The Apothecary’s Wife shows that medication in the West was not always a commodity, that is, something bought and sold with the purpose of making a profit. It became a commodity through deliberate decisions and actions by medical professionals during the so-called Scientific Revolution in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. I want readers to learn this important history. I also want readers to understand that medication therefore is not inevitably something available only to people who can afford it. It is and remains that way because of decisions being made every day. 

This is not the usual story of medicine or of science. The familiar story is explicitly about the triumph of science/medicine over superstition, and implicitly about the triumph of rational men over irrational women. The Apothecary’s Wife reveals that this narrative is fantasy, not reality. My book also disproves a few other pernicious myths.

First, Abandon Binaries All Ye Who Enter Here. Lived life and therefore history are more complicated than simple oppositions.

Science and domestic medicine were never irreconcilable. Women were involved in early science and men promoted domestic medicine.

In brief, history really goes like this. For centuries there was domestic medicine, a system in which women made and dispensed medications at home and for free. They grew medicinal plants in their gardens and foraged for them in the local area. Recipes that failed were immediately abandoned. Health was a community concern. Medical knowledge was meant to be shared, so women taught each other what was medicinal and how to process it. They kept recipe books for recording instructions for everything they made, medication as well as food. They wrote favorite recipes in each other’s books and passed those books down generations. Physicians and apothecaries, the professionals, made exactly the same medicines from exactly the same ingredients. They also had recipe books and medicinal gardens. However, they charged exorbitant fees and used drastic interventions like bloodletting and leeches that too often killed people. Their knowledge was restricted to men who got medical degrees or joined the apothecary’s guild. A very different system, in other words, based on very different values. 

The Apothecary’s Wife shows that starting in the seventeenth century, medical professionals used the Scientific Revolution to supplant women and domestic medicine. They created the system in place – with some variations – today around the world. They did not create better medication, however. Their drugs remained the same as women’s until the middle of the nineteenth century, long after the medical economy was established. Even though the professionals knew that poor people would be unable to access treatment in a profit-oriented health care system, they went ahead with the change anyway. They normalized the suffering and death of fellow human because medication was unaffordable. That is an economic issue, not a medicinal one: this book is not a diatribe against science.

More about the book here.

Ongoing thread. More from Karen Bloom Gevirtz to follow.