The Apothecary's Wife: The Hidden History of Medicine and How It Became a Commodity

(Hardback)

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How women were removed from the Scientific Revolution, and what we lost as a result. The running joke in Europe for centuries was that anyone in a hurry to die should call the doctor. As far back as ancient Greece, physicians were notorious for administering painful and often fatal treatments and charging for the privilege. For the most reliable, effective treatment, the ill and injured went to the women in their life. This system lasted hundreds of years and it took less than a century to replace. Between 1650 and 1740, physicians and apothecaries became the preferred providers to the hurt and sick, and womens domestic treatments were considered inferior. It was a brilliant campaign the effectiveness of medication and its ingredients had not changed but in the cultural consciousness, the domestic female and the physician had switched places: she the ineffective, potentially dangerous quack; he the knowledgeable, trustworthy expert. The Apothecarys Wife tells this other, overlooked story of medicine, that male professionals used the opportunity created by the Scientific Revolution to wrest control of medicine away from women. In doing so, they transformed domestic, organic medication and its communal methods and concepts into an economic system. Thoroughly researched and fiercely argued, Gevirtz shows how a great deal was lost in this moment in history, and explores how this inheritance underpins todays for-profit medication system, and the global healthcare crises we face.

Reviews

A rich and pacy narrative history setting out the position of women during the commodification of medicine. * Sara Read, author of The Gossips' Choice *
Trenchant, witty, and erudite, The Apothecarys Wife is a timely reminder that the profit-driven commodification of healthcare and medicine in our society is neither natural nor pre-ordained, but rather man-made. Gevirtzs book uncovers the largely forgotten domestic origins of those sciences, centering women in that history. Its a story everyone should know. * Jon Michaud, author of Last Call at Coogans: The Life and Death of a Neighborhood Bar *

Author Bio

Karen Bloom Gevirtz is Professor of English and former co-director of Women and Gender Studies, specializing in gender and the language of science, at Seton Hall University. Gevirtz earned a BA in English from Brown University, where she was also pre-med and a research assistant in a neurochemistry lab. She has a PhD in British Literature and was awarded a Fellowship to the Folger Shakespeare Library one of many funding awards she has received for her archival research. Internationally recognized for her scholarship on women and writing in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, she is the author of a number of academic articles and three academic books. Her work has also appeared in the HuffPost and the Wall Street Journal. She lives in New Jersey, USA.