Events

SUMMARY & BIO What features of medicinal plants produce ideas of nationhood? How can medical botany writing advance the symbolic and commercial promise of a postcolonial nation? In this talk, join Kathleen Cruz Gutierrez as she examines a seminal work in the history of medical botany in the Philippines, Eduardo Quisumbing’s Medicinal Plants of the Philippines (1951). Published from the rubble of Manila after the brutality of the Pacific War, Medicinal Plants of the Philippines relies on a particular brand of “encyclopedism” to recuperate the capital, its scientific institutions, and the nation more broadly following World War II. Gutierrez suggests that medicinal plants help to anchor—through reiterative and repetitive discourse—a particular vision of the nation, no matter the political persuasion. Kathleen Cruz Gutierrez is Assistant Professor of History at the University of California, Santa Cruz. She graduated from the University of California, Berkeley with Ph.D. in Southeast Asian Studies and a Designated Emphasis in Science and Technology Studies. A specialist of the plant sciences and Southeast Asia, Gutierrez released her first book, Unmaking Botany: Science and Vernacular Knowledge in the Colonial Philippines with Duke University Press in 2025. At U.C. Santa Cruz, Gutierrez also serves as co-Principal Investigator for a community-initiated, student-engaged public history project on Filipino agrarian labor in California’s Pajaro Valley and the Philippines' Ilocos region called Watsonville is in the Heart. For her efforts, she was presented the Richard E. Cone Award for Emerging Leaders in Community Engagement by LEAD California in 2024, a biannually award honor given to a single person in California higher education committed to community engagement.

SUMMARY & BIO How and when did early hominins begin to use plants as a source of drugs? How did they learn which plant extracts were useful for treating disease and how did they rationalise the effects that they obtained? This lecture will take a look these questions and trace the subsequent development of our understanding of drug action. BIO Rod Flower is emeritus professor of biochemical pharmacology at Queen Mary University of London. His career has focused particularly on inflammation and anti-inflammatories, and he has an active interest in biosecurity matters and the misuse of science. He is the author of Drugs: The Story of Pharmacology, a fascinating guide to the history of drugs and medicines, the science of how they work, and the way they’ve shaped healthcare and society.