“For Horse Medicine We Need …”: Plants, Horses, and People in Early Modern Russia (17th — 18th Centuries)

The article is devoted to the use of plants in the treatment of horses and people in Russia in the early Modern time. The work compares medicinal plants used in medicine and veterinary and traces the continuity in their use in the 17th and 18th centuries. We discuss not folk tradition, but European medical science, transmitted by foreign doctors working in the Apothecary Chancery, as well as foreign veterinarians from the Stables Department. In fact, the same plants were used to treat the tsar, his family and court, as well as horses in the court stables and embassy suites. The authors conclude the absence of fundamental differences in the use of medicinal plants between pre-Petrine Russia and the Russian Empire until the end of the 18th century.