Unnamed, not unskilled: Toward a new labor history of pharmacy

Abstract

By recovering the dependent, often enslaved, laborers who helped to make European medicines commercially available in the New England colonies, this article offers a new history of early American pharmaceutical knowledge and production. It does so by considering the life and labor of an unnamed, enslaved assistant who was said to make tinctures, elixirs, and other common remedies in a 1758 letter between two business partners, Silvester Gardiner, a successful surgeon and apothecary in Boston, Massachusetts, and William Jepson, his former apprentice, in Hartford, Connecticut. Using strategies from slavery and critical archive studies, as well as from social history and the history of medicine, this article emphasizes the materiality and embodiment of pharmaceutical production and follows fragmentary evidence beyond the business archive to reverse the systemic erasure of enslaved and indentured laborers from the records of eighteenth-century manufacturers of medicines. The medicine trades of men like Gardiner and Jepson appear more reliant upon dependent laborers – named and unnamed – who not only performed rote tasks but brought their experience and judgment to their labors as well. Their contributions could be obviously medical (preparing remedies) or more ambiguous (stoking fires, shipping goods), but these actions together constituted early modern pharmacy, enabled the expansion of the transatlantic medicine trade, and laid the foundations for the more self-sufficient and industrialized pharmacy that developed in the nineteenth century. Centering the skill and knowledge among subordinated laborers in one facet of an emergent transatlantic care economy affirms the entanglement of slavery and science and underscores the necessity of asking new questions of old sources.