A Non-Classical Plant: The Aubergine in the Medieval and Early Modern Pharmacology

Abstract

Aubergine (Solanum melongena L.) is a plant from the Solanaceae family with multiple varieties, whose wild ancestors come from Indochina and East Africa. Although in China and India was very early cultivated, it was not extended to the ancient West, where it was hardly known; this would be the reason for its absence in the ancient botanical and pharmacological literature. It was the Arabs who expanded the growing of this plant in the North of Africa and Al-Andalus, from where it went to Europe. The first Western testimonies about the aubergine are found in Latin translations of scientific texts from Arabic, which were then incorporated into the Medieval and Renaissance pharmacological literature. In Renaissance, however; the plant began to be studied because of its similarities with a type of mandrake. Even though the aubergine was supposed to have some medicinal virtues, it was always suspected to be of poor taste, hard to digest and causing some diseases. Only in the Renaissance the plant and its varieties would be described by botanists from a more «scientific» and botanical perspective, with little pharmacological interest.