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Secrets to Patents

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

Global History Seminar at the Lund Division of History

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Natacha Klein Käfer

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Global History Seminar at the Lund Division of History

In the second half of 2025, Secrets to Patents took on the organization of the Global History Seminar at the Division of History of Lund University. Concluding the program on April 10, 2026 with a presentation by postdoctoral researcher Angana Moitra titled “Physic in India, Medicine in Scotland: The Presence of India in Andrew Duncan’s Annals of Medicine”, the seminar included studies on Latin America, the Caribbean, Greenland, European interconnections, and the Indian continent.

Presentation by Dr Felicia Fricke – “Fugitive Motherhood: Women Running from Slavery in the Insular Caribbean, 1770s–1870s” on November 18, 2025.

The program included presentations by Asta Mønsted and Natalie Körner, Liam Benison, Felicia Fricke, Mark Williams, Oscar Broughton, and Angana Moitra.

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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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