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By Root 1994 0

words, and discussed how to read nature's "alphabet." Experimenters should inaugurate an ambitious program of initiating their own kinds of mixture, he recommended. Salts were central to this program. Like Daniel Coxe, a fellow physician, Grew thought that many bodies contained a "Saline Principle" that could provide the key to the core processes of life and nature: solution, agitation, fermentation, putrefaction, and digestion. For instance, he suggested that the salt in seawater originated in rotting animal and vegetable bodies, salt from which was carried downstream in rivers.54 The proposal had a practical, ifvisionary, point. Grew forecast that experimenters armed with the knowledge his project would provide might eventually make "Artificial Bodies in Imitation of those of Natures own production." They could manufacture artificial smells and tastes, for example. If they could capture the saltlike nitre from the air, then they could also use it to "refrigerate Roosts" artificially. And above all, they could make medicines artificiallyand these would be trustworthy drugs, freed from the natural and human vagaries of spas and apothecaries.55 Here, finally, was a commercial possibility as great as that offered by seawater. Its founding knowledge and civility alike were to be those of the Society's experimental enterprise.

In this way did a program of experimental investigation inspired partly by a practical attempt to reduce seawater return to the same subject again, after passing through some of the most elemental questions facing seventeenth-century philosophers and physicians. This was how experimental philosophy was supposed to work-by the incorporation of such duels into a regime of reading, registration, and circulation. But by virtue of moving between the Society and other settings where invention and discovery might be adjudicated-the royal court, the naval shipyards, London's coffeehouses-the conflict over the salts ofWalcot, Fitzgerald, Boyle, and Grew would end up catalyzing a major change. It would not, however, be a realization of the ambition of the Royal Society to extend its civility over arts and manufactures. That project was never to succeed. Instead they would lead to a transformation in the commerce of medicine. They would inaugurate the age of pharmaceutical patenting.

The pirating of books causes anger, uncertainty and disquiet. But it does not generally produce real fear. There are other kinds of piracy that do. Before the industrial age, such fear was an everyday part of life. The question of credit in manufactured words-the question that catalyzed the coining of the termpiracy-was really only one aspect of a much broader anxiety about credit in manufactured things. People worried particularly about the kinds of things that they took into their bodies: foods, wines, and medicaments. Grocers who bulked up food with flour or vintners who adulterated wine were jailed or locked in the stocks by theirpeers for public humiliation.' But it was medicaments that aroused particular concern. Anxiety about adulterated or forged medicines was endemic and well founded. In focusing on salts-which were key medicinal substancesthe Royal Society was therefore venturing into one of the most contentious and consequential areas of early modern life. This chapter considers why that anxiety about medicines arose, and what was done to address it. Its topic is a phenomenon that came to be calledpharmaceuticalpiracy -its nature, the countermeasures it inspired, and the legacies of both.

There are urgent twenty-first-century reasons, as well as historical ones, for focusing on medicine at this point. Angry feuds over property and piracy permeate today's culture, but they flare up with especial frequency and passion in the field of biomedicine. The pharmaceutical industry decries attempts to reduce the reach of its patents, while its critics assert that those very patents often represent an "intellectual land grab."At the same time, counterfeit pharmaceuticals circulate with dismaying ease in the developing world, and