarantines are an incredibly old way of dealing with illness. If there is an illness that seems to be contagious, you shut someone in their house or you close a particular region of town, you close a particular town off from visitors, you close the borders. And so they were often also involved in that kind of thing. I think you made a third. Oh, CVS. Actually, yes, again, towards the end of the 17th century and in the start of the. The 18th century, they start to either license, but then also some of their practitioners take on outside jobs, running their own kind of private versions of CVS. So it's this, the 17th century in particular, it's this strange amalgam of all of these different things. And later in the 18th century, these get pulled apart into, okay, the navy's going to have a separate department and private physi, private pharmacies are going to be a separate thing, and the court medicine will be a separate thing. But one of the interesting things about the Apothecary Chancery is it kind of does everything about official medicine in the 17th century.

[Erica Monahan]

And thank you for that. And I guess for our international listeners, that maybe CVS by that just means kind of the pharmacy. So I should have clarified that at all. But you knew that so for people listen to these from all over the world, where CVS might not be an everyday word. Okay. There's so much to talk about, both local and global, as your book moves between these registers so wonderfully throughout. But let's stay. Well, let's just stay with what the Apothecary Chancellery does for a minute and. Oh, who worked in it?

[Claire Griffin]

Oh, good question. Yes. So in its 16th century origins, we have a concern about who is going to be most invested in keeping the Hussar healthy. Because if you are the physician of the Tsar, you are in an unparalleled position of poisoning the guy if you feel like it. Right? Like if you don't like him, maybe accidentally mix the wrong medicines and off he goes. So who gets chosen for that position is a huge, huge issue. In the 16th century, they really solved that issue by bringing in foreign physicians from major diplomatic contacts in Western Europe, primarily the Protestant lands with which they have the closest links. You get a lot of guys from the German lands, from England and from the Netherlands. In the 17th century they do start training up Russians initially as field medics and pharmacists, but later various people get sent abroad to become university trained physicians. But that's really a development that's coming up across the 17th century and into the 18th century.

[Erica Monahan]

Hmm, that's so fascinating. So you. So just. So what you're saying is that it isn't so much a lack of expertise as a motivation to find someone without political motivations that may be behind importing foreign doctors originally.

[Claire Griffin]

So one of the tricky things, as you know about this period in Russian history, is that Muscovite sources were almost never explain the logic for doing certain things. Of course. Yeah. So we don't have a court document that says we should import people from Western Europe because we find these people to be particularly trustworthy for the following reasons. We are extrapolating from certain things. So is it a lack of expertise? Well, you do have folk healers in this period and you have actually very high ranking nobles who continue to use Russian folk healers. To Boris Morozov, who actually heads the Apothecary Chancery, at one point when he is ill, he hires both an Apothecary Chancery physician and a local folk healer. So clearly there are people in the Russian elite who think that the local expertise is perfectly good. So this isn't a sufficient explanation of this. And then you can also look at the fact that there are lots of universities training medics in this period and they could have hired people from the Ottoman Empire, which they very occasionally do. They could have hired people from Poland, which again very, very occasionally you see a couple of polls, they could be hiring people from Italy. Italy has some of the most famous pre modern universities, but they don't. And it's not like Italians don't show up elsewhere in Europe. So there is a very restricted range really of nationalities, if you look who mostly is working in the department. And it is very heavily focused on the diplomatic contacts of the court. And so it really does seem to be fitting into a diplomatic exchange of trust, actions of various kinds, rather than being solely about expertise.

[Erica Monahan]

Thank you so much. And just you're able that you can outline this for us is illuminating in so many ways or points in so many directions and raises so many questions. So thank you. My next question. So I want to talk about the stuff that goes into medicines and I'll probably ask you a few questions about that. But to start out, you have chapter two is called Muscovy's Botanical World. And chapter three is called Selling the Chemical Universe. So I wanted to ask you to briefly explain what you mean by these categories and how they matter in your story.

[Claire Griffin]

Sure. Well, here we have to think about what is the mentality of the Muscovites. And so we're in here in a branch of Christianity. So obviously there are non Christians within the empire, but for the most part the elite are Christians, although you do have a few Muslims at court as well. And actually both the Christians and the Muslims are working in this tradition of a created world, so that there is a belief in the world as created in a purposeful fashion by God. And so it is important to try and understand the world. But we also think that everything in the world has some kind of specific function. So we might then argue about what that function is. But we are coming into the idea with a sense of the purposefulness of the world. And then so what are the purposes of these things? And so it's a part of a process of sorting out the universe into kinds of things. Interesting for us here what is helpful, what is harmful, what is not useful. And so often botanicals are really widely used in medicines. Of course, as we are eating plants of various kinds, we get used to not only what do they taste like, but what does it feel like when we taste them. In both the earliest Russian document on coffee and a lot of the rest of discussions of coffee in the early modern period, we get this idea that it makes you super wakeful. And of course we'd recognize that today, but that's people taking this thing, drinking this thing and going, this is how I feel like afterwards. So that's how we kind of start to discover the uses of botanical things which in the Muscovite realm, a lot of them can be good medicines, but then some of them we think could be used for witchcraft, could be used for poisoning. What would we then do with chemicals? So what we think of as chemicals are not what they would think of as chemicals necessarily. So we're not in a period where we can extract the kind of the essences of certain plants in the same way that you can in the modern era. So we're thinking about things like mercury and arsenic and this kind of naturally occurring chemical substance. We also then have thoughts about, well, how does our body react to such things. Arsenic is almost always historically classified as a poison because such a small amount of it is so dangerous. And all of these other chemicals that they would call chemicals in this period also have very strong effects. So maybe they could be useful, but we also know that they can be harmful. And so there is a concept of these two different things. They all have helpful and harmful potential qualities. But we kind of have to be more careful with chemicals. We're not quite sure where they might go, given how powerful they can be.

[Erica Monahan]

Okay, yeah. And what did to kind of stay on this matter of ingredients and the actual Materia Medica, you have another section where you talk about flesh based medicines and how the Orthodox Russian world had a particular take on that. Could you tell us a bit about that?

[Claire Griffin]

Sure. So this actually originates out of a slightly different kind of document from the Apothecary Chancery about medicines. If you want to work in the Apothecary Chancery in any capacity, you have to swear that you will only prescribe good things and you won't prescribe bad things. So this isn't the physicians, this isn't the apothecaries. This is everyone. Physicians, apothecaries, translators, everyone is swearing the same oath. And so it's then an interesting list and conceptualization of what they consider to be good and bad medical practice. So first of all, it's interesting that within the concepts of good and bad medical practice, they do prioritize medicines, the making of medicines as really significant. This is one of the major things we think of as, or they think of as really good or really bad. The other thing that leads into this flesh based medicines chapter is that they are very clear in multiple versions of the oath that we are not to use what they refer to as mummy powder or to use evil snake poison. And so reading this at the start of the project, you go, well, how did we get to snakes? How do we get to mummies? How did we get to snakes? Because it's such a kind of unexpected thing. If you haven't read early modern medical documents before, where snakes are coming from in Moscow is unclear. They're not super common around Moscow. So it took a while and also showing these documents to other people who are familiar with early modern medicine in other contexts to work out what is it that the Russians don't like. So mummy powder was a name for a range of different ingredients in this time period, but particularly associated with mummified human flesh. So in the ancient world, there was a particular ingredient that was good for use in various kinds of medicines that was also used in the mummification process of Egyptian mummies. At some point these two things become conflated. We start with the idea that actually mummified human flesh is a good medical ingredient. Although western medicine people tend to have this idea that the early modern Western medicine must be good because modern medicine is based off it. Actually, a lot of early modern Western medicine is a bizarre and problematic misunderstanding of ancient world Middle Eastern medical texts, as in this case, one of the most prestigious and popular kinds of mummy powder is then actually ground up North African Egyptian mummies. So when we're talking about global medicine, we are in a way here talking about an African commodity. It is not something we should be thinking of as a commodity because these are people's ancestors, these are human remains, but they are clearly treated as commodities in this time period. And even if it's actually mummy powder created either from other human corpses or in some other way, it's often linked back to the idea that this is Egyptian in some way. So that's our mummy powder. It's specifically the dried human flesh. Even though sometimes it will get talked about as if it's ground up bones, it's actually specifically the human flesh that's been mummified. What is our evil snake poison? So similarly, we have an ancient world recipe called thyriac and that goes through multiple different versions. And it goes through multiple different versions really across Afro Eurasia. And it comes up in Middle Eastern texts and Persian texts, and it gets to China and it's used a lot in Europe, in particular, Italy has a whole thing about this. And this concept gets to Russia. And clearly when they initially come across this, they have some concerns. Thariak in this time period is created partly on the basis of viper flesh and Viper flesh was thought at this point to be poisonous. And so again we have another kind of flesh. And these are two things which are huge in Western Europe and are pretty widely and pretty widely used, pretty acceptable in Western Europe. Some people do have problems with the mummy powder, but it is pretty widely used. Two flesh based medicines. The Russians clearly do not like this, right? Someone's explained this to them at some point and they have gone, absolutely not. Under no circumstances give this to anyone. Under no circumstances give this to the Tsar. So here we have a whole process just to know what to do phrases mean, right? This is. So this is the classic researchers dilemma is that you spend, you can spend weeks and it ends up as like one footnote. But so that's, that's the whole backstory even to know what this stuff is before we get into why don't they like it. Like I said, we're here in a created universe. And one of the things about Christianity is that you get a very specific set of rules about what you are and are not not allowed to consume. So we have issues with, so communion wine we should consume, whereas certain other things. So we shouldn't be eating certain kinds of meat on fast days. So there are various different rules, what is good to eat, what is not good to eat. So we have to always consider that when we're considering Christian prohibitions on kayak of medicine. Conveniently, although the Russians don't explain themselves, some of those Western European physicians do. So they go home and they say they complain about things. And one of the things they complain about is Russians will not break a fast to take medicines, so they prefer to follow religious rules rather than follow the recommendations of the foreign physicians. This again points us in the direction that we don't like these flesh based medicines because they are contravening Christian ideas of what is and is not acceptable to eat. That makes perfect sense in terms of although Leviticus. I don't think Leviticus specifically bans people from eating human flesh, but it certainly fits, fits into those biblical prohibitions on eating that we primarily find in the book of Leviticus. So this is all a very, very complicated story that gets boiled down into you may not prescribe mummy powder or theriac.

[Erica Monahan]

This is just so fascinating. And it is fascinating and I know there's, you know, I, or well, just to kind of put a point on it, that your sense is that the Mumia mummy powder was more accepted in Western Europe as an ingredient in medicine.

[Claire Griffin]

In the early part of my story. Yes, you can. If you go through Things like lists of medicines that can be prescribed in say Amsterdam and London and things you often do find this is fairly straightforward. You find multiple versions of this. You find trade records of it being sold in the big markets on Hamburg. You find people like Paracelsus telling you how to make mummy. Paracelsus tells you that ideally recently executed criminals are a good source of bodies to make mummy powder. So it's. It's certainly not 100% accepted, but it's fairly mainstream in Western Europe, whereas it is not in early 17th century Russia. Later they kind of change their minds a bit, but it takes a few decades for this to become something that they think is okay.

[Erica Monahan]

Yeah, that's. So I found this part fascinating and in a kind of tangentially related matter, you may have. You may know a lot more about this than me. This is in the book. But this business of using human skin for book covers and they pop up occasionally in certain libraries, etc. But I've talked to medievalists who insist no, no, no. In the medieval world this could not be done in a Christian context under no circum. And it's in the early modern period. And later some criminal. The skin of some criminals ends up. Someone has traced it end up as book covers. And it just kind of calls in certain questions about. Is this about ideas, religious ideas about humanity, hierarchies, et cetera, et cetera. But I'll stop there. That just is kind of one tangent because you do talk about in this and I know in your ongoing work about the human body, et cetera, and it's such a fascinating topic. So, so thank you. I encourage everyone to read it. But as. And while it is maybe a little bit gruesome, but maybe we could just round it out. Human fat. Tell us about that. That is okay.

[Claire Griffin]

Or not interesting. Yeah, so. So there are. Mummy powder is probably the most famous and may have been the most widely used of human body based medical remedies in Western Europe at this time. But you get lots of other things being mentioned. So executioners used to sell human body parts like they. They partly made their income off selling the rope that someone was hanged by, but also various bits of their body. And so you do hear accounts of people drinking human blood for medical remedies using human and fat. Various other. Oh, I think the. One of the other famous ones is. So apparently there's a kind of moss that grows on human skulls and that's also good for various things. So there's this whole collection of different body parts. Certainly some people Consider the use of human fat to, again, be gross and weird. And we do get some. Some of the more religious writings from Western Europe saying, don't do this. But you also get rather fabulous storage jars for displaying in pharmacies. And they are beautifully, beautifully painted. And they say in Latin, human fat. So the fact that someone is producing these objects in Latin, in these beautiful things, this is something that people know about. This is something that people are doing, and it's something that people want to display. We're not pretending, we're not doing this. We can put this, you know, on the shelves behind our pharmacy counter so that people can see it. So it is, to some people, acceptable or maybe even prestigious.

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[Erica Monahan]

Wow. Thank you. And I love, actually, I love how your attention to things and objects really gives the reader as going through the book, just more of a sense of the medicinal landscape. So now really broadening that medicinal landscape. I want to talk about the global part in your subtitle. The subtitle of the book is the Global Drug Trade in Early Modern Russia. And first, so you. You talk about African objects you've already mentioned, and American. And the book also talks about American objects. And so I want to ask you, what do Africa and America have to do with this history of medicines in Muscovy that you're telling? What's the broader significance of it? And what are these things doing in Muscovy?

[Claire Griffin]

Yeah, well, like I said, one of my processes is to. I'm sorry, I'm now being climbed on by a cat who was trying to steal my microphone. One of the things I do is to find a medical record or another historical document and say, well, there's something strange going on here, and let's try and understand what this thing is. So another thing that I found in my medical records. So we know that the Russians don't like human bodies, or at least not human bodies in medicines, and we don't like weird bits of snake in our medicine either. But something that does come up just kind of entirely casually dropped in there is sassafras in particular. But Some of the other American plants as well, like sarsaparilla. And this is weird because of time. So we know that the Russians are messing around in what we now call the bering Sea. From 1732 onwards, they then colonize in a kind of resource colony, various parts of what is now Alaska and northern Canada. So we are expected to see Russian American relations really from the middle of the 18th century century onwards. We also know that, of course, tobacco is coming into Europe earlier than that, but tobacco actually gets banned in Muscovy throughout basically the whole 17th century. So we really don't expect to see American commodities in Russia before the early 18th century. That's kind of our established chronology. And yet we see from the early 17th century onwards, we see sassafras and we see other things which are very specifically American. And this is actually useful to historians because we can track where this thing is from. So something like rosemary. Rosemary grows all kinds of places. So if you just see the word rosemary, well, is it from next door's garden or did we import it from a thousand miles away? It's not clear. Whereas sassafras in this period absolutely does not grow within the Russian empire. It has to be imported from the new European colonies on the east coast of the Americas. So there is something strange here in terms of time that we are able to track because we know the specifics of these American commodities which are so new to Afro eurasia in the 16th, 17th century.

[Erica Monahan]

Thank you. Yeah, these are just great examples from these distant ingredients in the medicines that are being made in Muscovy and the personnel. Your book just lays out all these connections in concrete ways. It's been sitting there all along that at least I. And it seems like we, as a historical field, haven't appreciated or if we've maybe suspected, your book just brings it to us in such detail that we can see earlier than I think. As you said, so many of us expected to see it. So, yeah, it's just terrific in that respect. I really encourage people to read it. Let's see. Sorry, I'm just listening to you talk. It's going in a lot of directions, but. So maybe what I wanted to. What I wanted to ask you is, in doing this research, what surprised you most? I mean, just listening to you talk, it's clear to the listener. I'm sure that there's so many surprises in this research. The book is filled with so many really fascinating moments.

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[Erica Monahan]

So what surprised you the most? And on the flip side of that, what fit with your expectations? The Most.

[Claire Griffin]

This is an interesting one. I mean, there's this old phrase that the past is a foreign country. But honestly, I think possibly 17th century Muscovy is just a different planet. It is in some ways such a radically different understanding and way of thinking about things. And so you really do have to rearrange your brain because you come across all these things that seem like, why would they be doing this? But it seems to make sense to them. So if you take something like sassafras, they don't have a big thing saying, should we use this? What is this? What's happening here? It just starts appearing. And it's possible we lost the thing where they said, where they debated whether or not this is a good idea. But fairly quickly into this period of sassafras you use, they're just totally chilled out using it. And so something that's really surprising to us, Sassafras in 17th century Moscow seems totally normal to them. So you do spend a lot of time rearranging your brain into what is it that 17th century Muscovites may be thinking here? And I think actually that was the most unexpected thing, that there are American commodities in early modern Russia and also which commodities? Because now we think of famous American commodities, we think of chocolate, we think of tobacco, we think of potatoes. But actually, these aren't the early things that are adopted. It's actually things like sassafras which are being used for medical purposes. So really, Sassafras in 17th century Moscow is the thing I found most surprising.

[Erica Monahan]

Okay. And something that. Something in, you know, the study as a whole that fit with your expectations. I mean, and of course, it goes without saying, but I'll say it for people that aren't historians, that by the time, you know, you get to a point that you can write out a table of contents, you've already spent a good deal of time with the material. So what's something that fit with your expectations?

[Claire Griffin]

That's an interesting one. I mean, I'd been looking at Russian medical history for a while at the point that I was starting working on this book, really. So I guess I had kind of invested my brain in the process already. So what did fit with my expectations? So I actually. Perhaps the paranoia of recipes at court. So recipes at court, these are the medical recipes. These are the things that we're putting together and then we're giving to someone. They tell us what's in it. They usually tell us who it's for, and they pretty much always tell us who put it together. So you note there that missing is, why do we want this in the first place? So these recipes, they're not about what to treat. They're about who to blame if someone gets ill. If someone dies after medical treatment, as does happen, the very first thing they're going to do is say, well, hang on, who put together these medicines that they just took? And that's really a classic court situation, not just in Moscow, kind of everywhere, if someone prominent gets ill, you're pulling up people. Like, you're pulling up the people who make the food, you're pulling up the people who make the medicines. To make another biblical analogy, if you think to the Joseph story in Exodus, who is Joseph in prison with when he's in Egypt? He is imprisoned with the pharaoh's baker and with the pharaoh's person who pours the wine. So these are the kind of people who get suspected of various kinds of court shenanigans because the elite are putting so much trust in their servants and in their cooks and in their physicians. So it totally makes sense. Although it seems odd to us not to tell us why the prescriptions are being made, it does make sense in a court setting that you want to know who put the thing together in case it all goes horribly wrong.

[Erica Monahan]

Yeah, thank you. That is. That's definitely an insight to kind of sit with and think about. But next question. I want to ask you about the last chapter of the book, if I could, which you call the New Textual Authorities. As kind of historians, we talk about change over time. So what's going on? What are you talking about in the New Textual Authorities? Tell us a bit about that, please.

[Claire Griffin]

Sure. So when I was trying to make this pile of strange lists into an actual coherent academic study, I started thinking about objects. And so we have the chemicals and what we think about them, and we have the mummy flesh and we have the plants. But for us, we are not actually accessing the object itself. We are accessing it via a text that's actually quite common for material culture studies. We tend to think of material culture in terms of, okay, here's a teapot, and I will go and pick up this historical teapot and I can look at it. But even if you do have the object, you still spend a lot of time reading texts and looking at representations of that object, because that tells us how people are thinking about this material culture in the context of early modern medicine. We don't have this stuff anymore. We don't have the sassafras, we don't have. Happily, we mostly do not have the powdered mummy flesh anymore, although some museums do have some of it. So what we're doing is accessing objects through other objects and those objects are books. So we should think about the physicality of the books and we should think about the physicality of them in the time where they were being made and used. But we have to actually think about their physicality or lack of physicality as we use them. Now I have picked up various of these objects, particularly the scrolls, very, very carefully. But some of these things I have never used as a physical object. I have rather used them through online scans in libraries and in Google books and things like this. And so we want to consider all of these aspects of the text itself as object because it's so important for us to access other objects.

[Erica Monahan]

Yeah, that's great. And I'm thinking of a set of early modern instructions for some complicated process where even the writer of that text just said, oh, there's no use in even writing down all the details because it, you know, it's, it takes more subtle steps anyway, so just do it. And so this is a great point that you bring. Okay, I have promised not to take up too much of your time today. I do want to say to people that study Muscoy or are curious about Muscovy, to people that, that give any thought to the history of medicine, to people that give any thought to the early modern world trade patterns, globalization patterns, this pick up, mixing medicines, the global drug trade in early modern Russia. And I, you will find it worth your while. So, but moving on from this book, Clara, we like to always wrap up with the question, what are you working on next?

[Claire Griffin]

Yeah, good question. One that I am on by my new head of department on a semi regular basis. So I am actually staying in my familiar surroundings of early modern medical history. The apothecary, chancery. Like I said, it is this very, very strange land. If you are not trained in early modern medical things. One of the other things they are doing is treating soldiers, as I mentioned, and they're often treating soldiers who have been injured. And in particular they are answering a set of questions. The questions are, is this person injured? Can they be treated? And can they serve the Tsar if they have been treated? So these are very cold bureaucratic questions and there is almost no mention of pain in what are some really gnarly descriptions. And if you look at these records, and often they're gunshot wounds. We're very interested in examining people who have been shot and they are things like someone taking a bullet to the hand and how much damage it did to their hand, which must be excruciating. But we really don't get into the pain or how to actually even treat the guy. We are just taking this very mechanical approach as to can we fix the, this broken object almost. So these are very interesting records and they are interesting from perspectives like the history of pain and how do we have pain included or excluded from medical records. They are interesting in terms of wounded bodies and histories of the body. And they're also interesting, interesting in a kind of transnational global sense sense because Russian soldiers are being shot by all kinds of people in the 17th century. Given that these particular records always list how the person was injured and have a particular focus on firearms, then we see this being linked into Russian concerns about the military capacity of their enemies. I am going to move on from the cheery subject, subject of ground up human body parts into the much nicer subject of people being shot.

[Erica Monahan]

Oh, goodness, goodness. Tongue in cheek. The past. Not rated PG is what I always tell my students. All right, well, thank you very much for that. I will look forward, I will look very, very forward to this next work. And I'm even thinking about how the current war is changing access to archives in Russia that you have done so, so, so much work in. But that is of course perhaps a theme for another time. Yeah. Claire Griffin, thank you so so much for being with us today. It's really been my pleasure to both read the book book and to get to talk to you about it today. And I wish you all the best and look forward to our paths crossing at some point in the future.

[Claire Griffin]

Well, thank you so much for having me and it's been great to speak to you about this.

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