From healing to healthcare: How my interest in witchcraft in colonial India paved the way for a research project on pharmacological prospecting and patents

It was at a conference dinner in Rome in November 2022 that I quite surreptitiously stumbled upon the idea for a postdoctoral project. It had been two years since I had successfully defended a doctoral thesis which had looked at the literary evolution of the figure generally known as the Fairy King (or perhaps as Oberon, especially for those fed on a diet of Shakespeare and Anglophone literature), and although I had had vague ideas about how to continue the project, the pressures of a global...