Lecture | Global Histories of Knowledge Seminar

From Secrets to Patents: Global Colonial Entanglements Shaping Medicine as Property

• Natacha Klein Käfer (University of Copenhagen / Lund University)

Date

Friday 20 March 2026

Time

15:30 - 17:00 hour

Serie

Global Histories of Knowledge 2025 - 2026

Address

Johan Huizinga
Doelensteeg 16
2311 VL Leiden

Room

2.60

Abstract

How did medical and pharmaceutical knowledge become a for-profit commodity? This presentation will examine how interdisciplinary research can yield a new understanding 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. With the introduction of the Research Environment Secrets to Patents: Trans-Imperial Strategies for Keeping Medicines as Private Assets from 1500 to 1900 (2025-2030), the seminar will also address the main challenges of conducting a long-term, geographically broad historical analysis, as well as the tools available to overcome them.

"Peru offers a branch of cinchona to Science (from a 17th century engraving)". Cinchona genus is the source of Peruvian bark, an important historical remedy against malaria. Rassegna Medica, March-April (No. 2) 1955. Public domain, Wikimedia.

Speaker

Natacha Klein Käfer is the PI of the Swedish Research Council Secrets to Patents: Trans-Imperial Strategies for Keeping Medicines as Private Assets from 1500 to 1900 at Lund University and the Research Leader of the HEALTH & SCIENCE theme at the Centre for Privacy Studies, University of Copenhagen. These projects study the interplay between health and privacy, with a focus on how popular healing knowledge survived in the private sphere despite the efforts to suppress it. Klein Käfer is particularly interested in how health is framed in trans-continental and trans-imperial contexts and the connections between health, death, superstition, secrecy, and privacy.

• kolonialisme en slavernij