The Hidden History of Medicine and How It Became a Commodity
Starred review from October 15, 2024
The profit in healing. Scholar of literature, gender studies, and medical humanities, Gevirtz brings a breadth of knowledge to her witty, deeply researched history of the commodification of health care and medicine. Drawing on abundant archival sources, including letters, diaries, herbals, sermons, advertisements, medical tracts, and a prolific number of recipe books, Gevirtz reveals that until the mid-17th century, ill people were treated at home with medications made in kitchens by a family member or friend. Recipes for elixirs, poultices, salves, and libations appeared in the same books as recipes for soups and stews and were handed down from woman to woman. The advent of the scientific revolution, however, wrested the production and administration of medicine from women. Physicians and apothecaries, which became "defined professions with guild status," competed for control of diagnosing illness and prescribing, making, and selling medications, united only in their determination to exclude women. What was once free was transformed into a product with monetary value; what was once freely shared was produced in secret factories. Even recipe books changed to contain apothecaries' or physicians' recipes, for which women sometimes had to pay. By the mid-18th century, women's housekeeping, gardening, and cookery books "had little or nothing to say about women's role as medicine makers." In recounting a century of tumultuous change, Gevirtz introduces a host of idiosyncratic characters: a man who concocted and fed viper wine to his wife; a naturalist eager to dissect a dead elephant delivered to his front lawn; a bold, self-promoting "medicatrix" trained by her physician father. All participated in the "shift in values [that] compromised medication's identity as a fundamental right of all human beings." As Gevirtz's well-populated narrative amply shows, seeking profits from treating ailing patients did not begin with big pharma. A lively medical, scientific, and economic history.
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