The Institute for the Preservation of Medical Traditions is a 501(c)(3) organization devoted to fundamental research.
We promote knowledge of ancient medicine to all components of society, we encourage, generate, and practice collaborative work across a vast array of disciplines, and we share our knowledge with the next generations for them to build on, and go beyond, our own work.
Our Mission
With a special interest in the ancient Greek World, we aim to collect and document the medical literature of the most remote past, with a special interest in the uses of plants as medicine and food, which we interpret as the record of actual practice.
We make the results of our research available to interested and qualified parts for new investigations aimed to assess the efficacy and safety of ancient practice(s) for possible renewed and safe applications environmentally and economically sustainable.
We aim to inform, inspire, and involve people worldwide about ancient medicine, its achievements, significance, history and seminal role through the centuries through our collections, programs, and publications.
Building on fifty years of cross-disciplinary research, collecting all over the world, and disseminating accurate information, we are a resource and a research center for any individual interested in, and valuing, the legacy of ancient knowledge.
Through exchanges across the disciplines we foster conversations and debates on all aspects of ancient medicine, including its recovery, tradition, interpretation, assessment, and possible safe revitalization.
We aspire to bring together, inspire, and engage all those interested in medicine in the ancient Mediterranean.
Our Vision
Stabilize, consolidate, expand
The Institute stems from the enthusiasm of its founders, capitalizing on their research over the past decades. It needs to transform this initial impetus into a more permanent structure, financially sustainable and stable. By linking medical tradition with contemporary medical needs in a creative association, it will suggest new avenues for fresh pharmacological investigations and innovative research strategies.
Core Values and Beliefs
The Institute for the Preservation of Medical Traditions stems out of the passion of Alain Touwaide and Emanuela Appetiti for the study of the therapeutic lore of ancient and contemporary traditional cultures. Both could not believe, contrary to a widely shared opinion, that ancient and traditional cultures invested energy, time, and resources in preserving formulas for medicines that were not efficacious. Following this intuition and capitalizing on their different yet complementary backgrounds—Touwaide is a classicist and Appetiti a cultural anthropologist— they patiently and tenaciously scrutinized ancient therapeutic literature, and understood that it encapsulates the results of experiments made by trial and error over centuries. By following the transmission of the ancient body of data all around the Mediterranean area, they threw a new light on its transformations, which result from constant mechanisms of adaptation to different natural and epidemiological environments, and not from scribes’ mistakes and misinterpretations. After pioneering works validating the intuitions and labor of Touwaide and Appetiti, medical research has begun to recognize the therapeutic value of herbs, and to appreciate that tradition may be a precious source of information for research. A realization of Touwaide’s and Appetiti’s life-long passion and dedication, the Institute for the Preservation of Medical Traditions saves and records therapeutic traditions before they are lost, unlocks their information, and makes it available for new research, new applications, and even new strategies, with the firm conviction that today medicine cannot take the risk of ignoring such a wealth of time-tested therapies.
