Merchants of Medicines: The Commerce and Coercion of Health in Britain's Long Eighteenth Century by Zachary Dorner

Abstract

Reviewed by: Merchants of Medicines: The Commerce and Coercion of Health in Britain's Long Eighteenth Century by Zachary Dorner Justin Rivest Merchants of Medicines: The Commerce and Coercion of Health in Britain's Long Eighteenth Century. By Zachary Dorner. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2020. 269 pages. Cloth, ebook, pdf. Zachary Dorner's Merchants of Medicines: The Commerce and Coercion of Health in Britain's Long Eighteenth Century should find a wide readership in a variety of historical subfields, from the history of medicine and pharmacy to the history of the British Atlantic world, as well as the history of capitalism and the eighteenth-century consumer revolution. Dorner offers an enlightening portrait of the connections among empire, capitalism, and medicine, subjects long understood to be deeply interwoven but that have only recently begun to attract detailed archival work that demonstrates the precise mechanics of their interdependence. Where many historians of medicine focus on the production of medical knowledge or the patient-healer encounter, Dorner's gaze is squarely focused on commerce; medicine serves the needs of business in his story, but it also emerges forcefully as a business itself.1 His work is at its most provocative when he suggests that this commerce came to shape the content and popular expectations of medicine, gearing it toward expedient use-this-for-that solutions and positing a standardization of human bodies through commercial and imperial needs. Merchants of Medicines deepens our appreciation of the early modern medical marketplace by adding a new set of consumers often overlooked in accounts that emphasize patient agency in a variegated, largely urban and European marketplace of medical pluralism.2 To the colorful crew of learned physicians, barber-surgeons, itinerant operators, bonesetters, tooth drawers, and midwives familiar to historians from the work of Roy Porter, Harold J. Cook, Margaret Pelling, Gianna Pomata, David Gentilcore, and others, Dorner adds protoindustrial apothecaries and chemists serving the new health care demands of an expanding British Empire.3 Far from the [End Page 398] (sometimes naively) empowered "patient's view" of 1990s historiography—which aimed to write the history of medicine "from below" by emphasizing the agency of patients as medical consumers in a diverse medical marketplace—Dorner focuses on "involuntary consumers" (10), namely, slaves, soldiers, sailors, and laborers for trading companies. For these people, commerce was intermingled with coercion and, as the end consumer of medicine, they were not always the decision maker addressing their health problems. Dorner's interest in commerce allows him to pose novel questions and to interrogate untapped sources that have eluded the gaze of many historians of medicine. In chapter 1, for instance, he makes ingenious use of fire insurance records to track the growth of London's protoindustrial pharmaceuticals industry. He explores the private ventures of the London-based Quaker apothecary Thomas Corbyn and his partners in bulk pharmaceutical production and long-distance trade, as well as the collective experiment of London's Worshipful Society of Apothecaries in creating a joint-stock company to manage a large-scale chemical laboratory that could serve their wholesaling needs. Well in keeping with the binary of a more freewheeling English capitalism, as compared to the more regulatory and state-driven innovation of continental Europe, Dorner emphasizes London's comparative lack of formal medical regulation as a source of invention. In chapter 2, Dorner explores how London-based merchants extended their networks outward. Here again he uses novel sources, namely customs records and mercantile correspondence, to detail "the management of information as a business technology" (48) via epistolary networks. He explores the "distinct calculations of risk versus reward" (47) that merchants of medicines engaged in, how they addressed concerns of quality and perishability, and how they requested character references and credit checks, all of which lead Dorner to conclude that "credit, in all its forms, proved essential to the distribution of healthcare" (69). For this reason, he places medicine into the ongoing scholarly discussion of eighteenth-century credit cultures, itself a valuable contribution that could fruitfully connect the (as-of-yet) disparate discussions of the role of credit in the history of science with parallel discussions in economic and political history.4 Dorner's core...