Potent Substances: On the Boundaries of Food and Medicine

The author of the Hippocratic treatise 'Ancient Medicine' deemed medicine a branch of food and highlighted culinary practice as foundational to medical knowledge and practice. Nonetheless, throughout history, there have been fierce debates over what exactly constitutes materia dietetica (nourishing substances) and materia medica (medicinal substances) and evidence about their effects. Potent Substances engaged historians, anthropologists, scientists and policy-makers in conversation about the boundaries of food and pharmacy in the past, present and what they should look like in the future.