The study of aphrodisiacs is an overlooked area of global history which this article seeks to remedy by considering how such substances were commercially traded and how medical knowledge of them was exchanged globally between 1600 and 1920. We show that the concept of ‘aphrodisiacs’ as a new nominal category of pharmacological substances came to be valued and defined in early modern Latin, English, Dutch, Swiss, and French medical sources in relation to concepts transformed from their origin in both the ancient Mediterranean world and in medieval Islamicate medicine. We then consider how the general idea of aphrodisiacs became widely discredited in mid-nineteenth-century scientific medicine until after the First World War in France and in the US, alongside their commercial proliferation in the context of new colonial trade exchanges between Europe, the US, Southeast Asia, Africa, India, and South America. In both examples, we propose that global entanglements played a significant role in both the cohesion and the discreditation of the medical category of aphrodisiacs.

中文翻译：

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全球医学思想史上的壮阳药

春药研究是全球历史上一个被忽视的领域，本文试图通过考虑这些物质如何进行商业交易以及它们的医学知识如何在 1600 年至 1920 年间在全球范围内交换来加以补救。我们表明，“春药”的概念作为在早期现代拉丁语、英语、荷兰语、瑞士和法语的医学文献中，新的药理物质名称类别开始受到重视和定义，这些概念与从古代地中海世界和中世纪伊斯兰医学的起源转变而来的概念有关。然后我们考虑春药的一般概念是如何在 19 世纪中叶的科学医学中受到广泛质疑的，直到第一次世界大战之后在法国和美国，以及它们在欧洲之间新的殖民贸易交流背景下的商业扩散，美国、东南亚、非洲、印度和南美洲。在这两个例子中，我们认为全球纠缠在催情药医学类别的凝聚力和诋毁中都发挥了重要作用。