Trans-Imperial Strategies for Keeping Medicines as Private Assets from 1500 to 1900
On March 20, the PI of Secrets to Patents gave a lecture at the Global Histories of Knowledge Seminar at Leiden University. Introducing the Secrets to Patents project, the presentation focused on how interdisciplinary research can yield new understandings of how medicine, law, and colonialism were intertwined in the creation of a legal and academic system of ownership over remedies and cures from the early modern period to the nineteenth-century patent laws.
Secrets to Patents
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.
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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