Piracy_ The Intellectual Property Wars from Gutenberg to Gates - Adrian Johns [50]
Contemporaries of Newton and Hooke saw the issue of counterfeit drugs in their own day as one of deadly seriousness, and as related in essential ways to the problematic constitution of a commercial society Practitioners of all kinds-to say nothing of their patients-confronted real crises of authenticity in medicines, and worked hard to address them. The methods they recommended had much in common with techniques that we have already seen being developed in the realms of print and natural philosophy, and reflected contemporary understandings of commerce and interest. But for laypeople they were much more immediately important. False books could lead you astray, and illegitimate patents could ruin you, but fake medicines could kill you. Partly for that reason, the struggle for authenticity could never be declared won. When today's authorities warn of the dangers of counterfeit and pirated drugs, they are ringing alarms that were sounded in Newton's day. A response, then as now, required addressing the very nature of the commercial world.
Both books and medicines emerged from artisanal crafts organized in broadly similar ways, with apprenticeship systems, ritual calendars, inspection regimes, and the like. Early moderns were therefore quite accustomed to thinking of the problems theyposed in parallel. Apothecaries and authors were often portrayed as broadly similar.' But in reality the relationwas even closer than that. Medicines andbooks -or, more specifically, newspapers-shared some of the same physical spaces. Bookshops often sold medicines. Printers secured their livelihoods by advertising medicines, and many ran workshops to prepare them. In eighteenthcentury England, the printer John Newbery marketed an elixir of his own, the principal ingredient of which seems to have been boiled dog. His counterpart William Rayner's newspapers depended on advertisements for a "pectoral tincture" that could be purchased from his own house. Rayner created what he called an "Elixir Warehouse" near St. George's Church in Southwark, whence he sold what he claimed to be Dr. Stoughton's elixir (but could this notorious press pirate be relied upon to hawk the real thing?). Other printers-in Dublin, for example-maintained their own rival elixir warehouses. This kind of alliance could be found in many cities across Europe, and, as the century wore on, in America too. Physicians told each other that if they want to market a new drug then they ought to go to the booksellers to do it.3 It all meant that the connection between credit in medicine and in print was not just figurative. The conjunction of media and medica, as it were, was mundane and practical. And when the authenticity of medicines was called into question, the same people and the same places were implicated as those involved in issues of print piracy. It was from this conjunction that pharmaceutical patenting emerged. It did so partly as a mechanism to secure not property, but authenticity.
THE PIRACY OF WORDS AND THINGS
As the seventeenth century drew to a close, Nehemiah Grew should have been a happy and wealthy man. A past secretary of the Royal Society, the compiler of the printed catalogue of its repository, and the author in his own right of a pioneering series of researches in natural history, Grewwas a successful physician and a respected naturalist. He owed his elevated position largely to the Society's patronage. But as 170 o approached, all this success was suddenly put at risk. Grew had become a victim of piracy.4
Grew's misfortune