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

LECTURE | GLOBAL HISTORIES OF KNOWLEDGE SEMINAR | LEIDEN UNIVERSITY

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
Series Global Histories of Knowledge 2025 – 2026
Location: Leiden University, Johan Huizinga building, 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.

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.

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“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.