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Emanuela and Alain

Plants, Medicine, and Peoples in History

Our Research and Collections are Looking for a New Home

Fifty years ago, Alain Touwaide embarked in an intellectual journey through the world of the plants, medicine and peoples of the ancient Mediterranean World. Later joined by Emanuela Appetiti, together they have assiduously traced and researched the ancient documents in libraries worldwide that transmitted the plant and medical knowledge across the centuries in the Mediterranean region. They have patiently built a reference library comprising most, if not all, the available scientific literature in the many topics touched upon in their research. Crossing the boundaries of traditionally defined academic disciplines, they have gradually developed an appropriate transdisciplinary methodology for which they further created an academic space, the Institute for the Preservation of Medical Traditions. A platform for original scientific research on ancient written medical traditions, the Institute has hosted researchers from all over the globe at any stage of their career, to whom Alain and Emanuela have opened the doors of their library, archives and other documentary collections.

After 50 years of sustained effort and continuous academic advocacy through publications, lectures, teaching and seminars, as well as active participation to conferences and workshops, the field is gaining recognition and is burgeoning in different forms worldwide. In no place, however, it is a discipline in its own right, with a specific methodology and the necessary documentary resources. To compensate for this gap and adequately respond to the constantly growing demand, Emanuela and Alain wish now to transform their private initiative into an institutional programme aimed to make their collections available to the scientific and scholarly communities, develop relevant teaching programmes to educate the next generations, foster research, and further develop and consolidate the expanding field Plants, Medicine, and Peoples in History. They seek an institution that will take the torch, acquire their collections, possibly partner with them to launch new initiatives or reinforce existing ones, and develop a unique and dynamic platform devoted to exploring the deep history of the human relationship with plants.

A Reference encyclopedias 001 D Journals