Karen Bloom Gevirtz's "The Apothecary's Wife"

Karen Bloom Gevirtz spent nearly three decades as a professor of English at American universities while also specializing in gender studies and medical humanities.

Her new book, The Apothecary's Wife: The Hidden History of Medicine and How It Became a Commodity, is one of Kirkus Review's Best Nonfiction Books of 2024.

Gevirtz applied the "Page 99 Test" to The Apothecary's Wife and reported the following:

Page 99 is the end of a chapter, and reads, “and medication between 1650 and 1740. Had the Digbys lived a century later, Kenelm would have had to become an expert in chicken soup, not viper wine, if he wanted to take care of his beloved Venetia.”

The Page 99 Test works quite well for my book, despite the fact that page 99 has only 37 words.

Each chapter centers on two remarkable figures, and on page 99 the browser encounters that device in the form of Kenelm and Venetia Digby. The passage includes a somewhat repulsive medication from the period (viper wine) and what it was used for (helping an ailing person), titillating information that appears throughout. Browsers also encounter the book’s approachable, occasionally wry or humorous voice, especially in the chicken soup line.

Unfortunately, while three central elements do appear on page 99 – that medication is important to the book, that medication changed over time, and that the period of change is 1650-1740 – each element is mentioned so briefly that a browser probably won’t get a sense of what the book is about. Reading page 98 or 100 would reveal properly that The Apothecary’s Wife is about the transition from domestic medicine made and administered at home by women to commercial medication made and sold in shops by men. It explains how the Scientific Revolution provided an opportunity for professionals to take over medication, and how they converted it from household goods like peach preserves and soap into something exchanged for money, that is, how the foundations of Big Pharma and today’s for-profit medication system were laid. Why did people stop getting medication for free, at home, from a trusted member of the family who made it from known ingredients combined in a time-tested recipe and start paying a stranger medication for medication made in secret from mystery ingredients? It wasn’t that the stranger’s medication was better, because it wasn’t, but a reader will not get that from page 99, alas.

Visit Karen Bloom Gevirtz's website.

--Marshal Zeringue