Taste-Based Medicine

R E S E A R C H E S S A Y S | India Mandelkern, University of California, Berkeley SPRING 2015 Taste-Based Medicine GASTRONOMICA 8 Abstract: This essay examines the significance of gustation in the history of therapeutics as a shared anthropological inheritance that mediates human relationships with the natural world. Bringing together ancient Indian, Chinese, and Western medical cosmologies, I argue that our faith in the curative properties of certain tastes—or ‘‘taste-based medicine’’—has been remarkably enduring. Focusing on elite English medical practitioners over the long eighteenth century, I demonstrate that ‘‘taste-based medicine’’ not only Keywords: taste, dietetics, medicine, materia medica, sensory studies, history. ‘‘one ought to be acquainted with the powers of juices, what action each of them has upon man, and their kinship towards one another.’’ Thus concluded the anonymous author of the fifth-century BC treatise, On Ancient Medicine. A foundation of the Hippocratic corpus, the text is known today for its scathing attack on the use of dogmatic and abstract theories and speculations as explanations for disease: the divine forces of Love and Strife, for example, or the omnipresence of earth, air, water, and fire, the four cosmic elements that made up all matter.1 When it came to making medicines, On Ancient Medicine asserts, physicians were studying all the wrong things. It was not a plant or herb’s cosmological status that mattered, but rather its taste—its bitterness, acidity, or saltiness—that predicted its effect on the body. This claim, moreover, was hardly radical. Nor was it new. Discriminating among the different flavors of food, the author argues, was where medicine all began. Early man had been endowed with a sense of taste for the same reason that animals had: to help him distinguish nourishment from poison. Over time, however, man began to notice a pattern. Brute animals could subsist happily on diets of raw, pungent, and unblended foods while man himself fell sick from the same diet. Before long, he had learned to associate illness and disease with the especially salient flavors in his diet, every one of which was ‘‘either bitter, or intensely so, or saltish and acid, or something else intense and strong’’ (On Ancient Medicine 14.5). The first cures for the sick were nothing more than special foods, cooked in a manner designed to mitigate these unhealthy sensations. Gruel was made from mixing small amounts of pungent food with water, followed by boiling and blending to diminish its intensity. Medicinal drinks were better still, as the nourishing flavors had been further isolated from their natural coarseness. Thanks to their ability to temper strong flavors by cooking, our ancestors slowly began to extend their lives. On Ancient Medicine is often invoked in theories about the origins of medicine, and this probably is not far-fetched. For thousands of years, physicians have described the faculty of taste as an inborn survival mechanism, helping men and animals choose foods that nourished and avoid those that harmed. Aristotle, writing in the fourth century BC, saw the faculty of taste as a fundamental act of choice: between acceptance and rejection, pleasure and pain, sweetness and bitterness, life and death. Lacking external knowledge or surrogate nutritional cues, all beings would perish without it (De Sensu I.1, De Anima II.10). Cooking was therefore a medical act, a technology for transforming the flavors of substances, rendering them more digestible, nutritious, and potentially healing to man. Medicine has substantially less to do with taste today; its utility has been eclipsed, we like to believe, by advances in chemistry, biology, and genetics. But, as I contend in this article, our faith in the curative properties of certain tastes—what I call ‘‘taste-based medicine’’—is an old and enduring anthropological heritage. There is something primal and profound about our sense of taste. The final sensory frontier before the outside world was, for better or worse, permanently integrated into the body; taste feels immediate, survived transformations within the English medical marketplace and the rise of the ‘‘new science,’’ but actively mobilized debates about the constitution of expertise and who should have access to it. gastronomica: the journal of critical food studies , vol.15, no.1, pp.8–21, issn 1529-3262.  2015 by the regents of the university of california. all rights reserved. please direct all requests for permission to photocopy or reproduce article content through the university of california press’s rights and permissions web site, http://www.ucpressjournals.com/reprintinfo.asp. doi: 10.1525/gfc.2015.15.1.8. ***** Once man had learned to civilize unhealthful tastes through cooking, he next began to classify the different tastes he found in nature. This impulse was not limited to the dusty islands of the Aegean Sea, but was shared by several early medical traditions. The Charaka Samhita, for example, one of the foundational texts of Ayurvedic philosophy compiled around the first century AD, describes an intimate gathering of ten rishis, or princely sages, in the mythical Chaitraratha woods.3 Albeit old and wise, inquisitive in spirit, and conversant in virtually every learned subject, the sages eventually converged upon a question on which they could not agree: Many numbers were proposed over the course of the ensuing discussion, all of which were accompanied by convincing explanations. One rishi suggested that tastes could be reduced to two types: those that heal the body and those that harm. Another countered that there were not two tastes but five, as each one corresponded to the five cosmological elements— fire, water, earth, wind, and ether—that comprised all matter. And still another rejected the exercise altogether. Did not every individual detect different flavors in the same food? Did not the same food affect every human body slightly differently? How, then, could all the tastes found in nature be reduced to a finite number? At last the rishis alighted on the divinely given answer. All gustatory perceptions could be reduced to a mixture of six basic tastes: sweet, sour, pungent, bitter, salty, and astringent. The ideal nutritious meal would include all of them in some combination. Six was not an arbitrary number in the Ayurvedic tradition. It was linked to a larger philosophy of health and the cosmic order; there were also six seasons and six stages of disease. Administered in groupings, the six tastes could summon the three doshas, or humors, and ‘‘check’’ the three causes of disease. The power of each taste extended well beyond the fleeting sensation in the mouth, for it also measured the virya, or specific energy, of a food. The sweetness of honey provided the body with energy. The sourness of unripened fruit improved digestion. The pungency of ginger and black pepper stimulated the metabolism. Even the processes of digestion could be separated into three ‘‘phases’’ named for their different tastes, followed by vipaka, a special post-digestive state determined by the flavors of the ingested food. Little wonder that the Sanskrit word for taste—rasa—signified much more than a particular gustatory sensation. Rasa was also a juice, an essence, and a life force. Classifying tastes informed the scientific basis for medical practice in China as well as on the Indian subcontinent. The Huangdi Neijing, transcribed at roughly the same time as the Charaka Samhita, shared a strikingly similar outlook. This dialogue identified only five tastes: sweet, bitter, sour, salty, and pungent. But their cosmological synchronicities are even more pronounced. Each of the five tastes corresponded to the wu xing, or five ‘‘phases’’—wood, fire, earth, metal, and water—that organized the five sacred grains, the five fruits, the five meats, and the five vegetables designed to nourish the five organ networks governing the human body. Each taste corresponded to a color as well as a season. SPRING 2015 How many tastes existed in the universe? (Charaka Samhita 1:26) 9 GASTRONOMICA authentic, especially deserving of our trust. The unknown author of On Ancient Medicine did not deny the possibility that odor, appearance, or a myriad of other factors could also signal a substance’s nutritional value, perhaps even more accurately than its taste could. But gustatory sensations, for unexplained reasons, were etched most deeply in ancient man’s memory. Before he learned of the four humors coursing through his body, the metabolic powers of his pepsis, or the complex pharmacological language of simples, compounds, laxatives, and purgatives, the palate was the sacred template for self-preservation, the key to nutrition, the seed from which the culture of experiment had sprung. These associations legitimated gustation’s influence upon treatments and therapies, which persisted far longer than historians like to acknowledge. To date, much scholarly work on the senses in therapeutics has focused on visual knowledge; the medieval doctrine of signatures, for example, stressed the physical resemblance between specific herbs and the bodily organs they were supposed to cure (Foucault 1970; Stannard 1999). A more recent flurry of scholarship has emphasized the medical significance of olfactory qualities, such as the salts of odiferous aromatics believed to protect men and women from noxious miasmas (Corbin 1986; Palmer 1993; Classen 1994; Roos 2007).2 Even more importantly, many recent studies have taken for granted the slow but inevitable decline of ‘‘sensuous medicine’’ over the early modern period, thanks to the institutionalization of medical knowledge and the evergrowing authority of the printed word (McLuhan 1964; Roberts 1995; Howes and Classen 2014: 40–45). Yet it did not decline. In seventeenth-century England, which shall be the setting for the remainder of this story—not for its particularly exceptional emphasis on gustatory knowledge as much as for its richly documented public medical culture—taste-based medicine became integrated into a new, iconoclastic experimental culture, outlasting the erosion of the very medical bodies that authorized it. F IG UR E 1: As the five tastes corresponded to the five organ networks governing the human body, examination of the tongue was critical to traditional Chinese clinical practice. courtesy of wellcome images, a website operated by wellcome trust, a global charitable foundation based in the united kingdom. of mankind. The sensations in the mouth were more immediate, reliable predictors of a substance’s effect on the body than the heavens’ omnipresent and invisible forces. Like their counterparts in the East, Greek medical writers also attempted to classify tastes; by the fourth century BC, they had agreed more or less on seven: sweet, succulent, pungent, astringent, sour, acid, and bitter.4 But the significance of this number—as well as the specific powers of each taste—was always more ambiguous in the West. Did all tastes lie in a circle or on a spectrum between sweetness on one end and bitterness on the other? Must a food be ‘‘seasoned’’ with sweetness in order for us to find the food palatable?5 Which tastes were more nourishing than others? Nor did the number of tastes reflect the cosmos quite as neatly as it did in the East, as there were four elements, four humors, and four seasons, but seven tastes. Ancient texts provide important glimpses into taste’s role within early medical cosmologies, yet they leave other questions unanswered. We know that Alexander the Great came into contact with Ayurvedic physicians when he invaded India in the fourth century BC (Ninnivagi 2008). We know that the opening of the Silk Road in the second century BC fueled the exchange of ideas, experts, foods, and drugs. Yet, since these systems likely circulated by word of mouth for centuries—perhaps millennia—before they were written down, it is nearly impossible to determine their origin. Such a search may well be fruitless; in fact, it is more plausible that taste-based medicine was not ‘‘invented’’ or ‘‘borrowed’’ at all, but instead grew out of broader, organic concerns about our relationship to the natural world. SPRING 2015 ***** GASTRONOMICA 10 Sweetness was valued for strengthening the blood, while spiciness expelled pathogens and improved the circulation. Just as in Ayurveda, it was medically desirable to balance every taste in each dish. As historians have often pointed out, ancient Greek medicine evolved differently than its Eastern counterparts. Lacking a definitive canon and exalted foundational texts, medical knowledge became more open and accessible, while theoretical debates were both heated and frequent. Taste certainly mattered to Greek medicine, but in slightly different ways. The Ayurvedic science of life had been devised by Brahma, the creator of the universe, and thus was perfect and permanent. But by subjecting the palate to the processes of trial and error, our anonymous Hippocratic author had argued, early man had discovered medicine. Taste was an agent of empirical exploration harnessed to the advancement Taste-based medicine was passed down from the Greeks to the Romans to the fledgling kingdoms of the West, where it became a cornerstone of clinical practice throughout early modern Europe. In England, this was true at all levels of the medical hierarchy. The ability to theorize about tastes was critical to the university-educated physician’s practice. His admission to the medical elite, the College of Physicians, required an intimate textual knowledge of the diseases and pathologies described by the ancients as well as of the properties of the drugs needed to cure them.6 Taste also mattered to the apothecary’s profession, whose business relied on collecting the correct plants and herbs to use as simples or in the manufacture of new drugs. Taste even mattered to the common housewife, who—with an expertise gleaned from received wisdom and personal experience rather than professional training—concocted her own home remedies from SPRING 2015 reformers decried everything from the physician’s elitist prostrations to outdated Greco-Roman authorities to the heathen brutality of conventional treatments such as cupping and bloodletting. They resented the informal yet powerful controls on access to pharmaceutical knowledge. In 1649 Culpeper tried to undercut the establishment by translating and publishing the Pharmacopiea Londonesis, an authoritative source of guidance for London apothecaries (hitherto available only in Latin) in English for the layman’s benefit.10 In 1660 the College of Physicians, which had reigned as England’s undisputed medical elite since 1518, was forced to live uneasily alongside the newly chartered Royal Society, which had become an outlet for renegade experimental philosophies and therapies imported from the Continent. By 1664 one physician likened the extant constellation of alchemical and medical philosophies in England to warring squadrons of cooks: ‘‘the rosters of Geber, the tosters of Lully, the fricasseers of Paracelsus, and the olla podrida men of Helmont, men that all know how to rost apples, stew prunes, tost cheese, and some who can, it is believed for need, toss a pancake’’ (‘‘C.T.’’ 1670: 32). His beloved College of Physicians never recovered its uncontested authority. The Royal Society was not the only thorn in the College’s side. After the Restoration of the English monarchy in 1660, the College also began to endure ever more strident challenges to its authority by the rapidly growing Society of Apothecaries. 11 One of the central issues in this struggle for autonomy was the apothecaries’ right to make and prescribe medicines of their own.12 (Formerly they had only been allowed to manufacture and dispense medicines that physicians had prescribed.) This threatened to erode the College’s monopoly on the practice of medicine and inspired vehement pamphlet wars that continued for decades. Conservative members of the College of Physicians came up with various arguments for why the apothecaries should not be allowed to make their own medicines or dispense their own medical advice, most of which had to do with the apothecaries’ lack of academic wisdom. Who was to say that the apothecary’s pharmaceutical knowledge was accurate? Too often, the physicians claimed, his expertise was gleaned from faulty second- or third-hand translations of ancient texts, or worse, entrusted by superstitious herb women. Members of the College were also suspicious of the apothecaries’ stake in the expanding international drug trade, granting them access to mysterious new medicines that had not been satisfactorily evaluated. How could one trust whether a drug acted in the way that the apothecary said it did? How did one know that the apothecary was motivated by public welfare and not by private profit? 11 GASTRONOMICA local herbs and saps (Leong and Pennell 2007). As long as there existed no other means to chemically identify the ‘‘active principles’’ of medicines, taste was the only game in town. But by the middle decades of the seventeenth century, taste-based medicine began to face new challenges. The first was the expansion of the drug trade, forcing the medical marketplace to somehow make sense of the panoply of new substances imported from abroad. In less than a hundred years, more than twenty times as many plants were introduced into Europe as had been in the preceding two thousand years. The organoleptic properties of sarsaparilla, guaiac, sassafras, and various balsams from the New World required identification in order to be incorporated into existing pharmacopeias. While the herbal—a collection of botanical descriptions used primarily for their medicinal properties— could trace its roots back to antiquity, the invention of the printing press allowed the genre to flourish over the second half of the sixteenth century. By 1600, dozens of new drugs had been classified in herbals, while physic gardens sprouted up in cities and towns.7 Describing tastes had always been important to botanical classification. But as printed herbals became increasingly available, the subjectivity of gustatory descriptions became all the more glaring. When writers were not ruthlessly plagiarizing from one another, they were often confusing their readers with contradictory plant descriptions. How could one writer label coriander ‘‘hot and dry’’ when Dioscorides considered it to be cooling (Cogan 1636: 47)? How could it be innocuously compared to parsley in one text, but ‘‘stink so basely’’ in another, so much so it ‘‘can hardly be endured’’?8 Writing herbals was hardly a professional enterprise; no real requirements had to be met before a gentleman could call himself an herbalist. John Gerard, author of Herball, or Generall Historie of Plants (1597), the most widely circulated botanical book in the English language during the seventeenth century, was a member of the Barber-Surgeon’s Company, setting him apart from the medical establishment. Nicholas Culpeper, author of the well-regarded The English Physician (1653), was an iconoclast whose radical views made him controversial among both physicians and apothecaries. By the middle of the seventeenth century, educated practitioners complained that herbals had spawned irrational superstitions and a pandemic of quacks.9 The wealth of subjective gustatory descriptions found in printed herbals illuminated very real inconsistencies in the medical literature. Challenges to taste-based medicine extended well beyond the herbal’s scope. The English Civil War (1642–51) had catalyzed the spread of new medical theories that soon mapped onto larger power struggles within the establishment. Postwar SPRING 2015 GASTRONOMICA 12 In this volatile political climate, taste-based knowledge became an important subject of reformist critique. The status quo had long evaluated a drug’s therapeutic suitability for a patient based on how its unique taste, smell, and visual appearance measured up to the patient’s humoral complexion. Yet under closer analysis, the reformers warned, the causal relationship between favorable taste impressions and good health seemed to break down. ‘‘It argues great Incogitancy,’’ one of these reformers contended, a die-hard follower of the influential Flemish chemist Jan Baptiste van Helmont, ‘‘to Judge of the Inward Energie of an Elaborate Pharmacon by the Taste, or outward apposition before the Ingredients be rightly understood; and the exquisite Manufacture discovered’’ (Thomson 1675: 55–56). After all, some poisonous foods tasted good, or even innocuously bland, while bitter or seemingly nauseating tastes could be surprisingly nutritious. For the renegade Helmontians and their upstart Society of Chemical Physicians, reliance on taste underscored the Galenists’ intellectual laziness at the expense of newer and more accurate descriptors.13 Still, not even the Helmontians could completely discard taste from their medical philosophy. Van Helmont himself acknowledged that many remedies do ‘‘by odor and savour . . . help our infirmities’’ (quoted in Wear 2000: 89n), even though he never devised a definitive program for classifying them. Indeed, given its association with centuries of received wisdom, one might think that this turbulent period would precipitate taste-based medicine’s demise. This did not happen. In fact, in these heated debates, taste became a powerful rhetorical weapon that allowed each of these warring groups to claim that theirs was the true and authentic medical philosophy. In 1665 an anonymous gentleman by the name of ‘‘T.M.’’ penned a forty-page pamphlet proposing to reform the medical profession by institutionalizing increasing specialization and transparency in the process of medicine-making. In an ideal world, T.M. argued, physicians would frequently visit apothecaries’ shops to personally inspect individual simples in their natural states, before they were made into medicines.14 Not only would this allow the physician to devise new ways to improve the ‘‘efficacy and operation’’ of medicines already in use, but it would also afford him the chance to analyze ‘‘their taste and scent, which ought to be one great part of a physician’s care, and is now too much neglected.’’ The sensual experience of tasting one’s own medicines allowed physicians to both ‘‘preserve in memory what is proper and useful’’ and to make medicines ‘‘more gustful and palatable,’’ which, T.M. believed, was also essential to preserving the lining of the stomach—so often harmed in the treatment of chronic illnesses. ‘‘Nothing,’’ T.M. continued, ‘‘can be more his interest than this’’ (‘‘T.M.’’ 1665: 43–44, 55–56). T.M. was not alone. Robert Pitt, a fellow and ardent supporter of the College of Physicians, believed that exploitation of this one sense enabled men to quickly and precisely identify the medicinal properties of diverse herbs and even discern how these properties could be employed in combination with one another. Such skills could not be learned from books (Pitt 1704: 4). Others took Pitt’s claim even further. The physician’s principal task, Sir John Floyer believed, should be to ‘‘chuse and apply tastes,’’ which he interpreted as divinely endowed essences that, when properly combined, could give rise to any type of medical remedy. He saw his encyclopedic 1687 treatise on all the tastes found in nature, Pharmako-basanos, or the touch-stone of medicines, as part of a crusade to ‘‘vindicate the Art of curing diseases from the common scandal of being conjectural’’ (Floyer 1687: 1–13). Why did a discerning palate become such a powerful measure of credibility at the precise moment that received wisdom began to face ever-mounting skepticism? At this time of crisis in the medical marketplace, taste-based therapies benefited from associations with primordial wisdom that promised to return medicine to an uncorrupted golden age.15 Indeed, T.M. (1665: 21) did not exalt the new science at antiquity’s expense; all physicians, he insisted, should read Hippocrates, Galen, ‘‘and the Old Masters of this science.’’ But by excessively relying on texts and neglecting the immediacy of his natural environment, the modern physician had lost his way. Galen had traveled the world looking for the right plant specimen needed to match a certain sensory property. He would not dare prescribe a drug that he had not ‘‘first tasted and smelt’’ (ibid.: 24). While T.M. praised antiquity as the culmination of tastebased medical practices, his contemporary John Floyer looked back even further. Even the ‘‘ignorant Indians,’’ for whom progress and history were unknown, more skillfully rendered their flora and fauna into useful medicines than the average English apothecary could. Yet while the pre-Socratics had also paid close attention to the diverse tastes and smells found in nature, Floyer blamed Aristotle for taste-based medicine’s decline. Reducing a diverse sensory vocabulary into the constricting categories of hot, cold, moist, and dry, he argued, obscured the natural relationship between medicine and gustation.16 For all of these writers, taste sat at the very nexus of human culture, at the point when the brute struggle for survival metamorphosed into the art of physic. Gustatory knowledge presupposed not only an intimate connection with the natural world, but also allowed the physician to showcase his most desirable professional qualities, such as scrupulousness, refinement, and attention to detail. his botanical investigations. Historians generally know Grew for his work in microscopy, culminating in his sweeping book of botanical and zoological lectures and papers, The Anatomy of Plants (1682).18 His interest in plant morphology naturally drew him to his subject’s ‘‘sensible qualities’’ of color, smell, and taste, which he believed were insufficiently understood. In a 1672 lecture read before the Royal Society, Grew lauded the work of his botanical predecessors, both ancient and modern. He cautioned that abandoning the old Galenic vocabulary—‘‘hot, cold, moist, dry, thin, gross’’—would be ‘‘rashness.’’19 But, at the same time, he warned that the ancients had assigned medicinal virtues with ‘‘much uncertainty, and too promiscuously.’’ If one were to carefully examine an old herbal, Grew griped, ‘‘you shall find almost every Herb, to be good for every Disease.’’20 When one did wish to learn about the unique medicinal virtues associated with a plant, the old herbals, more often than not, would not mention them. Rehabilitating botanical knowledge, Grew concluded, therefore demanded a multipronged analysis of SPRING 2015 F IG U R E 2: The tastes of plants were crucial to Nehemiah Grew’s (1641-1712) botanical studies. 13 GASTRONOMICA Some of this rhetoric had been heard before. Physicians had always debated the various therapeutic applications of different tastes, and whether they constituted causes or cures of disease. But never before had taste-based medicine been accorded such high moral stakes, highlighting one group’s credibility and expertise and another group’s pedantry and negligence. For many of the parties involved, even those who were otherwise opposed to one another, paying close attention to the distinct tastes of different medicines and drugs broadcast one’s mastery of the divinely bestowed ‘‘original’’ pharmacopeias present in nature. As Floyer (1687: 16) wrote, ‘‘The true physician knoweth [taste’s] virtue, the manner of its preparation, the suitableness of it to the humour to be corrected, and to the constitution of the patient: of all which the quack is ignorant.’’ In the same vein, Robert Pitt, an ally of the College, justified his indictments against the unlicensed apothecaries on the grounds that the apothecary’s alarming inattention to the senses led to faulty therapies, thus harming patients more than they helped. The apothecaries retaliated by arguing that their years of apprentice work spent collecting simples in the fields provided them with a far more sophisticated understanding of the pharmacological potential of different tastes than the pedantic physician hunched over his dated Latin texts.17 Still others placed the blame on van Helmont’s followers, who were inclined to destroy the virtues of a simple by excessively tinkering with its invisible chemical properties. Physician and apothecary, empiric and druggist— all struggled to claim taste as a sign of their intellectual descent from the Hippocratic tradition, a conviction that was not invented by the social and intellectual conditions of seventeenth-century England insomuch as it was inherited from various traditions, customs, and shapeless intuitions that had been accumulating well before antiquity. This, however, did not preclude attempts to update and rationalize the methods by which tastes were applied to physic. As a system of empirical investigation, taste also had to meet the experimental rigors of the new science. The ancients, for all their wisdom, had fallen short in this regard. While devising a reliable system by which gustatory sensations could be analyzed and measured was a challenging if not insurmountable task, beginning in the 1670s, several ambitious physicians attempted to design new taxonomies of all the tastes that existed in the natural world. This, they hoped, would constitute a pharmaceutical key to all mythologies, forever severing physic from folklore and superstition. The first of these gustatory researchers was the nonconformist physician and botanist Nehemiah Grew (1641–1712). Born in Coventry and educated in Cambridge and Leiden, Grew was elected to the Royal Society in 1671 on the basis of SPRING 2015 GASTRONOMICA 14 each vegetable’s sensible qualities, of which taste inspired the most rigorous analysis.21 Grew proposed four modifications to the existing gustatory botanical taxonomies. First, he pledged to increase the number of basic tastes in medical use. For how could the existing vocabulary describe the peculiar taste of the ‘‘white roots of Yarrow,’’ which Grew deemed ‘‘hardly any other way perceptible, than by causing a gentle glowing and continued Warmth upon the Tongue’’? Second, he recommended expanding the number of ‘‘degrees,’’ which charted the intensity of each flavor, from four (the long-standing Galenic standard) to ten. Third, he advocated the creation of a new system by which physicians could synthesize the enlarged category of flavor properties along with the greater number of degrees. Last, he argued that botanical studies could not reductively classify each plant according to a single flavor. If one separated the roots from the leaves, or compared a seedling to a mature plant, their respective tastes would differ considerably. Charting a truly accurate compendium of tastes required an empirically sound analysis of vegetable life. Three years later, Grew delivered another lecture to the Royal Society. This time he focused exclusively on the classification of tastes, a subject that hitherto had been treated with ‘‘so much scantiness and defect.’’22 After all, Grew theorized, if different substances could provoke such radically diverse sensations in the mouth alone, surely they must also elicit equally diverse physical and mental reactions. Executing this new system required three new measurements. First, instead of nine simple savours, as Thomas Willis had earlier proposed, Grew identified at least sixteen simple tastes that could maintain their unique qualities when mixed with other tastes and odors.23 Each of these tastes had a natural partner; sweetness paired with bitterness, sourness with saltiness. ‘‘Compound’’ tastes, which Grew compared to words made out of letters, consisted of two or more simple tastes. Acris was a combination of ‘‘pungent and hot, as horseradish.’’ Notrofus was made from ‘‘pungent and cold.’’24 The number of such combinations could be limitless, Grew claimed, although the English language had words to describe only a handful. In some respects, Grew’s work was not that remarkable. The number of basic tastes has never been constant in the West, and continues to be debated up to this day.25 More important were his attempts to minimize gustatory subjectivity by analyzing sensations quantitatively, clocking both the duration of a given taste and its sensational intensity over time.26 Grew believed that the trajectory of a substance’s intensity had an analogous relationship to the course of disease, from the prodrome to the fever to the breaking. The ‘‘heat of Galangale’’ (an Indonesian root in the same family as F IG U R E 3: John Floyer’s Pharmako-basanos (1687) raised chemosensory research to new heights. courtesy of wellcome images, a website operated by wellcome trust, a global charitable foundation based in the united kingdom. ginger) did not reach its height of intensity until after half a minute, Grew observed, while the mysterious ‘‘heat of Blackbore’’ took a whopping four minutes to peak after initial contact with the tongue. Much like a long-lasting gum, the bitterness of a wild cucumber lasted for a full fifteen minutes. Finally, after identifying five ‘‘seats’’ of taste—lips, tongue, palate, throat, and gullet—Grew separated tastes that remained ‘‘fixed’’ in one part of the body from those that provoked sensations elsewhere. (He was uncertain whether some of these sensations—supposedly felt from the tongue all the way to the stomach—actually counted as tastes at all.) Still, by applying the scientific method to the study of gustatory SPRING 2015 such as carrots and parsnips, to ‘‘sweet-subacids’’ made up of strawberries and grapes. Grew (1682: 292) had included an appendix on odors to his lectures on tastes, noting that ‘‘many things already explained . . . may easily be transferred to those of their Odours.’’ But on the whole, Grew’s remarks on smell are disorganized and incomplete, although he expressed hope that they one day would be improved by others. Floyer integrated odors into his study far more comprehensively. Not only did he believe that specific qualities, such as acidity, could be accessed by the nose as well as by the palate, but he also posited that there existed an entire class of medicines created by combining certain tastes and smells. ‘‘Aromaticks,’’ for example, which increased blood circulation and the heartbeat, paired an acrid taste with a fragrant smell. ‘‘Cress tastes’’ paired bitter or acrid tastes with ‘‘a quick Pungent Smell, which flies from the Tongue into the Nose, as Mustard-Seed’’ (Floyer 1687: 6). Even texture, Floyer contended, could help determine a plant’s therapeutic potential. Still, like many of his predecessors, Floyer believed that taste, even more than smell, was the most comprehensive and reliable guide to a plant’s nutritional and pharmacological properties.30 Tastes were believed to display their nature more clearly than odors, which worked predominantly as lures to guide us to nourishing food. So highly did he esteem the human palate that, although he read about and admired the latest innovations in dissection and microscopy, Floyer personally did not think much of the microscope. While conceding that chemistry might indeed help men identify the different salts and acids that composed different flavors, Floyer (1702–3) nevertheless insisted that the naked human palate could detect ‘‘all the Chymical Principles in Plants’’ with more accuracy and efficiency than any artificial machine. Just look at the state of English cuisine, Floyer (1687: 17) pointed out, and taste’s pedagogical functions could be easily understood: How else would cooks know that it was healthy to mix acids like vinegar with ‘‘hot meats’’ and herbs, or that one should eat cool fruits after meat? These states, Floyer proclaimed, ‘‘are best discovered by our Tastes and Senses,’’ even if his perpetual stomachaches testified to the occupational hazards of sensory research (ibid.: 30). Not everyone shared Floyer’s view. Not only had recent studies suggested that similar tasting substances could in fact have wildly different chemical properties, but even Grew conceded the shortcomings of taste as a barometer of absolute truth.31 Like many of his seventeenth-century colleagues, Grew accepted the distinction between ‘‘primary qualities’’— such as solidity and motion—and ‘‘secondary’’ or ‘‘sensible’’ ones—such as tastes, colors, and smells. Rather than 15 GASTRONOMICA perception—incorporating elements of time, motion, and feeling—Grew’s so-called ‘‘Scientifick Definition’’ claimed to correct the irregularities of herbal literature. Even if his new system was not much more streamlined than the old one he was trying to replace, the project reconciled the Royal Society’s devotion to progress with the ancient, if not prehistoric belief that tastes constituted windows into an underlying cosmology, the excavation and understanding of which could serve the progress of mankind. Grew’s work was well received. Along with Robert Hooke, he was appointed joint secretary of the Royal Society in 1677. Three years later, he became an honorary member of the College of Physicians, although his nonconformism prohibited him from officially joining. Yet in many ways, Grew’s work remained unfinished, as he never determined the unique medicinal virtues of different taste combinations. He observed that plants had more bitter and sour tastes than sweet and salty ones, yet he could not explain why this was. He noticed that ‘‘soft and sweetish’’ substances often made good antiscorbutics and that bitter things like fenugreek seeds worked well as cleansers. But for the most part, he was baffled by the relationship between a substance’s taste, scent, and color on the one hand, and its curative properties on the other. How did cooking change a substance’s taste? How did taste and smell conspire within herbal therapies? While it was ‘‘probable’’ that more specific medical virtues could be determined by tastes alone, Grew left most of the work to posterity.27 This project was taken up several years later by Sir John Floyer (1649–1734). The son of a barrister, Floyer studied at Oxford during the 1660s, when the ideas of Galen and Hippocrates were experiencing a revival.28 In subsequent years, Floyer also read Nehemiah Grew’s work as well as some of the latest anatomical studies on the tongue.29 All of these influences culminated in his ambitious work Pharmakobasanos, or the touch-stone of medicines (1687), which lauded Grew’s ingenuity while also attempting to expand on his work. Rather than limiting himself to vegetal tastes, Floyer also devoted chapters to the tastes of minerals and animals. Instead of sixteen simple tastes, Floyer believed that there were only four: ‘‘watery, earthy, oyly, and acid,’’ and he reduced the number of ‘‘degrees’’ from ten to three. But Floyer’s classificatory system was actually far more complex than Grew’s. Two or more simple tastes could produce a compound taste. ‘‘Diverse tastes’’ consisted of one simple taste paired with one compound taste. And countless other ‘‘classes’’ of tastes resulted from the pairing of two compound tastes. Sweetness, Floyer (1702–3) wrote in a separate article, came in eleven different varieties ranging from ‘‘Sweet-aromaticks,’’ F IG UR E 4: The ‘‘taste test’’ continues to distinguish food, medicine, and poison for 21st century herbalists such as Katrina Blair. SPRING 2015 this excerpt has been adapted from katrina blair’s the wild wisdom of weeds (october 2014) and is printed with permission from chelsea green publishing. GASTRONOMICA 16 constituting an independent force of their own, these latter qualities had no innate being beyond the capacity to evoke sensations in the taster. A gustatory sensation, Grew (1673: 4) reiterated, was ‘‘not what is actually received by Sense,’’ but an immeasurable approximated perception: ‘‘such materials or external circumstances [that] are requisite to their becoming the Adequate objects thereof.’’ Seeing, smelling, and tasting an object might create simple ideas of that object in the mind, but, thanks to our fallible senses, these ideas would always be flawed estimations of that object’s true nature. Nevertheless, Grew and his colleagues strived mightily to create the most objective lab conditions possible. Before undertaking a taste test, Grew recommended washing one’s mouth out with warm water, washing again before every subsequent tasting, and then waiting for a few minutes before trying the next one. Floyer insisted that all decoctions must be tasted cold. Physicians also had to account for the diversity of human palates and the inexact vocabulary used to describe what they tasted. Floyer (1687: 23) had consulted the palates of ‘‘all sorts of Persons . . . divers Divines, Apothecaries, Chirurgeons, Gentlewomen and Young Persons.’’ He particularly coveted female participants, having found that tobacco and intemperance often dulled men’s tongues. Even so, when John Rutty, a Quaker physician and fellow of the Royal Society, began to collect taste-impressions in 1728 in hopes of devising a new system of materia medica—going so far as to hire a blind taster as an assistant—he soon encountered frustrations. ‘‘The difficulties attending an account of taste and smell [result] from not only our inability to express by words many Ideas we receive this way,’’ he wrote to his brother, ‘‘but also from the diversity of both in different persons.’’32 Not only were gustatory experiences inherently subjective, but even the existing vocabularies used to describe them—sweet, salty, and so on—seemed unstable categories of knowledge. Rutty’s only recourse was to simplify his system to the lowest common flavor denominators, ignoring subtler notes as ‘‘useless and perplexing’’ in favor of general ‘‘predominant qualities’’ upon which most tasters could agree. Rutty was not the first to comment on taste’s resistance to the scientific method. In 1695 John Houghton’s weekly Newsletter for Husbandry and Trade acknowledged that changes in the flavor properties of foods were exceedingly difficult to Within the tavern’s walls, each member of the club attempted to use his palate to situate the mystery medicine within the existing body of pharmaceutical knowledge. Yet no two men could agree on what it tasted like, so no one could agree on its precise medical use. Ward quickly revealed, however, that the joke was on them, as the visitor belatedly admitted that the Egyptian natives did not actually eat the substance. It was intended for another orifice altogether.35 On the surface, this satire exposes the challenges that come with elevating the subjective palate to a credible tool of medical inquiry. Echoing popular critiques of the Royal Society, Ward pokes fun at the earnest virtuoso so intent on learning for learning’s sake that his (literally) myopic analyses beget humorous gustatory consequences. Taste-based medical deductions are impossible, Ward insists, as every man at the table interpreted his experience differently, detecting everything from spiciness to saltiness, the piquancy of capsaicins to the numbing effects of menthol. Ward also questions the supposedly innate and ‘‘natural’’ status of taste-based medicine; after all, it is not until the virtuosi are told exactly what they are eating that they unanimously decide that the taste is unpleasant. Accounting for taste seemed to depend ***** This, however, was not the end of taste-based medicine. Throughout the eighteenth century, curative properties continued to be associated with tastes. Most scholars know Linnaeus (1707–1778), for example, as the famous architect of a new sexual system of botanical and zoological classification— one that replaced older systems that relied on accidentia such as taste and smell or the physical plant structures such as roots and leaves. Indeed, in Philosophia Botanica (1751), Linnaeus listed three flaws with gustation-centered classification schemes. The first involved climate and soil quality, causing a great deal of gustatory variation within the same species. The second flaw consisted of cultural subjectivities, which rendered ‘‘mild, sweet, pleasant, and wholesome’’ to some people what SPRING 2015 . . . every one nibbling at the sharp-end that had lain stewing in the Dregs, some nodding their Heads, as if they had found by the Taste, what Analogy it had with some other Species that was noted for its Vertue. Others spitting out what they had chew’d and mumbl’d, for fear the Secret should produce some poysonous effect. One declaring, it must be a great Dryer, because of the Spiciness of its Taste. Another, That it was certainly a powerful Antiscorbutick, because so full of Saline Particles. A Third, That he believ’d it was Antivenereal, because its biting Taste had some affinity with Guaicum. A Fourth, Asserting it a great Narcotique, for that it had numb’d his Tongue, by conveying it to his Palate. Thus the Jest went round, till every Member of the Club, who had the least skill in Physick, had most gravely deliver’d his Judgmatical Opinion.34 on cultural preferences and taboos, and not necessarily on physiology. Moreover, behind this scatological comedy rested greater social stakes. It was bad enough that one blind tasting produced such a range of different sensations, undermining the certainty of the taxonomies Grew and Floyer had worked so hard to create. More worrisome was the fact that it was impossible to judge whose palate was accurate and whose was not. And if a man could evaluate medicines based on a taste alone, virtually anyone with a tongue could declare himself an authority. Elevating the subjective palate into a reliable pedagogical tool thus undermined the already unstable hierarchical divisions propping up the medical establishment. For as many different tastes that the club’s members identified, there were just as many different disciplinary specialties that informed each virtuoso’s erroneous conclusions. Labeled an ‘‘odd mixture of Mankind,’’ members of the club ranged from ‘‘a purblind Philosopher’’ to a ‘‘talkative Spectacle-maker,’’ from an ‘‘atheistical Chymist’’ to a ‘‘water-gruel Physician.’’ Taste-based medicine was very much a do-it-yourself, try-this-at-home kind of science; anyone, even those with the ‘‘least skill in Physick,’’ felt entitled to offer his opinion. It is most likely no coincidence that Ward’s satire was penned after the 1704 Rose decision that legally entitled London-based apothecaries to prescribe their own medicines, further loosening the College of Physicians’ grip on medical authority. Ward was not a physician himself—he was actually a publican—but he was a High Church Tory deeply concerned about the erosion of the authority of both Church and State. By elevating sensory experience as a valid gateway to medical knowledge, thereby broadening the spectrum of actors who had access to it, taste-based medicine could be manipulated to undermine these pillars of authority. 17 GASTRONOMICA explain ‘‘[until] we have a good theory of taste, which I find hard to be got and greatly wanting.’’ Four years later, the outlook looked even more bleak; Houghton resigned himself to the fact that such a theory ‘‘‘tis rather to be wish’d for than expected.’’33 Nor did the problem escape the satirist’s pen. In 1709, for example, the Tory Grub-Street journalist Ned Ward described a so-called ‘‘Vertuoso’s Club’’ that met every Thursday at a tavern in Cornhill. (This fictional club was undoubtedly invented as a jab at the Royal Society.) One week, a visiting physician brought with him an ‘‘Aegyptian Cargo’’ containing an exotic drug reputed to have unexplainable medicinal properties. Intrepid empiricists as the members were, it went without saying that they must try it. When all the men had taken a taste, Ward, a publican himself, recorded their reactions: SPRING 2015 GASTRONOMICA 18 might be by nature ‘‘sour, austere, harsh, bitter, and disagreeable.’’ The last flaw was more of a practicality, yet no less important; the simple ‘‘taste test,’’ Linnaeus pointed out, was hardly an attractive poster-child for the scientific method. For example, the slightest taste of a particular species of arum (wakerobin) could poison a man, permanently robbing him of his speech. Not only were sexual characteristics inalienable from a plant’s identity, Linnaeus argued, but they also were a lot safer to evaluate (from Rose 1775: 104). Once placed within distinct sexually determined classes, however, Linnaeus believed that the sensible qualities of plants—especially taste—betrayed important nutritional wisdom (ibid.: 314). Not only did he notice that the fruiting bodies of plants of the same class often shared common gustatory properties, but he also considered their tastes to be reliable indicators of their specific medicinal capacities. The strongest tasting and smelling plants in a given genus, he claimed, were usually the ‘‘most efficacious’’ and ‘‘possess[ed] the greatest medicinal virtues’’ (ibid.: 248). Linnaeus even went so far as to link these tastes to colors. Red fruit denoted the acidity of raspberries and plums. Pale colors indicated the insipidness of endives and asparagus. Bitters happened to be yellow in tone. Linnaeus had his critics. ‘‘The Colour is a very uncertain guide; the Smell goes but a little farther,’’ cautioned the eminent Scottish physician William Cullen in a 1761 lecture on materia medica; ‘‘it is the Taste only that is of any extensive application.’’ While Cullen acknowledged (and frequently cited) the pioneering work of Linnaeus and Floyer, he warned that they ‘‘have carried the matter too far.’’36 Insipid, flavorless substances might well be medicinally impotent, yet this did not necessarily mean that particularly poignant substances were more powerful than blander ones, argued Cullen, citing the odorless Brazilian ipecacuana plant, with a taste so subtle that it revealed itself only after prolonged chewing. The problem was not whether or not tastes indicated something about a given substance—Cullen was confident that they did. ‘‘The difficulty,’’ he concluded, ‘‘is to ascertain the degree.’’ William Withering, writing over a decade later, was even more skeptical. Not only did he believe that sensible properties have ‘‘but little connexion with the diseases they are adapted to cure,’’ he also contended that this view, after a number of unsuccessful studies, had been utterly abandoned by respectable physicians (Withering 1785: 2). Even if technologies did exist for objectively analyzing different tastes, Withering implied, they would not tell us much about a substance’s virtues. Ultimately, taste-based medicine did not overcome the rise of alternative drug classification systems, the increasingly specialized training required by new chemical machinery, and the isolation of the first white, bitter tasting alkaloid powders observable in a glass tube.37 Over the ensuing decades, it slowly disappeared from the pharmacological literature, although physicians continued to publish articles about its therapeutic properties well into the nineteenth century.38 Yet even today, we like to believe that tastes have special abilities. Aromatherapy remains as popular as it was a thousand years ago, as studies continue to come out about its effect on everything from alertness to stress relief.39 Even though food scientists have surmised that certain aromatic compounds—such as piney terpenes and pungent phenolics— possess anti-inflammatory or anti-oxidant properties, we still do not know exactly how and to what degree these compounds might slow cell damage or heal wounds. Most importantly, by putting our faith into the older science of concrete properties, gleaned from sensory experience, the old Hippocratic adage—that food is medicine—becomes a lot more relevant to our lives. We are seeing that everywhere. Since the 1960s, Ayurveda—a holistic, dietetic system more than a diet—has attracted growing numbers of followers in the West. The 1970s California food movement adopted ‘‘flavor first’’ as its mantra, emphasizing the composite psychological benefits of experiencing flavorful food. ‘‘Depersonalized, assembly-line fast food may be ‘convenient’ and ‘time-saving,’’’ wrote Alice Waters in her introduction to the 1982 Chez Panisse Menu Cookbook, ‘‘but it deprives the senses and denies true nourishment.’’ Finally, a new generation of foragers and wild-food enthusiasts are finding new meaning in ancient Hippocratic wisdom. While observation, education, and intuition help today’s foragers make alimentary decisions, it is ultimately taking a small, nearly imperceptible taste of an unknown substance that allows them to distinguish food from poison.40 Taste-based medicine may have faded from clinical practices, but as a healing technology, its life has been incredibly long. notes 1. On Ancient Medicine 24.1. While On Ancient Medicine is considered a part of the Hippocratic Corpus, establishing the authorship of these ancient texts is exceedingly difficult. The Hippocratic Corpus is made up of sixty or so works that have been circulating together under the name of Hippocrates since the third century AD. 2. Other scholars, such as Nicolson (1993) and Porter and Bynum (1993), have examined the senses in diagnostics as opposed to therapies. 3. The origin of the Charaka Samhita is unclear. Some say that this Sanskrit metered text was compiled around 760 BCE in northwestern India, while others date it to the third century AD. I am using the 1896 English translation. 22. Nehemiah Grew, ‘‘On the Diversities and Causes of Tastes, Read before the Royal Society March 25 1675,’’ in The anatomy of plants, with an idea of the philosophical history of plants, and several other lectures (London, 1682). 23. Willis’s ninth flavor was ‘‘insipid or without taste,’’ however, so we could also say that he believed there were only eight. Two Discourses on the Soul of Brutes (London, 1672), part 1, ch. 12, p. 63. He also lists sweet, bitter, salt, acid or tart, astringent or biting, sour, and oily. 24. Grew (1682: 281) likened compound tastes made of simple ones to complete words made of letters. 25. Bartoshuk (1978) has charted this in her work on the history of taste research. While scientists today generally recognize five types of taste receptor cells—sweet, sour, bitter, salty, and umami—more recently, many have proposed that more might exist. For example, the Genetics of Taste Lab, based in the Denver Natural History Museum, has recently hypothesized that ‘‘fat’’ is a sixth taste. 26. Essentially, Grew was the first to understand the distinctive attributes of a taste percept, such as quality, spatial localization, hedonics, temporal dynamics (timing cues), and intensity. Together, these attributes can be integrated to form a single taste sensation. We are also aware that tastes can have location and timing cues, such as when bitter tastes linger too long in the back of our throat. See Breslin (2013). 27. Grew concludes his treatise by claiming that ‘‘the specifick virtue of medicines, which some physicians positively deny, and most dispute; from some of the forementioned differences of taste . . . may seem, at least, to be probable.’’ 28. D.D. Gibbs, ‘‘Floyer, Sir John (1649–1734),’’ Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (Oxford University Press, 2004). 29. Jenner (2010). Floyer also incorporated Malpighi’s mechanist explanations of taste as a physical body. No plant, he explained, could be described in terms of one simple taste alone, but more accurately produces different ‘‘modes’’ depending on the motion and texture of bodies making up a substance. 30. Both Aristotle and Theophrastus both believed taste to be more accurate and perceptive than smells, which were generally accorded less space in pharmacopeias as they did not physically nourish the body. Smell nevertheless played an important role in clinical practices; see Palmer (1993) and Roos (2007). Described as both the ‘‘messengers of savours’’ as well as ‘‘their promiscuous parents,’’ in some cases, Helmont believed odiferous airs more effective medicines than liquid medicines. See Roos (2007: 110). 31. Meli (2011) points out that as far back as 1661, the Italian anatomists Borelli and Malpighi had questioned why olive brine had very different chemical properties than fish guts, even though the two (apparently) tasted quite similar. Robert Boyle (1675) gleefully recalled fooling test subjects into thinking that SPRING 2015 the same point about taste’s relationship to the medical ‘‘golden age’’ that Floyer does, save for the target of the critique. 17. Even Christopher Merrett, member of the College and the Royal Society, admitted that apothecaries are better acquainted with materia medica than most physicians. 18. See, for example, Agnes Arber (1942–43) and Michael Hunter (1981–82). More recently scholars have begun to examine Grew’s ideas about physical matter; see Garrett (2003). 19. Nehemiah Grew, ‘‘An Idea of a Philosophical History of Plants, Read before the Royal Society January 8 and January 15, 1672,’’ in The anatomy of plants, with an idea of the philosophical history of plants, and several other lectures (London, 1682). 20. Ibid., 29. 21. Grew also includes a few words about ‘‘consistency,’’ or touch, but he did not consider this a sensible quality. 19 GASTRONOMICA 4. In some cases, the saline was separated from the bitter, making eight tastes, yet the general logic still applied. There were always exceptions, however. According to Beare (1906), Menestor of Sybarus believed that the number of tastes was unlimited, while Plato believed that there were four. Theophrastus was also ambiguous. Sometimes he implied that bitter and sweet were the two ‘‘primary’’ tastes, of which all others were just derivatives. In general, he proposed eight tastes: sweet, oily, bitter, harsh, pungent, sour, astringent, and saline, although one could conflate saline and bitter, making seven. The vinous taste, which some proposed as separate, was in Theophrastus’s opinion only a combination of sweet, astringent, and harsh. 5. Both of these propositions are found in Aristotle’s theory of tastes, outlined in De Sensu 1.4. In fact, his contention that sweetness lifts many less desirable flavors to higher acceptance levels has found support in current psychological research; see Breslin (2013) and Davidson et al. (1999). 6. The College of Physicians was an exclusive incorporated body of learned medical practitioners who were admitted by examination. Having obtained a royal charter in 1518, this body was given statutory powers to regulate and prosecute unlicensed medical practitioners to prevent them from giving medical advice and prescribing remedies. Although it still exists today, the College’s power was seriously curtailed in 1704, when a parliamentary decision gave apothecaries the right to practice medicine; see Cook (1986) and Pelling (2003). 7. Scholars have disagreed over the actual reception of these New World drugs. Many supposedly ‘‘new’’ drugs were misidentified, while descriptions of others were plagiarized from other accounts. See Morton (1981) and Estes (1995). 8. For example, compare the definition provided in Elisha Coles’s dictionary (1677) to Nehemiah Grew’s analysis (1682: 293). 9. For example, Robert Hooke (1665: 155) complained that herbals delivered ‘‘so little . . . of the virtues of a Plant, and less of truth.’’ 10. Not only did Culpeper add an expanded list of drugs and their therapeutic properties (often based on astrological information) to his translation of the 1618 original, but his work also had a reformist subtext. Culpeper compared the College of Physicians to papists on the grounds of their resistance to vernacular medical texts. 11. The Society of Apothecaries had been officially severed from the medieval Grocers’ Company and given a monopoly to dispense drugs in 1617. However, the Society was to sell medicines specifically prescribed by physicians, which were also supposed to be listed in an official pharmacopeia published by physicians. Physicians also had the right to inspect the drugs in apothecaries’ shops. The Rose Case of 1704 saw a dramatic turn in the Society’s fortunes, as it allowed apothecaries to dispense medical advice, and in 1815 they were given the power to license and regulate medical practitioners throughout England and Wales. 12. This is discussed in Cook (1986). Essentially, the Society of Apothecaries wanted recognition as legitimate practitioners in instances when physicians were not available in London. This debate was eventually resolved in the apothecaries’ favor in the Rose Case of 1704. 13. Helmont (1662) rejected the Galenic idea that tastes were intrinsic qualities within substances, instead classifying them as ferments produced by chemical reactions. 14. According to Cook (1986), ‘‘T.M.’’ was probably Christopher Merrett (1614–1695), a Fellow of both the College of Physicians and the Royal Society. 15. Jenner (2010) has also addressed the rhetorical use of taste and medicine by Floyer’s evocation of the ‘‘pristine sensitivity of ancient palates.’’ 16. Floyer might be confusing Aristotle with his fifth-century Sicilian predecessor Empedocles. Curiously, On Ancient Medicine makes SPRING 2015 GASTRONOMICA 20 a concoction of roots and artificial coloring was a delicious raspberry wine. 32. In a letter to his brother, Rutty pledged to ‘‘reduce [pharmacological] knowledge . . . to a greater certainty,’’ and sever it from the ‘‘farrago of superstitions and incredible virtues with which botanic writers abound.’’ See Royal Society Archives (London), ‘‘‘An account of a Letter from Dr. John Rutty of Dublin to Dr. W Rutty’ by Mr. John Martyn’’ (RBO/14/96); and ‘‘Letter from John Rutty, dated at Dublin, to William Rutty,’’ March 21, 1730 (EL/R1/71). Also see Max Satchell, ‘‘John Rutty’’ in the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography. The inspiration for Rutty’s project was the College of Physician’s 1724 publication of one of the largest catalogues of simples in Europe. By the time that the book came out— Materia medica antiqua et nova (London, 1775)—Rutty’s careful gustatory observations felt irrelevant and outdated. The book sold poorly, although it was followed the next year with an English work, entitled Observations on the London and Edinburgh Dispensatories: with an account of the virtues of various simples of the materia medica (London, 1776), which highlighted the native medicinal remedies lost during previous consolidations of materia medica. 33. John Houghton, Newsletter for the Improvement of Husbandry and Trade (Friday, June 14, 1695), 1:150, p. 395, as well as no. 398 (March 1699/1700). Houghton was also baffled by smell (August 9, 1695), 1:158, p. 415. 34. The ‘‘Vertuoso’s Club’’ was most likely inspired by the Royal Society, which frequently held meetings and dinners in local taverns. 35. The ‘‘learned’’ physician’s failure to identify common materia medica is a common trope in medical satire, present in the anonymously authored Lex Talionis, or, a receipt of our present distempers (1685: 25) where a mystery foreign herb turned out to be nothing but a carrot top. 36. Cullen (1772: 2). This is an unauthorized publication of his work from circulating 1761 lecture notes taken at the University of Glasgow. 37. Roberts (1995) argues that the challenges of operating new machines deployed in the late eighteenth-century chemical revolution caused the decline of ‘‘sensuous technology’’ as reliable determinants of scientific knowledge. 38. Pereira’s (1839) influential pharmacology textbook deemed classifications based on sensible qualities to be ‘‘necessarily very imperfect, owing to the impossibility of defining sensations,’’ yet he hardly dismissed the gustation-centered studies of his recent predecessors, citing two recent studies of taste in medicine: Osborne’s (1828) On the Indications Afforded by the sensible qualities of plants with respect to their medical properties and Greeves’s (1829) ‘‘Essay on the varieties and distinctions of Tastes and Smells, and on the Arrangement of the Materia Medica’’ published in the Supplement to the Edinburgh New Dispensary. 39. See Spiers et al. (2014), Heuberger et al. (2001), and Weber and Heuberger (2008). Many essential oils have been touted for their antimicrobial properties. 40. Conversations with Katrina Blair on October 21, 2014 and November 4, 2014. Taste is indispensible to foraging behavior among mammals (Krueger, Laycock, and Price 1974). references Anon. 1665. Lex Talionis, or, a receipt of our present distempers. Arber, Agnes. 1942–43. ‘‘Nehemiah Grew and Marcello Malpighi: An Essay in Comparison.’’ Isis 34: 7–16. Aristotle. 2001[ca. 350 BC ]. On Sense and the Sensible. Translated by J.I. Beare. Virginia Tech: Blacksburg. Bartoshuk, Linda. 1978. ‘‘History of Taste Research.’’ In Tasting and Smelling, ed. Edward Carterette and Morton Friedman. New York: Academic Press. Beare, John. 1906. Greek Theories of Elementary Cognition from Almaeon to Aristotle. Oxford: Clarendon. Boyle, Robert. 1675. Experiments and observations of the mechanical production of tastes. Oxford. Breslin, Paul A.S. 2013. ‘‘An Evolutionary Perspective on Food and Human Taste.’’ Current Biology 23: 409–18. ‘‘C.T.’’ 1670. Some papers writ in the year 1664. London. Caraka. 1896. Charaka-samhita. Translated by Avinash Chandra Kaviratna. Calcutta: G.C. Chakravarti. Classen, Constance. 1994. Aroma: The Cultural History of Smell. London: Routledge. Cogan, Thomas. 1636. The haven of health. London. Coles, Elisha. 1677. An English dictionary explaining the difficult terms used in divinity, husbandry, physick. London. Cook, Harold. 1986. The Decline of the Old Medical Regime in Stuart London. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. Corbin, Alain. 1986. The Foul and the Fragrant: Odor and the French Social Imagination. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Cullen, William. 1772. Lectures on the Materia Medica. London. Culpeper, Nicholas. 1649. A Physicall Directory, or, A translation of the London dispensatory, made by the College of Physicians in London. London. Davidson, J. M., R.S.T. Linforth, T.A. Hollowood, and A.J. Taylor. 1999. ‘‘Effect of Sucrose on the Perceived Flavor Intensity of Chewing Gum.’’ Journal of Agricultural and Food Chemistry 47(10): 4336–40. Estes, J. Worth. 1995. ‘‘The European Reception of the First Drugs from the New World.’’ Pharmacy in History 37: 3–23. Floyer, John. 1687. Pharmako-basanos: The touch-stone of medicine. London. ———. 1702–3. ‘‘Observations on the Class of Sweet Tastes, made by comparing the tastes of sweet plants with Monsieur L’Emery’s chymical analysis of them, in his treatise of drugs.’’ Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society 23: 1160–72. Foucault, Michel. 1970. The Order of Things. New York: Pantheon Books. Greeves, A.F.A. 1829. ‘‘Essay on the Varieties and Distinctions of Tastes and Smells, and on the Arrangement of the Materia Medica.’’ In Supplement to the Edinburgh New Dispensatory. Grew, Nehemiah. 1682. The anatomy of plants, with an idea of the philosophical history of plants, and several other lectures. London. Helmont, Jean Baptiste. 1662. Oriatrike, or Physick Refined. London. Heuberger, Eva, Tapanee Hongratanaworakit, Carina Böhm, Ruth Weber, and Gerhard Buchbauer. 2001. ‘‘Effect of Chiral Fragrances on Human Autonomic Nervous System Parameters and Self-evaluation.’’ Chemical Senses 26(3): 281–92. Hippocrates. 2005[ca. 400 BCE]. On Ancient Medicine. 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