Secret Remedies and the Medical Needs of the French State: The Career of Adrien Helvétius, 1662–1727

Abstract

This article explores the relation between proprietary drugs and state interests in early modern France by following the career of the medical entrepreneur Adrien Helvétius (1662–1727). Helvétius began as a private practitioner, but his successful remedy against dysentery and his access to the world of the French court enabled him to become a pharmaceutical monopolist and large-scale pharmaceutical contractor supplying the French army, and later, state-funded poor relief efforts. Rather than seeing his distribution system as an instance of proto-public health or a simple case of military “spinoff” into civilian medicine, I argue that his various roles are an outgrowth of “court capitalism” and that he tapped into existing infrastructures of military and charitable care to find a new market for his drugs. In this view, the state emerges as a bulk consumer purchasing drugs from a private entrepreneur, distributing them to civilian and military populations that do not have access to the urban medical marketplace.