Reviews of Books

Reviewed by Aaron Fogleman, University of South Alabama

Two centuries before Bayer and Nestlé were shipping aspirin and infant formula around the globe, European drug makers were engaged in an active pharmaceuticals trade with German-speaking people throughout the Atlantic world. Such remedies as essentia dulcis for the relief of ailments of the nervous system and a wide variety of other problems were valuable cargo, along with books, textiles, and other finished goods, on ships sailing from the Old World to the New, and they made their way to German settlers from New York to Georgia and through Dutch connections to the West Indies. The leading supplier of these pharmaceuticals was a philanthropic organization, the Lutheran Francke foundation in the German city of Halle. At this center of Pietism, the foundation ran a large charitable and educational establishment, famous throughout Europe, that took in orphans and others and trained them to be teachers, doctors, druggists, printers, pastors, and missionaries. The production and sale of pharmaceuticals—an enterprise that flourished in this university town with its medical faculty—helped to finance this philanthropy. The drug trade was a small but vital element in the transatlantic economy of the eighteenth century, and it played a unheralded role in the recreation of German Pietist culture in the Americas.

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Renate Wilson's Pious Traders in Medicine documents the conduct of the transatlantic trade in pharmaceuticals and the development of a distinct medical market and culture in the German Lutheran and Reformed communities of British North America and the United States roughly from 1700 to 1810. Wilson, a social and medical historian, who trained in German area studies and who teaches at Johns Hopkins University's School of Hygiene and Public Health, canvasses a wide range of sources, including the journals of Lutheran Pietist pastors from Pennsylvania to Georgia, correspondence between those pastors and the Francke Foundation, and contemporary newspapers, periodicals, and medical texts. From her survey emerges the first clear picture of this far-flung commerce: the leading participants, notably, the pastors; the medicines and manuals they purveyed; the means of distribution; the social and geographical networks through which goods moved. Wilson describes the formation of Pietist networks in North America, the appeal of "medical ministers" to German immigrants in the colonies, and the adaptation of European practices to the informal, more egalitarian medical environment of the New World. The result of this effort, Wilson maintains, was a specifically German medical culture and market in the British colonies, whose existence offers a fresh view of the interconnected medical, business, and religious history of the transatlantic world of the eighteenth century.

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