The project Secrets to Patents in collaboration with the Centre for Privacy Studies (DNRF138) organized a panel at the 2025 History of Knowledge Conference at Lund University. With presentations by Liam, Benison, Jelena Bakic, as well as Ida Vos and Natália da Silva Perez’s joint paper, the panel brought to the forefront the interplay between knowledge and health from the sixteenth to the nineteenth century. The examples ranged from the role of utopianism in public health, women’s knowledge of health preservation, and wet nursing as a valuable resource and yet undervalued skill in racialized colonial contexts.
Trans-Imperial Strategies for Keeping Medicines as Private Assets from 1500 to 1900
Secrets to Patents
The Project
The Research Environment Secrets to Patents investigates the long-term history of how life-saving and health-improving medicines became for-profit commodities from 1500 to 1900. Focusing on the Atlantic Colonial Nexus, the project’s team will investigate the strategies that different historical agents used to claim ownership of medicinal knowledge.
Funding
Secrets to Patents has been generously funded by the Swedish Research Council (2025-2030) and hosted at Lund University (SE), in collaboration with the Centre for Privacy Studies at the University of Copenhagen (DK) and the History Department of Universidade Federal de Santa Maria (BR).
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