Show Notes
How did medicine become something we buy? And what happened to the women who had provided much of our everyday healthcare for centuries?
In this episode of The Scholar’s Armchair, I speak with Karen Bloom Gevirtz about her fascinating book The Apothecary’s Wife: The Hidden History of Medicine and How It Became a Commodity.
We tend to think of the history of modern medicine as a straightforward story of progress: science replaced superstition, and trained medical professionals replaced unreliable folk remedies. But Gevirtz tells a much more complicated story.
For centuries, women were responsible for much of the everyday medical care within households and communities. They grew and gathered ingredients, prepared medicines, kept recipe books and shared remedies with one another. During the Scientific Revolution, however, medicine increasingly moved out of the home and into the hands of predominantly male professionals. At the same time, something that had largely been shared within families and communities became something that people were expected to buy.
We discuss how and why this transformation happened, the relationship between the Scientific Revolution and the commercialisation of medicine, the disappearance of women’s medical authority, and the rise of the prescription system.
And we ask what this history can tell us about medicine today. What happens when medical knowledge becomes a commodity? How have assumptions about gender shaped medical research and treatment? And can we celebrate the extraordinary achievements of modern medicine while also asking what may have been lost along the way?
Karen Bloom Gevirtz is an independent scholar specialising in early British literature and the history of science and medicine.
LINKS
📖 The Apothecary’s Wife — University of California Press: https://www.ucpress.edu/books/the-apothecarys-wife/hardcover
🌐 Karen Bloom Gevirtz: https://www.karenbloomgevirtz.com/
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