He applied the “Page 99 Test” to his new book, Merchants of Medicines: The Commerce and Coercion of Health in Britain’s Long Eighteenth Century, and reported the following:
Page 99 of Merchants of Medicines comes at an important point in chapter three where I reinforce the argument, made earlier in the chapter, that imperial institutions incentivized the transformation of mobile populations of unfree laborers (namely soldiers, slaves, and servants) into patients who could be treated, willingly or unwillingly, with manufactured medicines. More specifically, page 99 details the complexity of healthcare in the eighteenth-century Caribbean where local and imported medicinal products coexisted in an iterative marketplace of treatment options closely tied to the transatlantic sugar economy.Visit Zachary Dorner's website.
Take the following quotations as examples:Merchants of medicines provided treatments theoretically convenient and useful for disparate populations of willing or unwilling patients, but actual application varied according to the hierarchies of race and gender that structured eighteenth-century slave societies and often remain concealed in the business archive. Such records rarely capture the daily intricacies of healthcare in the plantations, households, and urban areas of the West Indies. Merchants, apothecaries, and practitioners sold local medicines and imported ones prepared in Britain, often in large quantities, for a variety of purposes…Browsers opening Merchants of Medicines to page 99 would find the book’s themes of medicine, capitalism, difference-making, and empire, as well as its approach to business records well-represented on the page. What the test would fail to entirely convey, however, is the book’s broad scope spanning South Asia, Europe, Africa, and the Atlantic colonies in tracing the production, distribution, and consumption of medicinal commodities. Page 99 comes at a point in chapter three where I focus on the impact of an imperial system of healthcare in the Caribbean and the consequences for emergent ideas of inherent bodily difference. As a result, the book’s attention to distance, motion, and transformation embodied in European laboratories, long-distance trade, trading companies, and colonial wars can only be glimpsed on the page in favor of the ongoing deeper dive into the complexities of death and dying in the Caribbean. Readers will be able to follow analytical threads established elsewhere, but a browser would not necessarily have all the context required to see the themes and arguments reflected on the page.
…Therapeutic practices of folk healers and nurses most likely surpassed other forms of plantation healthcare in effectiveness, though this did not prevent practitioners, planters, manufacturers, and authors from recommending British medicines in large quantities as part of the plantation health regime. If a planter was willing to pay for imported medicines, little incentive existed for practitioners to curtail their ordering, even if enslaved people refused them.
As I noted above, chapter three really is a crucial chapter for Merchants of Medicines. Analytically, it elaborates on key arguments and, narratively, it transitions the book to focus more on non-European spaces moving forward. It shows that imperial institutions, such as the slave trade, East India Company, and armed forces drove the overseas medicine trade, a trade that was increasing exponentially by the mid-eighteenth century. The Atlantic colonies, and Caribbean specifically, were the engine of this growth. The needs and proceeds of a large-scale sugar economy drove the trade in medicines seen as useful in plantation management and middle passage. Consequences of this growth included: turning people into interchangeable patients, closer ties between London apothecaries and Caribbean planters, and new expectations of what medicines could and should do.
Though perhaps not directly, page 99 reflects that Merchants of Medicines is a history of medicine, of commerce, and of empire, concerned with how the long-distance trade of medicinal commodities affected not only the form of early modern empire but also people’s understandings of self and the world around them.
--Marshal Zeringue
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