A01=Karen Bloom Gevirtz
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apothecary
Author_Karen Bloom Gevirtz
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big pharma
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Category=MBX
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Charles II
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Covid-19
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doctor
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medication
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physician
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Purdue
river fever
Royal Society
Sackler
Scientific Revolution
seventeenth century
smallpox
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thalidomide
vaccinations
women
Product details
- ISBN 9781803286990
- Dimensions: 153 x 234mm
- Publication Date: 07 Nov 2024
- Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing PLC
- Publication City/Country: GB
- Product Form: Hardback
- Language: English
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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, most recently at Seton Hall University. Gevirtz earned a BA in English at Brown University, where she was also pre-med and a research assistant in a neurochemistry lab. She has a PhD in British Literature and has received fellowships and grants for her archival research. Internationally recognized for her scholarship on women and writing in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, she has authored academic articles, chapters and several scholarly books, and co-edited a collection of essays. She lives in New Jersey, USA.
