The Apothecary's Wife

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 effective treatment, the ill and injured went to the women in their lives. This system lasted hundreds of years. It was gone in less than a century.
Contrary to the familiar story, medication did not improve during the Scientific Revolution. Yet somehow, between 1650 and 1740, the domestic female and the physician switched places in the cultural consciousness: she became the ineffective, potentially dangerous quack, he the knowledgeable, trustworthy expert. The professionals normalized the idea of paying them for what people already got at home without charge, laying the foundation for Big Pharma and today's global for-profit medication system.
A revelatory history of medicine, The Apothecary's Wife challenges the myths of the triumph of science and instead uncovers the fascinating truth. Drawing on a vast body of archival material, Karen Bloom Gevirtz depicts the extraordinary cast of characters who brought about this transformation. She also explores domestic medicine's values in responses to modern health crises, such as the eradication of smallpox, and what benefits we can learn from these events.

Karen Bloom Gevirtz spent nearly three decades as a professor of English at American universities before becoming an independent scholar. She also taught in Women's and Gender Studies programs, as well as the Medical Humanities program at Seton Hall University, where she developed courses connecting the sciences and humanities. Gevirtz earned a BA in English at Brown University while also taking pre-med courses and working as a research assistant in a neurochemistry lab. She has a PhD in British Literature from Emory University, where her dissertation was a finalist for the Lore Metzger Prize. Internationally recognized for her scholarship on women and writing in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, she has received research fellowships and grants from organizations including the Folger Shakespeare Library, Chawton House Library, and the Institute for Advanced Studies at Loughborough University. Gevirtz has authored academic articles, chapters and three scholarly books, and co-edited a collection of essays. The Apothecary's Wife: The Hidden History of Medicine and How It Became a Commodity is her first book for a non-academic audience. She lives in New Jersey, USA.