This paper explores the entanglement of scholarship, commerce, and leisure that accompanied the spread of scientific literature throughout the seventeenth century in France by focusing on the popular treatise of drugs printed in 1694 by a Parisian grocer-druggist.
By uncovering the epistemological strategies, the materials, and the individuals involved in the making of Pierre Pomet’s "Histoire Géneral des Drogues", this study argues that by 1700 drugs became a contested field of expertise and a subject of interest to a wider and more heterogenic public. Encouraged by different factors, traders, travellers, curiosi, educated women, artisans, courtiers and civil servants joined physicians, apothecaries, and naturalists in furthering their understanding about newly discovered simples and how they compared to well-known products provided by indigenous specimens.
The economic, intellectual and epistemic importance that simples acquired throughout this period was reflected in and affected by the publication of an increasing number of medical books, pharmacopeia and botanical treatises. Each publication contributed to shaping local consumption and fostering the commodification of drugs in its own way. The "Histoire Géneral des Drogues" showcases the importance of the market to scientific knowledge and vice-versa while illustrating the centrality of print in providing non-educated individuals such as Pomet an active and direct participation in the production, circulation and use of scientific knowledge –natural history and medicine in particular.
