Life and Literature Speaker: Alain Touwaide

Alain Touwaide is the Scientific Director of the Institute for the Preservation of Medical Traditions and a Research Associate at the Smithsonian Institution in Washington, DC, Alain Touwaide studies the history of botany, particularly the medicinal plants, from Antiquity to the 17th century, in the Greek, Latin, and Arabic cultures that flourished around the Mediterranean Sea. Through a trans-disciplinary approach, which involves philology and history, medicine and pharmacy, pharmacology, ethno-anthropology, and genetics (DNA sequencing of ancient biological material), he analyzes ancient texts in their original language (Greek, Latin, Arabic), prepares critical editions of major works (with English translation and scientific analysis), searches in libraries all across the world for unknown ancient manuscripts, and produces reference works on ancient botany, therapeutics, and plant representations. He is a Fellow of the International Academy for the History of Pharmacy, of the Washington Academy of Sciences, the American Association for the Advancement of Science, and the Royal Society of Medicine. The author of 400+ publications, he is also the Editor of the series Medicine in the medieval Mediterranean that he has created, and of the Web Site PLANT- Plantarum Aetatis Novae Tabulae realized in collaboration with the Smithsonian Libraries and the National Library of Rome, in Italy.