Secrets to Patents: Trans-Imperial Strategies for Keeping Medicines as Private Assets from 1500 to 1900

This RE investigates the long-term history of how life-saving and health-improving medicines became for-profit commodities from 1500 to 1900.

The project will address the research question: How did the idea of keeping medicines as a private asset of individuals or companies become an accepted norm?

Our team will investigate this question from a trans-imperial perspective, highlighting the role of colonialism in the formalisation and normalisation of patents over medicines, especially in the transatlantic colonial nexus.

The RE will focus on 4 main regions: German territories; Great Britain and their Atlantic colonies; the Iberian Peninsula and their Atlantic colonies; and Scandinavia and their Caribbean colonies.

The research focuses on 3 central strategies employed to establish ownership of medicines: secrecy, discovery claims, and intellectual property rights.

The team will tackle them as interconnected medical, legal, and colonial processes, tying them also to contemporary global health challenges.

To parse the large source corpus of medical journals and patent files, the project will create a dynamic database and use an open-source language model to systematise the contents to reveal how different historical agents claimed medicines as their private assets.

Through this long-term trans-imperial perspective, this RE will be able to create a new historical framework to understand the commodification of medicines from 1500 to 1900, from secrets to patents.