Pious Traders in Medicine: A German Pharmaceutical Network in Eighteenth-Century North America (review)

Renate Wilson. Pious Traders in Medicine: A German Pharmaceutical Network in Eighteenth-Century North America. University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2000. xiv + 258 pp. Ill. $37.50 (0-271-02052-0).

"Pious traders" may seem an oxymoronic expression, but Renate Wilson's study of the pharmaceutical "expedition" of the Francke Foundation rests on just that fusion of religion and commerce in eighteenth-century medicine. She takes what may seem a narrow focus on German Americans and opens it up, outlining the principles of a transatlantic sectarian medicine; sketching out the contours of a "Protestant International" held together over oceanic expanses by deep religious and philanthropic convictions; and demonstrating the falsity of facilely drawn dichotomies between secular and religious spheres, for "from 1720 to 1750, the Halle link between charity practice and clinical education was at the forefront of European reforms" (p. 65).

Wilson begins with the manufacture of pharmaceuticals (is this perhaps an anachronistic term?) at the Halle orphanage soon after the turn of the eighteenth century. The amazing complex of eleemosynary institutions created by the Pietist reformer August Hermann Francke embodied an ambitious program of educational, charitable, and medical services. The development of the essentia dulcis ("sweet essence")—a tincture of gold that purportedly served to strengthen and fortify—in 1702 started the ball rolling, and by the 1720s the Foundation was deeply involved in a highly profitable trade in "orphanage medications" that spanned the globe. The Foundation packaged selections of drugs as a "standard Halle commercial offering." In addition to the medicines themselves, purchasers received instructions in their uses. At the same time, the Halle medicines—like the similarly constructed Halle book trade—"formed an indispensable transfer mechanism for handling philanthropic finances . . . over the course of the eighteenth century" (p. 89).

From Halle, the medications journeyed across the Atlantic to German settlements in America. Pious Traders follows these voyages, and in so doing it greatly advances our understanding of an evolving Atlantic society, refines our perspectives on the rise of American medicine (as it slowly branched off from its European roots), and clarifies an often-blurry picture of transatlantic economics. Wilson's sensitive and thorough exploitation of the Halle business records allows her to reconstruct the mental, physical, and medical worlds of eighteenth-century German communities, revealing how German-settled areas "tended to look to German [health care] providers . . . to German self-help texts, and . . . [German] pharmaceuticals," thus documenting and explaining a "nascent regional and language-based medical market" (p. 107). Although Germans were relatively few in the early colonies (just 9 percent of the population in 1790), they often settled in fairly dense population aggregations—such as in Pennsylvania and Georgia—where they provided an excellent and reliable outlet for Halle pharmaceuticals.

On this market base, the Halle Foundation rather rapidly constructed a "transatlantic exchange" in medications, for no similar large-scale American pharmaceutical industry existed before the 1820s. All this trade had religious, "national" (in the sense of German), and philanthropic purposes, although it remained throughout a financial enterprise. The Francke Foundations were "heavily dependent on commercial incomes" (p. 130) and these mercantile relationships generated voluminous financial records. Wilson employs these to describe business transactions between the old world and the new, but—in a painstakingly thorough and also impressively imaginative use of sources—to address broader themes as well. The financial records (not by any means, however, Wilson's only texts) allow her to draw vivid pictures of a dynamic commerce flowing back and forth between Halle and the coast of America, and to delineate the rise of an American medical practice and the North American medical consumer. Unlike many scholars who scorn financial and economic records, Wilson revels in them and, as a result of her diligent labor, harvests rich interpretive and descriptive fruits from seemingly arid fields.

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