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February 20, 2025
2025 Kremers Award Lecture hosted by the American Institute of the History of Pharmacy (AIHP)
How Empire Turned People into Patients
Thursday, February 20th
12:00 (noon) CST
Guest lecturer:
Dr. Zachary Dorner
University of Maryland, College Park
The period from the late seventeenth to the early nineteenth century—the so-called long eighteenth century of British history—was a time of profound global change, marked by the expansion of intercontinental empires, long-distance trade, and human enslavement. It was also the moment when medicines, previously produced locally and in small batches, became global products. As greater numbers of British subjects struggled to survive overseas, more medicines than ever were manufactured and exported to help them. Most historical accounts, however, obscure the medicine trade’s dependence on coerced labor, plantation agriculture, and colonial warfare that underwrote this change.
In Merchants of Medicines, Zachary Dorner follows the earliest industrial pharmaceuticals from their manufacture in the United Kingdom, across trade routes, and to the edges of empire, telling a story of what medicines were, what they did, and what they meant. He brings to life business, medical, and government records to evoke a vibrant early modern world of London laboratories, Caribbean estates, South Asian factories, New England timber camps, and ships at sea. In these settings, medicines were produced, distributed, and consumed in new ways to help confront challenges of distance, labor, and authority in colonial territories. These experiences helped reconceptualize people whose health had once been understood individualistically into interchangeable patients and provided evidence for emergent ideas of racial difference.
Sickness and commerce are ubiquitous presences in our lives, intimately tied to our perceptions of ourselves and the world around us, yet they remain subject to material power outside our control. It feels urgent now, as it always has been, to identify the extent to which such abstraction has shaped our expectations of our own bodies and the bodies of those around us.
This event is open to the public; please register to attend.
The talk will be recorded and placed on AIHP's public YouTube Channel.
