Abstract

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 in 1713. The drug was based on cheap, locally-available plants, but their exact identity as well as the processing techniques needed to transform them 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 poudre fébrifuge in order to renew their royal monopoly privilege and to secure a lucrative contract to supply it in bulk to the French army.

But was the drug really the same? Drawing on surviving judicial records, I will explore the way in which trade secrecy could be a double-edged sword for early medical monopolists: it protected them from competitors and counterfeiters but could also opened the possibility of breaks in transmission across generations. I will also use the case to pose questions about substitution, 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 produced it.