Professor Patrick Wallis
How did the movement of medical materials into Britain change over the premodern period? What were the consequences of these changes? This paper explores the connection between the remarkable growth of global trade in medicines in the sixteenth to eighteenth centuries and the parallel expansion of the consumption of medical care that occurred in Europe. England had a particular position in this trade, as we see when we compare developments in England and France, which had divergent positions in the trade in materia medica. Historians of trade have long recognised the importance of high value medical drugs, along with dyes and spices, as commodities that motivated early long-distance trade, just as historians of science have highlighted the interconnections of new things and developments in natural philosophy. However, the effects of the growth in drug trade flows on the scale and structure of medical consumption have not been recognised, in part because of the lack of good evidence on healthcare. The importation of foreign-produced drugs grew rapidly in the same period as the consumption of commercial medical services expanded and evolved into different structures. This was not coincidental. In medicine, the greater availability of drugs and the addition of (a few) newly discovered drugs to the pharmacopoeia accelerated the growth in consumption of local medical services. Novelty in medicines was not the key, however: changes in quantity had an impact on their own.
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Patrick Wallis is Professor of Economic History at the London School of Economics. He has worked extensively on the social and economic history of medicine from the sixteenth to the twentieth centuries, with a long-standing interest in early-modern apothecaries, as well as guilds, apprenticeship and other topics in economic and social history. His books include Apprenticeship in the Early Modern Europe (2019), Medicine and the Market in England and its Colonies, 1450-1850 (2007) and Quackery and Commerce in Seventeenth Century London (2005).