The Apothecary's Wife

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 lives. 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 women’s 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 Apothecary’s 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 today’s for-profit medication system, and the global healthcare crises we face.