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By Root 2022 0

of medicaments was a familiar one. Ancient medical writers had cautioned repeatedly about the need to approach medical substances with suspicion.38 But as pharmaceuticals became a central element in a nascent consumer society in the seventeenth century, so their credibility had become a newly pressing issue. Adulterating drugs, or "pharmaceutical piracy" (pirateri.e phariniaceiitigiie) as one French investigator called it, proved a boomingbusiness.39 When a vessel arrived at the port of Marseille laden with medicaments, its cargo could be expected to multiply threefold in weight by the time it left the city. Londonwas no better. The hub ofa pharmaceutical trade extending across the Atlantic and beyond, London furnished huge temptations to dilute, reconstitute, or downright fabricate. Thomas Corbyn, an eighteenthcentury druggist with a prosperous business, remarked that he could have made "ioo% profitt" by practicing adulteration.40 Drugs were certainly "pirated" in such ways at least as rampantly as books, and probably far more so.

Yet Corbyn, for one, maintained that he declined the opportunity for a windfall. He realized that lasting security rested on his creating and maintaining a reputation for quality. Makers like him were increasingly conscious that they were selling more than substances alone. This awareness was in all probability sharpened by the ubiquity of fraud. The rampancy of drug piracy-like that of print piracy-actually seems to have created an opportunity for some operators to set themselves apart from and above the herd. They sought to distinguish themselves by ostentatiously not indulging in adulteration or counterfeiting. In a marketplace riven with justified skepticism, theyprofited by making themselves founts of assurance. They sold credibility.

As that implies, drug adulteration affected what might be called the epistemology of pharmacy. As a patient or as a physician, how did you know what a medicine contained, or that it worked? How did you know that you knew? These doubts mattered for more than therapeutic reasons. "Chymical" physicians demanded that their new remedies be adopted, and to bolster their case they challenged Galenists to put them to the test empirically. Grew's own salt was publicly associated with this empirical challenge.41 Yet their call seemed to go largely unmet. This was not necessarily unreasonable. After all, in Galenic terms it made little sense, because illnesses depended on individual constitutions, so the idea of a single substance having a determinate effect across many patients was intrinsically implausible. Chymical physicians dismissed this kind of reasoning as specious. But they had a much harder time resisting an argument from the nature of medicaments themselves. If adulteration were as real and as commonplace as all knowledgeable writers reported it to be-and if drugs were perishable, to boot- then substances themselves varied unpredictably and undetectably. It was therefore genuinely unclear whether an empirical trial could yield any result reliable enough to be deemed knowledge.42

So adulteration was deeply involved in the contest for authority in early modern medicine, and at the same time the greatest contemporary controversy about cures themselves could not be resolved until it was dealt with. Print seemed to offer a partial solution. Pharmacopoeias held up the possibility of disciplining things by words.43 They were meant to render drugs' identities regular and predictable, irrespective of the particular shop out of which a given dose came. The standardization offered by the printing house would thus produce standardization in the apothecary's workshop. London's physicians produced the world's first national pharmacopoeia, in 1618. Yet the same problems turned out to apply to pharmacopoeias as applied to all other printed books. The London pharmacopoeia itself had to be swiftly withdrawn and reissued, the College explaining embarrassedly that "the printer snatched away from our hands this little work not yet finished." It was then famously expropriated