An Origin Story for “Big Pharma” in the Reign of Louis XIV? An Early Modern History for the Present

Abstract

Presentation slides for lecture delivered by Justin Rivest, PhD (Assistant Professor of History, Kenyon College) on April 5, 2024. This talk poses a fertile, if playfully anachronistic, historical question: In the final two decades of his seventy-two-year reign, did Louis XIV (r. 1643-1715) subsidize the world’s first “Big Pharma” companies into existence? From the 1680s onward the Sun King granted monopoly rights and government supply contracts, first to the court physician Jean-Baptiste Chomel, and then to the Dutch-born medical entrepreneur Adriaan Engelhard Helvetius (naturalized French as Adrien Helvétius). Both men developed proto-industrial operations that annually shipped tens of thousands of standardized medicine chests all over France and beyond. Building on relationships forged in supplying medicines to the French army, Rivest argues that they took advantage of supply problems in existing Catholic poor relief networks to provide their standardized medicines to the largest possible purchaser—the French absolutist state—and the largest possible consumer base—the peasants of rural France. Although grounded in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, this talk raises questions about the connections between charity and capitalism; the role of private entrepreneurs in fulfilling the state objectives; and about how the state shapes markets as a consumer, rather than just as a regulator, that continue to have resonance in the twenty-first century.

Presentation recording available online: https://purl.dlib.indiana.edu/iudl/media/q47r66rn7r