Arzneimittelversorgung im 18 Jahrhundert: Die Stadt Braunschweig und die ländlichen Distrikte im Herzogtum Braunschweig-Wolfenbüttel (review)

Gabriele Beisswanger. Arzneimittelversorgung im 18 Jahrhundert: Die Stadt Braunschweig und die ländlichen Distrikte im Herzogtum Braunschweig-Wolfenbüttel. Braunschweiger Veröffentlichungen zur Geschichte der Pharmazie und Naturwissenschaften, no. 36. Stuttgart: Deutscher Apotheker Verlag, 1996. 296 pp. Tables, graphs. DM 40.00 (paperbound).

Apothecaries, like physicians, were at the core of the medical corporate structure of the early modern period. The wave of structural reforms of medical care that are a hallmark of the eighteenth century in continental Europe attempted to streamline the functions of apothecaries and integrate them into the growing system of territorial central control and regulation. Throughout, however, apothecaries had many competitors who provided the population with drugs, and governmental or corporate attempts to secure a monopoly of drug manufacture and sales--whether for reasons of safety or of profit--are part and parcel of the mercantilist era. We owe to this tug-of-war rich documentation in municipal and territorial archives throughout Europe, and Gabriele Beisswanger, in this monograph, mines the extensive materials illustrating the path of pharmaceutical reforms in the duchy of Braunschweig-Wolfenbüttel.

The territory was a relatively small but progressive German state whose ruler planned and enforced, with some success, what may be called an early form of state monopoly over drug manufacture, the purchase of supplies en gros and for retail, and the channels of distribution. A latecomer in the compilation of its own pharmacopoeia, Braunschweig-Wolfenbüttel was exceptional in setting up not just supervisory and regulatory mechanisms: it established its own central chemical laboratory, and an independent supply house intended to ensure economic efficiency and safeguard quality. However, it seems that this early attempt at state rather than corporate monopoly was not an unqualified financial success, for it lasted no more than twenty years, from roughly 1750 to 1770. Neither apothecaries nor the public seem to have considered the laboratory's generic drugs to be of better quality or available at a better price than those obtained from conventional sources. Apothecaries in particular seem to have resented losing their manufacturing privileges and being turned into sales agents.

Making good use of the richness of her sources, Beisswanger (herself a pharmacist) offers an extremely detailed and comprehensive account of the supply of drugs to the population in both urban and rural areas through licensed pharmacies, dry goods merchants, and itinerants. She sets pharmaceutical practice and reform in the context of population density; ratios of providers to population; catchment areas; the sources of raw materials, both within the duchy and, more frequently, at the various German and Dutch fairs; competition from local healers and itinerant peddlers of arcana and Oleitäten; and proprietary medications from places like the Halle Orphanage manufacture. To the historian of medicine and medical care interested in the evolution of public health mechanisms, professional hierarchies, and the clear divergence of professional and commercial interests between physicians and apothecaries, her survey of legislation and regulatory developments from 1721 to the end of the century offers much comparative material. She pays equal and balanced attention to physicians, apothecaries, surgeons and barber surgeons, and midwives, on the one hand, and to traditional sellers of drugs who were being pushed to the margin, on the other hand. Of particular interest is the persistent urban-rural difference in pharmaceutical supply and demand: deprivatization extended only to the larger pharmacies in the city of Braunswchweig and central areas, with remote rural areas apparently undersupplied until well into the nineteenth century.

Beisswanger's attempt to include consumer preferences and a larger view of the medical market is most successful in an extensive set of commercial data in the appendix. These are drawn largely from the annual pharmaceutical inventory forms demanded from the state-controlled pharmacies and from dry goods merchants permitted to carry some materia medica. Summarized by class of...