Merchants of Medicines: The Commerce and Coercion of Health in Britain's Long Eighteenth Century by Zachary Dorner

Abstract

Zachary Dorner’s Merchants of Medicines: The Commerce and Coercion of Health in Britain’s Long Eighteenth Century should find a wide readership in a variety of historical subfields, from the history of medicine and pharmacy to the history of the British Atlantic world, as well as the history of capitalism and the eighteenth-century consumer revolution. Dorner offers an enlightening portrait of the connections among empire, capitalism, and medicine, subjects long understood to be deeply interwoven but that have only recently begun to attract detailed archival work that demonstrates the precise mechanics of their interdependence. Where many historians of medicine focus on the production of medical knowledge or the patient-healer encounter, Dorner’s gaze is squarely focused on commerce; medicine serves the needs of business in his story, but it also emerges forcefully as a business itself.1 His work is at its most provocative when he suggests that this commerce came to shape the content and popular expectations of medicine, gearing it toward expedient use-this-for-that solutions and positing a standardization of human bodies through commercial and imperial needs. Merchants of Medicines deepens our appreciation of the early modern medical marketplace by adding a new set of consumers often overlooked in accounts that emphasize patient agency in a variegated, largely urban and European marketplace of medical pluralism.2 To the colorful crew of learned physicians, barber-surgeons, itinerant operators, bonesetters, tooth drawers, and midwives familiar to historians from the work of Roy Porter, Harold J. Cook, Margaret Pelling, Gianna Pomata, David Gentilcore, and others, Dorner adds protoindustrial apothecaries and chemists serving the new health care demands of an expanding British Empire.3 Far from the