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SUMMARY:How to rediscover a medical secret in eighteenth-century France: t
 he lost recipe of the Chevalier de Guiller's powder febrifuge - Justin Riv
 est (Faculty of History)
DTSTART:20180226T130000Z
DTEND:20180226T140000Z
UID:TALK98599@talks.cam.ac.uk
CONTACT:Sebestian Kroupa
DESCRIPTION:My talk will trace the fortunes of a single proprietary drug\,
  namely the _poudre fébrifuge_ of the Chevalier de Guiller\, a remedy for
  intermittent fevers which was granted a monopoly privilege by Louis XIV i
 n 1713. The drug was based on cheap\, locally-available plants\, but their
  exact identity as well as the processing techniques needed to transform t
 hem were lost to Guiller's heirs because he died in 1729 without revealing
  his secret. The next generation of would-be proprietary drug monopolists 
 were put in the position of needing to 'rediscover' the secret of the _pou
 dre fébrifuge_ in order to renew their royal monopoly privilege and to se
 cure a lucrative contract to supply it in bulk to the French army.\n\nBut 
 was the drug really the same? Drawing on surviving judicial records\, I wi
 ll explore the way in which trade secrecy could be a double-edged sword fo
 r early medical monopolists: it protected them from competitors and counte
 rfeiters but could also opened the possibility of breaks in transmission a
 cross generations. I will also use the case to pose questions about substi
 tution\, modification and counterfeiting in eighteenth-century pharmacy\, 
 and trace the ways in which information about a drug could sometimes prove
  to be inseparable from the embodied expertise of the actors who had produ
 ced it.
LOCATION:Seminar Room 1\, Department of History and Philosophy of Science
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