Popular 18th-century medicine in a new form
5 September 2022

Nils-Otto Ahnfelt (l) and Hjalmars Fors' (r) work on recreating Hjärnes Testamente began as a research project at the Department of History of Science and Ideas at Uppsala University.
Hello to Nils-Otto Ahnfelt, PhD pharmacist and visiting researcher at the Department of Pharmaceutical Biosciences. Together with the historian of science Hjalmar Fors, you have developed a reconstruction of the 300-year-old medicine Hjärnes Testamente in the form of a bitter schnapps. How did you come up with the idea of recreating an 18th-century medicine?
"I thought it sounded very exciting when Hjalmar Fors asked me if we should do it as a research project. Hjärnes Testament was famous in the 18th century and was considered something of a panacea. It spread across the world under names like Wunder-Kron-Essenz, Schwedenbitter and Swedish Bitter. Well into the 20th century, it was available in Swedish pharmacies and variants are still sold in health food stores.”
Hjärnes Testamente is a mixture of ten different plants, spirits and theriac, which alone contains some 70 ingredients. How has the reconstruction worked?
"We worked our way through various recipes that we could find in manuscripts and in Swedish and German pharmacopoeias from the 17th and 18th centuries. It wasn't that difficult. Finding raw ingredients for the composition was much more difficult. One of the ingredients, Theriaca andromachi, dates back to ancient Greece and tracing the names of all its ingredients was a challenge and some of the ingredients we didn’t manage. Still others had to be dropped for obvious reasons, such as viper meat and opium. We also found that many of the ingredients are used as spices in cooking even today and that a relatively small number of ingredients in the original recipe, such as opium and squill, can be considered to have pharmacological properties.”
What can the project tell us about the history of pharmacy?
"One of the more important conclusions is how strongly older drugs affect the senses, they very often had strong tastes and smells, both pleasant and awful. They also often had interesting tactile properties. For example, medicine could be given in a honey mash. There has been a major paradigm shift in pharmaceuticals, as these days they should ideally be both odourless and tasteless.”
How did you come to launch a commercial side project, making Hjärnes Testamente available to the public as an alcohol flavour?
"We knew from the start that we had a great story. Then we discovered that the more we learned about the art of old pharmacy, the better our products tasted. So we wanted to try and see if we could make it really delicious. Through UU Innovation, we received funding to finance a sensory analysis at Kristianstad University, which gave us a good basis for how to further develop the flavours and aromas."
How would you describe the taste?
"Complex! Like an explosion of aromas and flavours with several different shades of bitterness and a touch of sweetness. In the 18th century, it was sold in small bottles and was to be taken as drops in small quantities, for example in tea or brandy. Drinking it straight is very bitter. Our Hjärnes Testament is pre-mixed in alcohol and has no medicinal properties.”
Facts
Hjärnes Testamente is produced by Antidotarium AB, founded in 2017 and operated by Nils-Otto Ahnfelt, Hjalmar Fors, and Calle Ljungström.
News
-
Mandelgren Prize to Michael Neiß
13 april 2017
Svenska fornminnesföreningen (the Antiquarian Society of Sweden) has decided to award PhD student and archaeologist Michael Neiß the 2017 Mandelgren Prize for his research on Scandinavian animal art.
-
Archaeologists at the vanguard of environmental and climate research
26 februari 2017
The history of people and landscapes, whether natural or cultural, is fundamentally connected. Answering key historical questions about this relation will allow us to approach our most important environmental issues in novel ways. Today in the ope...
-
New database of Swedish archaeological research in Greece
09 januari 2017
In a recently completed project at the Swedish Institute in Athens, materials from more than a hundred years of Swedish archaeological research in Greece has been made available through the database PRAGMATA. The database includes, among other thi...
-
Bokrelease - Vicke Lindstrand On The Periphery
18 november 2016
Den australiensiske designhistorikern Mark Ian Jones lanserar sin nya bok Vicke Lindstrand On The Periphery. Detta är den första engelskspråkiga publikationen som beskriver Vicke Lindstrands liv och verk.
-
Digitisation of cultural heritage discussed at AIMday
03 november 2016
Cultural heritage has become a field of great importance for the development of modern society. Modern technology creates new opportunities for communicating and presenting cultural heritage, as well as making it accessible. The potential and chal...
-
Archaeologist appointed new honorary doctor
05 oktober 2016
Archaeologist Jeremy B. Rutter, Professor Emeritus at Dartmouth College, USA, has been appointed a new honorary doctor at the Faculty of Arts.
-
SEK 5 million grant to art project
27 september 2016
The Swedish Research Council has selected seven art research projects to receive grants, out of a total of 51 applications. One of the grants is awarded to Katarina Pirak Sikku and the Uppsala University Centre for Gender Studies.
-
Augmented reality app presents Old Uppsala in a new way
24 augusti 2016
In Old Uppsala lie the remains of one of Scandinavia’s most fascinating royal estates from the Iron Age. Once there were numerous houses and other buildings here, which visitors up until now have had to imagine from sketches. A new app called ‘Aug...
-
Innovative games win prizes at the Swedish Game Awards
20 juni 2016
Game Design students from Uppsala University Campus Gotland won half of the prizes at the Swedish Game Awards on 11 June.
-
Major international meeting on cultural heritage held
16 april 2016
Uppsala University’s Vice-Chancellor Eva Åkesson and Professor of Building Conservation Tor Broström at Campus Gotland participated in a large international conference on cultural heritage and cultural preservation at Yale University in mid-April....
-
New book documents terrorism from Shakespeare's time
02 december 2015
There was no word for terrorism in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, but outbreaks of terrorist violence were frequent. In his new book on terrorism in history and literature, Uppsala University Professor of English Literature, Robert Appel...
-
Heléne Lööw to be awarded the Martin H:son Holmdahl Scholarship
10 november 2015
The Martin H:son Holmdahl Scholarship is Uppsala University’s most prestigious award for the furthering of human rights and liberty. This year, the award is being given to docent Heléne Lööw at the Department of History for her important contribut...
-
Faculty of Arts awards honorary doctorates
02 oktober 2015
Robert Darnton, Professor Emeritus and previously university librarian at Harvard, and Hiroshi Maruyama, Professor Emeritus of Sociology at Muroran Institute of Technology, Japan, have been made honorary doctors by the Faculty of Arts, Uppsala Uni...
-
Uppsala University recruits Professor Don Kulick
27 januari 2015
The internationally recognised anthropologist Professor Don Kulick is being recruited by Uppsala University. He will lead a broad, multidisciplinary research programme funded by the Swedish Research Council which will allow us to better understand...