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Near the beginning of the 17th century, a weary herbalist characterized the boundless array of botanicals that he was required to master as a "sea of simples." That immense body of botanical and medical knowledge, first collected by the ancients and then vastly expanded by Renaissance and early modern explorers and botanists, became obsolete only in the 19th century, when chemistry transformed drug therapy. The wealth of literature and lore that physicians and botanists mastered in the 17th and 18th centuries is now being investigated anew, but this time by historians of medicine and pharmacy.
Cinchona, also named Peruvian bark
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