In the late eighteenth century, Peruvian physicians increasingly turned to local medicinal plants, challenging the dominance of European pharmacopoeia. My presentation investigates the contributions of Afro-Peruvian physician José Manuel Dávalos (1758–1821), who utilized native resources such as culén (Otholobium glandulosum), quinoa (Chenopodium quinoa), and canchalagua (Centaurium cachanlahuen) in his medical practice. His innovative use of these plants is documented in his 1787 Latin thesis, De morbis nonnullis Limae grassantibus ipsorumque therapeia ("On Some Common Diseases in Lima and Their Treatment"), which he submitted for his medical degree at the prestigious University of Montpellier.

This presentation situates Dávalos’s approach within the broader Enlightenment-era shifts in medical and botanical sciences, reflecting an emerging movement among American physicians to recognize and document the value of indigenous flora. By examining Dávalos’s critiques of the gap between empirical indigenous knowledge and Western medical science, the presentation explores how his work contributes to the construction of a national identity rooted in local resources. Finally, this analysis offers insights into the historical and philosophical dimensions of integrating ethnobotanical knowledge into scientific practice, broadening perspectives on biology's theory and praxis beyond the Western canon.

Ethnobotany – understood as the study of plants and their relationship with human society – has long been used to study botanical knowledge in cultures considered to be outside the modern botanical system. However, the conceptual tools used by ethnobotanists may be usefully applied within this system as well, particularly in the study of its past. As historians of science take a broader perspective on the history of knowledge, they are asking questions about historical actors’ relationship to plants in ways that overlap with those asked by ethnobotanists.
This paper will discuss the application of an ethnobotanical lens to the history of science, focusing on changes to natural history that occurred over the long 16th century. By examining the works of seminal figures like Hernández, Aldrovandi, and Cesalpino not only as milestones in a longer history of ideas about taxonomy, but also as expressions of the ways in which plants interacted with a particular religious, economic, and cultural structure, this paper will highlight and survey the useful parallels between historical and ethnobotanical modes of enquiry.

Ethnobotany is a quintessential “interdiscipline,” formed at the crossroads of the human and natural sciences. It has centuries-old precedents in the communication of plant knowledge across cultures, notably in imperial encounters between Europeans and colonized peoples since the beginning of the modern era. Paradoxically, however, it was not defined as such until 1895 - by which time disciplinary specialization in the sciences had pushed such integrative proficiencies to the margins - when a botanist named John Harshberger outlined four purposes for ethnobotany: discovering new medicines and manufactures, studying historical plant distribution, analyzing ancient trade routes, and evaluating peoples’ “cultural position.” Using case studies in New Zealand and Southeast Asia, this presentation discusses how ethnobotanists navigated these disciplinary boundaries before and after this time period, with particular reference to the shifting institutional contexts in which ethnobotanists plied their trade, and to changing attitudes toward the deeply inequitable circumstances in which ethnobotanical communciation often transpired. Unlike Harshberger, ethnobotanists today emphasize the conservationist aspects of their work, frequently undertaken in partnership with indigenous communities. Ethnobotany also enjoys significantly more institutional support than previously. As an interdisipline, however, ethnobotany remains an intricate and often challenging endeavour, defining itself in relation to more prominent specializations, and also in contrast to an earlier, conspicuously exploitative, paradigm.