How was knowledge about exotic drugs presented, consumed and contested in early modern print? Groves of large sassafras trees grew naturally in abundance in the English North American colonies, and the roots, leaves and bark were harvested for their medicinal virtues in treating the Pox, scurvy and women’s infertility. I consult 179 texts published in England between 1580 and 1680 that discuss sassafras, including letterpress books, pamphlets, serials, newspapers and other ephemera. These texts include literary, medical, religious and political writings that allow us to investigate sassafras’ reception as a cultural marker, economic commodity and medical drug. While physicians were the most common writers of works discussing sassafras, clergymen, poets, explorers and colonists were also engaged in sharing knowledge about sassafras. I find that sassafras was not regularly referred to immediately after its introduction, but rather after a concentrated effort to commercialise the drug seventy years after its first discussion in English print. After 1650, the frequency of discussions of sassafras and the diversity of diseases that it was recommended to treat increased significantly in scale. After sassafras was popularised, it was co-opted into contemporary debates, such as those between Galenic and chemical physicians, which had little to do with its status as originating from the New World.
