Publishing Virtue
Publishing Virtue: Medical Entrepreneurship and Reputation in the Republic of Letters
E. C. Spary

Acknowledgements and funding

The help of colleagues and friends was invaluable in the preparation of this article. Particular gratitude goes to Justin Rivest, Research Associate on the Leverhulme-funded Simples project from 2014-2018: that shared voyage of discovery through print and manuscript has completely transformed our view of the medical world of early modern France. In particular, Justin’s assistance made it possible to access key legal documents on Grenier used in this article. Samir Boumediene, Brian Ogilvie, Georgiana Hedesan, Justin E. H. Smith, Anne Secord, Laia Portet, Shelley Innes, and Tillman Hennies have all offered vital input on different points, and Maria Ramandi expertly translated Leibniz’s Latin correspondence on ipecacuanha for me. For funding support, I am very grateful to both the Leverhulme Trust (Research Project Grant 2014-289, “Selling the Exotic”) and the Faculty of History, University of Cambridge.

Abstract
A frequently recounted episode in the history of early modern medicine concerns the physician Adrian Helvetius’s introduction of ipecacuanha to French medical practice in the late seventeenth century, following his successful cure of Louis XIV’s son of dysentery using this medicinal drug. Yet to this day, the Helvetius story remains riven with contradictions, obscurity and confusion, even down to the nature of the drug involved. This article, challenging histories of “information” as homogeneous and neutral, explores the crafting of Helvetius’s reputation as physician and pharmaceutical entrepreneur through print and correspondence. Rather than seeking to establish a definitive account of ‘what actually happened’, it addresses the ways in which different media shaped and mediated the politics of knowledge surrounding Helvetius and his drug. Considerations of intellectual and commercial property inflected medical knowledge in different ways, producing distinct strategies of publicity. While Helvetius capitalised on courtly connections to promote himself and his drug, rivals eyed the Republic of Letters as an alternate route for establishing natural knowledge-claims. Yet the arch-newsmonger of the Republic of Letters, Gottfried Wilhelm von Leibniz, elected to preserve the connection between Helvetius and ipecacuanha in print. I argue that Leibniz’s actions stemmed from a view of the public domain which downplayed discovery and emphasised the disclosure of medical secrets in the public interest.

Introduction

How did Europeans come to know about new drugs around 1700? How did they obtain them and evaluate their effects? Such questions remain only partly answered within the history of medicine. In recent writing, the movement of drugs between their places of origin and consumption has attracted extensive scholarly attention, embracing the transformations of meaning and practice such processes entailed.[footnoteRef:1] The immense complexity of making plant materials available to consumers thousands of miles away in European cities has been noted.[footnoteRef:2] But few studies have explored contestations over the meaning of drugs within European medical cultures, not least because the occasions when new drugs—even well-known ones—first entered European consumption, and indeed their trade within Europe generally, have left few archival traces. This article, while indebted to recent research on the global drugs trade, charts a different course, seeking to demonstrate how the conditions of possibility of European knowledge of medicinal drugs could be shaped by power relations within the public domain. New methodological interest in the role of social credit in the making of natural knowledge has only rarely been turned towards the informational sources about drugs upon which historians rely.[footnoteRef:3] Several excellent studies have documented the key role of early modern courts as sites for the manufacture of natural knowledge and experimenters’ credit.[footnoteRef:4] But by 1700, print culture was also engendering other kinds of epistemological publics and other forms of epistemological authority, both existing outwith courtly control. It is with communication, as the locus of encounter between the power of courts and that of the Republic of Letters to shape medical information, that this article is concerned.[footnoteRef:5] Knowledge of remedies was readily available to medical clients in Europe around 1700 from receipt books, dictionaries, pharmacopoeias, advertisements, medical and botanical treatises, but the process by which particular knowledge-claims became public ‘facts’ about a drug has received far less attention. In fact, within the histories of medicine and ‘stimulants’, informational literature often appears as if epistemologically unproblematic, a resource to be mined for big pictures of how “Europeans understood drugs”.[footnoteRef:6]  [1:  See, for example, Crawford, 2016; Walker & Cook, 2013; Walker, 2009; Wallis, 2012; Huguet-Termes, 2001; Anagnostou, 2002; Boumediene, 2016. In the latter category, the now classic case study is Norton (2008).]  [2:  As emphasised by Parsons & Murphy (2012) and Wu (2017).]  [3:  On social credit and the non-neutrality of natural knowledge, see, in particular, Shapin (2010). For recent exceptions, see especially DiMeo (2017); Keller (2012). On the ‘global’ and ‘material’ turns, see, among others, Roberts (2012); Raj (2010a); McCook (2013); Hicks (2010); Guerrini (2016); Klein & Spary (2010), introduction; Bennett (2010); Finnegan (2008); Secord (2004).]  [4:  To offer just a few examples, Rankin (2017); Pugliano (2017); Biagioli (2009); Smith (2018).]  [5:  A valuable corrective is Crawford & Gabriel (2019). On the weakness of early modern courtly power in general, see Beik (2005); Charles & Cheney 2013; Raj (2010b). ]  [6:  For a suggestion of how to use the term “information” in respect of early modern epistemological practice, see Blair (2010, pp. 2-3).] 

This article critically evaluates, in the light of unused print and manuscript materials, a famous episode in which the Dutch physician Adrian Helvetius’s medical reputation was established by bringing the South American drug ipecacuanha to the French court in the 1680s. Here, rather than retaining the secret of his cures for himself, Helvetius supposedly made knowledge of the drug available to the French public, in return for monarchical patronage. The ipecacuanha case exhibits interactions between the new public sphere and an older culture of early modern medical secrets.[footnoteRef:7] It has long been known that secrecy fell from favour among men of letters after 1700, but Helvetius’s experiences offer a provocative example of how one medical entrepreneur juggled publicity and secrecy in quest of profit and reputation at court. The culture of medical secrecy worked to opposite effect from the genre of printed pharmacopoeias. Where the former ensured proliferation of multiple variants of receipts, the latter sought to essentialise these into a standardised format.[footnoteRef:8] The claim, largely associated with Elisabeth Eisenstein, that putting knowledge into print in the early modern period stabilised and standardised it has been convincingly critiqued by Adrian Johns, who views medical advertising as an archetypical example of the kind of problem confronted by early modern readers in attempting to rely upon print for true information.[footnoteRef:9] The tension between public and secret knowledge was, I will argue, heightened rather than resolved by Helvetius’s publication of his secret. Putting ipecacuanha into print did have a stabilising effect: it established the drug as public knowledge, available to a wider audience, rather than personal secret. This sat well within a new crown narrative, emerging in the 1680s, in which monarchical benevolence and legitimacy were displayed through acts of publicising medical information. Conversely, for Helvetius, the end goal of publishing was to defeat rival claimants and secure credit in the medical marketplace. Print served primarily to close down contestation over ipecacuanha’s identity. Once the drug became “black-boxed” as a natural kind, the labour and power relations producing it were then rendered invisible.[footnoteRef:10] The settlement of these controversies over knowledge, commerce and power has become an integral part of informational sources about the drug down to the present day. The Helvetius episode thus illustrates how the public domain before 1700 could form in a nexus between medical knowledge, commercial profit, scholarly reputation and political power.  [7:  On secrecy, see Eamon (1994); Long (2001); Jütte (2012); Vermeir (2012); Vermeir & Margócsy (2012). ]  [8:  Rivest (2019).]  [9:  The debate between Eisenstein and Johns is summarised in Alcorn Baron, Lindquist & Shevlin (2007, pp. 1-12); see also Eisenstein (2002) and Johns (2002). On piracy in the pharmaceutical domain, see Johns (2009, Chapter 5).]  [10:  On “black-boxing”, see in particular Callon (1986); Latour (1987). For an analogous case of courtly “stabilisation” as a route to the success of a drug, see, e.g., the discussion of quinquina in Boumediene (2016, Chapters 4 & 5).] 


I: The foreign medical entrepreneur in the big city
Ipecacuanha is often cited as a milestone in the changing pharmacological landscape of Europeans in the age of the first colonial empires. The drug, an emetic and purgative, is particularly associated with the name of Adrian Helvetius, the Dutch physician who sold the secret to the French crown in 1688.[footnoteRef:11] A mercifully short rendering of events from 1835 sets the tone: [11:  On Helvetius, see especially Krul (1896-97); Cumming (1955), Chapter 1; van Heiningen (2014); Brockliss & Jones (1997, pp. 622–3, 730–31); Lafond (1926, Chapter 2); Lunel (2008).] 


The introduction of this celebrated root into medical practice was chiefly owing to Helvetius, grandfather of the celebrated author of the work De l’Esprit, who came from Holland to Paris very young to practice medicine. He attended and cured a drug merchant, who paid him with a packet of the root from Brazil, called ipecacuanha. After some experiments in the hospitals, Helvetius found it possessed the virtue of curing dysentery. Before the end of thirty-two years, he had made 100,000 crowns by the cure of that disease. Louis XIV. gave him a thousand louis for his secret.[footnoteRef:12] [12:  Horner (1834, p. 189). See also, e.g., Thomas (1887, p. 159).] 


The common ground of this and other retellings is a triangular relationship linking Helvetius (familiarly known as “le médecin Hollandois”—the Dutch physician), monarchical patronage, and a South American root. The circumstances under which Helvetius acquired his ipecacuanha and rose to fame pass largely unscrutinised within such accounts, unsurprisingly so given their apologetic function. Descriptions of ipecacuanha to this day draw upon the same triumphal discovery narrative, which became incorporated into published genres whose ostensible purpose was to supply neutral information. The ‘script’ coupling Helvetius and ipecacuanha is thus widely expressed as historical fact.[footnoteRef:13] The assumption seems to be that once a drug like ipecacuanha reached Europe, it was always already ‘the same thing’, in spite of the vast distances over which such drugs had to travel, their inscrutability in transit, and limited European access to the locus of origin. This is a structural feature of commodity histories, which necessarily treat individual drugs such as coffee or opium as stable natural kinds, persisting across time and space.[footnoteRef:14] [13:  For modern uses of the Helvetius narrative, see, e.g., Mann (1984, p. 272); de Moulin (2013, p. 23); Sneader (2005, p. 36).]  [14:  E.g. Matthee (1985); Hobhouse (1985); Courtwright (2001); Schivelbusch (1992). For important recent critiques, see especially Norton (2008); Boumediene (2016); Wu (2017); Griffin (2020).] 

We can, however, view these transformations in European consumption differently by scrutinising acts of communication about the new drug ipecacuanha. Print and manuscript, two media used to share information about the drug, were used in different ways and for different purposes to that end. Looking at how news of Helvetius’s discovery travelled across European literate networks allows plural identities to be teased out for both the physician and the drug, and shows how international courtly and scholarly networks intersected to produce natural knowledge, and how the effects of courtly power made themselves felt in that process. In other words, from one discovery story, we can unfold a larger picture of the conditions of possibility of new pharmacological knowledge. 
Helvetius’s personal reputation, partly built upon ipecacuanha, became compromised thanks to both his association with a specific and his entanglement with the Parisian medical marketplace. As a foreign physician in a city where medical practice was formally permitted only to graduates of the university medical faculty, he faced considerable competition.[footnoteRef:15] After the French crown handsomely recompensed the Cambridge apothecary Robert Talbor in 1679 for disclosing the secret of his quinquina preparation, many drugs entrepreneurs insistently courted royal patronage.[footnoteRef:16] Amid the myriad claimants to royal favour brandishing new cures during the 1680s, why was Helvetius, a very young, impoverished, foreign doctor, singled out for royal recognition? A son of the Dutch alchemist Johann Friedrich Schweitzer, he arrived in Paris in the late 1670s under the Latinised name of Helvetius, probably to sample the city’s up-to-date medical teaching.[footnoteRef:17] However, when he eventually gained his doctoral degree in April 1680, it was—as his enemies exultantly reported— awarded by the medical faculty of Reims, known to offer “university degrees on the cheap”, in Brockliss’s words, and therefore popular with foreigners.[footnoteRef:18] That is, Helvetius likely could not afford the price of a doctorate from the Paris medical faculty that would have put the seal of respectability upon his medical practice.[footnoteRef:19] But by November that year, he was already making a name for himself through proprietary remedies, performing an “admirable cure” with a “liquor of great virtue”. By 1684, when he acquired letters of naturalisation, he evidently possessed a Parisian clientèle large enough to support him.[footnoteRef:20] [15:  On the Parisian medical world, see, in particular, Ramsey (1988); Brockliss and Jones (1997); Le Maguet (1971); Delaunay (1906). Medical entrepreneurship was not incompatible with possessing a university degree. Many licensed physicians led an entrepreneurial existence, but with very few exceptions, they were all graduates of universities other than Paris, whose faculty members attempted to defend their notional legal monopoly. Thus, the Paris medical world was riven with highly complex authority relations, which cannot be adequately addressed here; for a more in-depth study, see Spary (forthcoming).]  [16:  See Lebrun (1984); Bouvet (1928).]  [17:  Paris was a common destination for Dutch students up to the Franco-Dutch War of 1672-78. See Dibon (1963, esp. pp. 6-13); Gelfand (2010).]  [18:  Helvetius received his doctorate on April 30, 1680 (Carnegie ms 1085, Bibliothèque municipale, Reims, fl. 61). On the status of Reims medical degrees, see Brockliss (2009, p. 84).]  [19:  De Bezançon (1677, pp. 203-4).]  [20:  Justel (1680); O1 28 (1684, Mar 2), Archives nationales de France (henceforth AnF), Maison du Roi (henceforth MR), fl 76r. For comparable examples, see Boumediene (2016); Spary (forthcoming).] 

What Helvetius did after obtaining his degree is little documented, but resembled an alchemical process, in that the value of both doctor and drug were transmuted. Archival records confirm that in July 1687, he was permitted by the crown to trial his remedies on the sick poor at Paris’s two main hospitals, the Hôpital Général and the Hôtel-Dieu, following information received “from various sources about the remedy’s benefits”. The physician Pierre Légier and the surgeon Claude Landelle Gatelière were appointed by the minister to witness the trials and report on their outcome.[footnoteRef:21] That autumn, Helvetius was permitted to establish a small experimental house with four patients at crown expense.[footnoteRef:22] A few weeks later, the naval minister, Jean-Baptiste Colbert, marquis de Seignelay, wrote to Pierre de Catalan, the French consul at Cadiz, requesting a sample of a certain “radix d’or” (goldroot), used in the treatment of bloody flux. The consul’s reply promised one pound of the drug, with instructions from a local doctor.[footnoteRef:23] A further request, this time for 300 pounds, followed in January 1688. De Catalan struggled to fulfil this, for harvesting the goldroot was so labour-intensive—“this bejuquillo cannot be torn up without breaking the very stones”—that a whole galleon only carried around 50 to 100 pounds.[footnoteRef:24] The name radix aurus (goldroot) referenced the drug’s origin, the harsh landscape of New Spain: “it is only found on goldmines”, wrote the Parisian druggist Pierre Pomet; “those who are condemned to work in them are made to gather it, and what makes it so expensive is that even the strongest worker can only collect a dozen pounds a year”.[footnoteRef:25] Quite soon after the trials, then, the French royal administrative apparatus was set into motion to acquire a specific being touted by a foreign medical entrepreneur. In August 1688, the crown gave Helvetius monopoly rights over trade in his secret remedy throughout the realm, capping its price at 3 louis d’or per drachm. The privilege ranked him among numerous other medical entrepreneurs in possession of similar brevets. The letters patent he received were far more than a trade monopoly: they represented a form of royal protection or endorsement for the patent-holder and his knowledge-claim.[footnoteRef:26] From this date onwards, as Rivest has shown, Helvetius used the crown as a huge client, providing his medicines to the royal army, navy and hospitals, as well as continuing his lucrative private practice.[footnoteRef:27] During the years when ipecacuanha was under discussion in the public domain, the War of the League of Augsburg was generating fierce geopolitical conflict in Europe, and French ministers were particularly interested in new specifics with potential military applications.[footnoteRef:28]  [21:  O1 31 (1687, 15 Jul – 20 Aug), AnF, MR, fl 136v, 137r, 142r, 183r. On these trials, see Rivest (2016). On Gatelière, see Loriquet (1904, Vol. 2, p. 1085); on Légier, see Legrand (1911, p. 270). Most later accounts attribute Helvetius’s renown to curing the duchesse de Chaulnes and the Dauphin, e.g. Dictionnaire (1813, p. 152); Lambert (1751, p. 178); Brockliss & Jones (1997, p. 623). No account published before 1700 mentions these two cases, however.]  [22:  O1 31 (1687, 17 Nov), AnF, MR, fl 235r.]  [23:  BI 213 (1687, 8 Dec), Affaires Etrangères (henceforth AE), fl 85v: letter, Pierre de Catalan to Jean-Baptiste Colbert de Seignelay, Cadiz.]  [24:  BI 213 (1687, 11 Nov), AE, fl 81-83: letter, Catalan to Seignelay, Cadiz; BI 213 (1688, 15 Mar), AE, fl 106-107: letter, Catalan to Seignelay, Cadiz. On the global drugs trade at this time, see especially Boumediene (2016, pp. 227-30).]  [25:  Pomet (1694, Part I, pp. 46-7; Part III, pp. 147-8); Carney & Rosomoff (2009, pp. 81-7). ]  [26:  O1 32 (1688, 24 Aug), AnF, MR, fl 224r-225r; Louis XIV (1688, p. 24). On the royal licensing system, see Rivest (2017); Ramsey (1988); Hannaway (1976); Brockliss & Jones (1997, pp. 623-42).]  [27:  Rivest (2016).]  [28:  Rivest (2017).] 

Let us, however, pause in the middle 1680s, before Helvetius struck gold. Given that, like many medical entrepreneurs in Paris, he kept details of his remedies secret, aspects of his relationship with ipecacuanha prior to 1688 remain obscure, and probably always will. There is little information concerning the early trials, no family correspondence survives, and his claims about ipecacuanha became controversial so rapidly that conflicting stories were circulating within a couple of years of the royal patent. In one account, pseudonymously published by Noël-Bonaventure d’Argonne, vicar of the Chartreux monastery at Rouen, Helvetius came to Paris to sell his father’s proprietary remedy, capitalising on royal favour towards drugs entrepreneurs. Yet despite visiting the capital twice and advertising heavily, he could not make a living from his father’s drug. Finally he had the opportunity to attend a “rich city druggist”, tagging along behind the faculty physician François Afforty.[footnoteRef:29] As part payment, the two doctors were offered “five or six pounds of the root from Brazil, as something extremely precious”. Since “the virtue of this plant was unknown to [Afforty], he preferred to take the gold louis, whose specific virtue against that accursed plague of poverty desolating families in Paris and elsewhere he knew perfectly well”. Even better than gold, mere “red earth”, the root was a cure for the bloody flux. In d’Argonne’s account, Helvetius hurried to the hospital to test his new drug, discovered its efficacy and advertised it; these advertisements, coming to the attention of courtiers, led to trials of ipecacuanha at court. The drug operated a meteoric rise in Helvetius’s fortunes: he became the most fashionable physician in Paris, reputed to possess “specifics for all kinds of diseases”. His fame netted him the vast sum of 100,000 écus by the age of 32.[footnoteRef:30] In this rendering, Helvetius had finally discovered in plant form what his alchemist father had sought all his life—a philosopher’s stone, capable of turning all to gold.[footnoteRef:31] We can already see, here, plot elements from the version of events quoted at the start; except the genre is parody, not hagiography. [29:  Afforty held the chair of botany and pharmacy (Moréri, 1759, p. 552).]  [30:  [D’Argonne] (1700, pp. 42-5). The écu was worth approximately 5 livres.]  [31:  On Helvetius père’s quest for the philosopher’s stone, see especially Principe (2014, p. 166); Snelders (1993, p. 20).] 

The disease originally named in Helvetius’s privilege has largely been treated as irrelevant, but was not. Bloody flux was invested with a sacrality deriving from the famous New Testament episode when a woman was cured by touching the hem of Christ’s garment.[footnoteRef:32] The story was in wide currency at the time. In a 1686 treatise on the Eucharist, the Catholic convert David-Augustin de Brueys cited it in a discussion of Christ’s bodily powers to produce transformative change in natural objects at at distance.[footnoteRef:33] Probate inventories mention images of the episode in the possession of Parisians.[footnoteRef:34] A 1661 portrait shows Helvetius’s father also advertising a root, with the caption: “Contra vim Mortis est panacea Radix Jesse mea (Against the power of Death, my panacea is the Root of Jesse)”. The reference is to Isaiah 11:10, in a well-known discussion of peace and harmony in the natural world, when “the cow and the bear shall feed; their young ones shall lie down together: and the lion shall eat straw like the ox”.[footnoteRef:35]  [32:  Matthew 9:20-22; Mark 5:25-34; Luke 8:43-48 (This and subsequent references come from the King James version).]  [33:  De Brueys (1686, pp. 245-9); similarly, Fouquet (1686, unpaginated “Epître”).]  [34:  Gregory of Tours (1668, pp. 33-4, 426-7); Godeau (1672, p. 425); Le Fevre (1681, pp. 245, 293). Two images of the cure were owned, for example, by the modestly affluent Jacques Jollain in 1710 (Inventaire après décès Jollain, Jacques (1710, 5 Dec), étude IX/579, AnF, MC).]  [35:  Isaiah 11:7-13.] 




Figure 1: Unknown artist, “Portret van Dr. Johann Friedrich Helvetius (s(ch)weitzer)” (1629/32-1709). Line engraving of Johann Friedrich Schweitzer, Adrian Helvetius’s father, in 1661. Credit: Haags Gemeentearchief.
Here and elsewhere, the root is also the Messiah; the remedy doubles as a materium medicum and the most powerful natural body of all: that of God. Like his father, Helvetius probably wielded his “root” as part of a narrative of medicotheological healing metaphorically anchored in the body of Christ; unlike his father’s, his root was neither alchemical nor mineral, but one of many exotic plant roots entering the medical marketplace at this time. Despite this sacral theme threaded through the Helvetius dynasty’s medical enterprise, their attempts to publicise their remedies proved problematic. 

II: Helvetius in public
A less benign way in which Helvetius attracted public attention in Paris was onstage. On 10 November 1685, royal censors gave tacit permission for the performance of La Femme testvë, a play about a young woman, Isabelle, about to be married off to a “Dutch physician” with an implausible Germanic accent. Yet the Dutch interloper departs from the expected comportment of physicians in his “colourful outfit” and his refusal to let blood like a real doctor: 

The Dutchman: When I find a secret, to put it to use
I try out my secret on thirty.
Lyse: Good grief.
The Dutchman: Sometimes
Of thirty who take it, only three remain.
I correct the thing, and I salvage four.
I correct again, always reducing.
And when at last, for two who don’t want to get well,
I see that my remedy’s prevented one from dying,
I’m happy, and on that assurance
I can well expect to make my fortune in France.[footnoteRef:36] [36:  Robbe (1686, p. 25).] 


At length the Dutch physician is called away to “cure your remedy”, since the powder he has prescribed, though taken “according to all the recommendations indicated on your leaflets”, has only worsened his patient’s fever.[footnoteRef:37] To our eyes, instruction leaflets informing consumers how to use an unfamiliar drug seem to require neither defence nor explanation. But their distribution was not viewed by seventeenth-century patients as evidence of greater medical enlightenment.[footnoteRef:38] On the contrary, such practices, deviating from the behavior of respectable licensed physicians, could serve to exacerbate public doubt over Helvetius’s competence and the efficacy of his cures. Similarly suspect was his use of printed advertising, which, in the city’s politico-medical landscape, was used by medical entrepreneurs rather than faculty physicians—the same kinds of people who, lacking recognised local standing, pasted advertisements for pox cures on walls, touting for wealthy and desperate clients.[footnoteRef:39] Information about early modern drugs could be compromised by the very act of being made public. D’Argonne claimed that Helvetius advertised widely in Paris before coming to courtly attention; yet in the city, his publications only had wide credit among élite clients after he himself had been accredited at court.[footnoteRef:40] Helvetius’s super-stardom would thus result from chasing the very rich at court, not the modestly affluent in the city. And at court, trust in new drugs was built upon face-to-face encounters, personal recommendations, rumour and gossip, rather than print. News often circulated in handwritten or oral form.[footnoteRef:41] Helvetius thus had to perform a difficult balancing act; conciliating the quest for learned credibility with that for royal and courtly patronage led him into bitter conflicts with other healers. [37:  Robbe (1686, p. 26). Helvetius’s practice of supplying instruction leaflets with his drugs continued over several decades, e.g. Helvetius (1703).]  [38:  See, similarly, Dionis (1708, p. 540). ]  [39:  On the intersection of print and secrets, see, for the medical realm, especially Leong & Rankin (2011) and Siena (2001). ]  [40:  [D’Argonne] (1700, p. 44).]  [41:  On such “communication circuits”, see especially Darnton (1996, Chapter 7); on the importance of courts as sites for brokering new drugs, see especially Boumediene (2016, Chapter 5). ] 



Figure 2: La Racine Hola, Hola [detail]. Paris: Pierre Landry, 1688. Bibliothèque nationale de France, RESERVE QB-201 (171)-FT 5. Credit: BnF.


Print was a double-edged sword. It could be used to proclaim and destroy medical reputation with equal facility. An almanac published by the licensed engraver Pierre Landry in 1688, the year Helvetius received his letters patent, caricatures a Doctor Tricotin, who has “fait la d’Ecouvertte” (made the discovery) of a root. The publication date, coupled with repeated use of the word “Hola[ndois]” in the banner, suggests Helvetius was the real target here.[footnoteRef:42] During this period, almanac prints circulated in the tens of thousands. The crown favored them as a medium for distributing positive images of the king, his courtiers and his policies.[footnoteRef:43] This example was of high quality, probably commissioned by a wealthy individual or group; it is even possible that the Paris medical faculty was behind its publication, seeking to discredit a rival raking in profits from a newly fashionable remedy. Like the 1686 play, the image indexes Helvetius’s charlatanry in various ways: his garb, his refusal to offer credit, and his position on a stage all gestured at the practices of itinerant healers—a familiar sight in the Parisian medical marketplace. Invoking Helvetius’s own body in a performative context became a means of casting doubt on the virtue of his drugs; in touting his drugs so publicly, he trod a fine line between courtly recognition and urban caricature.[footnoteRef:44] [42:  While the link to Helvetius cannot be independently confirmed, the representation of “Doctor Tricotin” is sufficiently realistic to suggest that it was meant as a recognisable image of Helvetius himself. Unfortunately, no known portraits of the physician exist for comparison.]  [43:  On this image, see Duplessis (1878, p. 240); Kopp (2015); Préaud (1995, p. 88). ]  [44:  Bernier (1689, p. 474); also Boileau Despréaux (1821, p. 102); Bezançon (1677, pp. 208-9). ] 

Self-publicising thus made Helvetius an object of ridicule even as it turned him into a household name.[footnoteRef:45] Print had ambiguous effects upon credibility, shifting the consumption of exotic drugs both spatially and significantly. In a similar way to coin, print allowed knowledge-claims about drugs to be circulated. But, as will be shown below, print did not entail the end of secrecy, nor did it secure epistemological authority, and it certainly failed to generate transparency about the identity of Helvetius’s specific, despite widespread claims that knowledge of the drug was bought by the king with the express aim of making it public knowledge. [45:  Saint-Évremond (1700, pp. 362-3). ] 


III: Doubts and narratives
The story of the rise to celebrity of the practitioner and his specific was taken at face value by some. In a 1691 treatise, the Faculty physician Daniel Tauvry reported that “Ipcacuanha [sic] is a root that purges above & below: it comes from Peru. It is used with great success in dysentery cases... It is Mr Helvetius’s remedy”.[footnoteRef:46] Where ipecacuanha was mentioned, Helvetius’s name often followed.[footnoteRef:47] After Helvetius secured his letters patent from the king, medical consensus formed around the efficacy of ipecacuanha in Paris. Even Jean Bernier, premier physician to the king’s brother, who mocked Helvetius for his inexperience and charlatanism, was impressed by his drug.[footnoteRef:48] [46:  Tauvry (1691, p. 53).]  [47:  La Brosse (1691).]  [48:  Bernier (1689, p. cx). On Bernier, see Dezeimeris, Olliver & Raige-Delorme (1821, p. 362). On medical interest in specifics at this time, see Cook (2011).] 

If the 1688 letters patent were the originary moment of a mythology concerning ipecacuanha’s efficacy, Helvetius’s attempt at leveraging status using the drug would thus prove less straightforward. His initial attempt to advertise his possession of a new secret remedy for dysentery took a standard format for medical entrepreneurs operating outside the corporate system: a short pamphlet with the full text of his royal letters, a description of how to use the drug, and a couple of receipts, none identifying the central ingredient, which was to be purchased in prepared doses, obscurely but strategically labelled “A”, “B” and “C”. It seems probable, therefore, that Helvetius was actively seeking to conceal the nature of the drug for which he had been awarded royal support. Yet, within a short space of time, its identity was known to Parisian medical practitioners, and his priority as its discoverer was under attack. Writing in 1694, the Paris druggist Pierre Pomet took pains to stress that ipecacuanha had been available in Paris before Helvetius’s arrival. A deceased apothecary, Pierre Claquenelle, had acquired “a good quantity, which fell into the hands of his son-in-law Mr Poulain, another apothecary, who put it back into use following the prescriptions of Mr Helvetius”.[footnoteRef:49] Claquenelle, a master in the city guild since the 1630s, had a respected name. His son-in-law Antoine Poulain had entered the guild in 1681. In Pomet’s version of events, Helvetius’s prescriptions allowed Poulain to put the drug into circulation, not give it away as d’Argonne implied. In the apothecary Nicolas Lémery’s slightly later account, Poulain sold his supply to Helvetius.[footnoteRef:50] These authors were concerned to demolish Helvetius’s discovery claims in print by proving that ipecacuanha had been in Parisian shops years before the Dutch doctor received his monopoly. The implication, never stated outright, was that Helvetius’s claim to royal favor was illegitimate. [49:  Pomet (1694, Part I, p. 47); similarly, Bernier (1689, pp. cx-cxi). The source of this supply, though usually attributed to a physician named Le Gras (Boumediene 2016, p. 227), may have been a different physician, Pierre Blasy, who brought the drug back to France in 1664 (Chardon 1696, p. 21). ]  [50:  Lémery (1698, p. 388).] 

What prompted such challenges? An appeal case heard at the lawcourt known as the Grand’Chambre de relevée on Tuesday, May 30, 1690 offers a clue. Augustin Jean Grenier or Garnier, a merchant, had taken Helvetius to court to dispute the terms of a contract.[footnoteRef:51] According to a published account of the court case, Grenier claimed the two men had met in Spain, where he gave Helvetius a supply of “a root named Veguigullo or Vexecullo, also Hipepocuana”, whose virtues against dysentery he learnt on travels through the Spanish Empire. After successful trials in Paris, Helvetius wrote to Grenier, commissioning around 50 pounds of the drug at 37 francs a pound. His subsequent actions—securing a royal monopoly for himself and cutting his partner out—however enraged Grenier, who then refused to fulfil the contract at the agreed price. In his defence, Grenier claimed that François-Michel Le Tellier de Louvois, the minister of war, had commanded him to “bring in as much as he was able for the army, banning him from giving it to anyone else, and… even if he wanted to, he could not, because the war with Spain put paid to any hope of getting it, given that Peru and Brazil, where the root grows, were under Spanish control”. Since the crown was struggling to cut into the supply chain of the drug, as we saw, Grenier was a potential intermediary.[footnoteRef:52] However, the merchant’s appeal to raison d’état did not serve him well; he lost his case when Helvetius claimed to have been using ipecacuanha on his patients before ever meeting Grenier.[footnoteRef:53] From 1690, ipecacuanha was thus effectively secured in law as Helvetius’s personal property. Nevertheless, Grenier’s accusation marked Helvetius’s reputation. [51:  Y 638 (1689, 6 Sep), Helvetius v. Grenier, AnF. The case was appealed on 30 May 1690, but Grenier lost again (X1A 6481 (1690, 30 May), AnF, fl 115). Legal sources disagree on the spelling of Grenier’s name; I have opted for “Grenier”, as used by the apothecary Simon Boulduc, who may have had personal contact with the merchant. Both Bernier (1691, p. 86), and the official published account of the trial in La Guessiere & Nupied (1700, pp. 421-2), reported that Helvetius had induced Grenier’s creditors to call in monies owed and thereby force the merchant into bankruptcy. To date, however, we have not managed to locate legal documents relating to this event, which remains a subject for further research. La Guessiere & Nupied also claimed that Grenier was a hatter, explaining his contact with South American trade networks: at this time vicuña was a high-value raw material for hat manufacture.]  [52:  La Guessiere & Nupied (1707, p. 421).]  [53:  The same claim was made in later sources such as Helvétius (1818, p. 3). By the 1680s, Cadiz was superseding Seville as the main entrepôt for American trade; see Pomet (1694, Part I, p. 46); Savary des Bruslons & Savary (1723, pp. 935-8): “Commerce de Cadix”; Mézin & Pérotin-Dumon (2016).] 


IV: Ipecacuanha goes on a Grand Tour
Not long after the lawsuit, news of ipecacuanha reached Henri Justel, a Protestant French scholar driven to London by the revocation of the Edict of Nantes in 1685. Although Justel’s source is unknown, the Huguenot information broker treated the drug as a newsworthy item, an epistolary curiosity to offer—somewhat en passant—to one of his many correspondents, Gottfried Wilhelm von Leibniz, librarian to the house of Hannover, in January 1691.[footnoteRef:54] Within the Republic of Letters, a report from a single interlocutor did not constitute a fact, especially when it was as brief as Justel’s one-liner, sandwiched between other news. Seeking more knowledge of the mysterious root, Leibniz approached those of his correspondents with French contacts, like the Florentine court librarian Antonio Magliabechi.[footnoteRef:55] In reply, Magliabechi forwarded a report from the geographer and priest Michel-Antoine Baudrand, stating that the French minister Louvois had ordered the use of ipecacuanha in outbreaks of military dysentery, a disease seen as a significant handicap in the ongoing war. Baudrand, an aide to Cardinal Étienne Le Camus, was an authoritative source with connections at both the Papal and French courts.[footnoteRef:56] His words raised the alarming prospect that the French had come into possession of a wonder drug at this time of heightened European conflict. Leibniz straightaway attempted to recruit his patrons, Herzog Ernst August zu Braunschweig-Lüneburg and his wife Sophie von der Pfalz, to the information-gathering process, presenting ipecacuanha as a new secret weapon: “The marquis de Louvois had already [given the order] to all the army doctors and surgeons to stock up on this root. Up to now I have been unable to learn what root it may be: but the matter seems sufficiently important to me for the Duke to endeavor to find out for himself what it is”.[footnoteRef:57] This tactic, however, merely secured a smart put-down from the Duke, accustomed to Leibniz’s petitions on various schemes. “One would say the Duke must be infected by Calvinism”, Sophie told her librarian, “since he believes in predestination enough to make fun of me when I suggested that he might order in some of that root for dysentery you wrote about”.[footnoteRef:58] [54:  Leibniz (1923-, Series 1, Vol. 6), Letter 175 (1691, Jan 5/15): Henri Justel to Leibniz, London.]  [55:  Leibniz met Magliabechi while staying in Florence in late 1689 (Steudel 1970, p. 10; Albanese 2006). On Leibniz’s correspondence, see Arana (2010); on the Republic of Letters, Ultee (1987a,b); Daston (1991).]  [56:  Leibniz (1923-, Series 1, Vol. 6), Letter 223 (1691, 13/23 Mar): Gottfried Wilhelm von Leibniz to Antonio Magliabechi, Hannover; Letter 315 (undated [1691, Apr?]): Magliabechi to Leibniz, undated [Florence?]; Baudrand (1705), unpaginated preface. ]  [57:  Leibniz (1923-, Series 1, Vol. 7), Letter 17 (1691, 4 Sep): Leibniz to Herzogin Sophie von Hannover. On ministerial interest in specifics around Europe at this time, see, e.g., Rivest (2017); Cook (1990).]  [58:  Leibniz (1923-, Series 1, Vol. 7), Letter 20 ([1691], 7/17 Sep): Sophie to Leibniz, Herrenhausen. See Rescher (1992); Koldau (2005, p. 207-13); Feuerstein-Praßer (2004, pp. 161-3, 190-97); Knoop (1964, Chapter 5).] 

Shortly before this abortive exchange, Leibniz had also broadcast news of the drug to a different audience, Republicans of Letters, via a memoir sent to Johann Georg Volckamer, court physician to the Holy Roman Emperor, for insertion into the imperial academy’s journal Miscellanea curiosa.[footnoteRef:59] But after his exchange with Sophie in September 1691, his wires of communication went silent on the subject of ipecacuanha for over three years. Leibniz would later claim that this was because he had been unable to confirm Justel’s information about the efficacy of the new drug: “apparently it was held to be no more than a rumour”.[footnoteRef:60] However, the resistance of his patron probably played a significant role in quelling enquiry; for it must have been clear to Leibniz that there was no scope for using the drug for personal advancement at Hannover in the way Helvetius had done at Versailles. Ipecacuanha remained at the level of rumour rather than fact. Scepticism was boosted by another rumour, namely that Louvois himself had died in July 1691 “sur la selle”, in other words, of dysentery.[footnoteRef:61] [59:  Leibniz (1923-, Series 3, Vol. 5), Letter 35 (1691, 15/25 Aug): Leibniz to Johann Georg Volckamer, Hannover, reproduced in an appendix to Volckamer 1690-91, p.16; Letter 38 (1691, 5/15 Sep): Volckamer to Leibniz, Nürnberg. On Volckamer, see Duncker & Humblot (1896).]  [60:  Leibniz (undated), “Description d’un remede nouveau contre la dysenterie”, in Leibniz (1923-, Series 4, Vol. 6, p. 572).]  [61:  Leibniz (1923-, Series 1, Vol. 7), Letter 23 (1691, 14/24 Sep): Leibniz to Sophie, Wolfenbüttel.] 

In his 1691 memoir, Leibniz had made a rather open-ended plea to readers of the Miscellanea for information on the mystery drug. At length this bore fruit, in the form of an enquiring letter in 1694 from Conrad Barthold Behrens, a young doctor from Hildesheim, citing Leibniz’s article of three years before “in which you report that the French have discovered a root currently in use against dysentery” and asking “whether any more news about the specific has come in since then”.[footnoteRef:62] The only potential source of further news at this point was France. Encouraged by a report by Benedikta Henriette, dowager duchess of Hannover, recently returned from Paris, concerning ipecacuanha’s fame there, Leibniz now wrote to the Hanoverian court’s diplomatic resident in France, Christophe Brosseau.[footnoteRef:63] The Hanoverians were not without family connections at the French court. Sophie, Leibniz’s patron, was the aunt of both Benedikta and Elisabeth Charlotte, the second wife of Louis XIV’s brother Philippe, duc d’Orléans. Since her husband’s death in 1679, Benedikta had been living with Elisabeth in Paris, so her information on ipecacuanha’s standing in French high society was reliable.[footnoteRef:64]  [62:  Leibniz (1923-, Series 3, Vol. 10), Letter 306 (1694, 28 Jun/8 Jul): Conrad Barthold Behrens to Leibniz, Hildesheim. On Behrens, see Deichert (1935-36).]  [63:  Leibniz (1923-, Series 4, Vol. 6), p. 572; these documents are discussed on pp. 569-71.]  [64:  Koldau (2005, pp. 200-207); Feuerstein-Praßer (2004, pp. 110-12).] 

Yet a courtier’s word was not the type of evidence Leibniz needed for circulating to the Republic of Letters. Brosseau accordingly was asked to cast about among the Parisian scientific community for a learned report on the elusive drug.[footnoteRef:65] Fortunately, a suitable figure was close at hand. Simon Boulduc, personal apothecary to Elisabeth Charlotte, counted as a reputable source on both the courtly and scholarly planes, for he was also a member of Paris’s royal academy of sciences. The medical household of the d’Orléans family was deeply structured by Palatine patronage; at Boulduc’s marriage in February 1691, Benedikta had been a witness.[footnoteRef:66] The apothecary’s response to Brosseau’s request for information illuminates the fault-lines running beneath Helvetius’s appropriation of the drug. In later papers presented to the academy, as well as in its published proceedings, Boulduc would remain mute about ipecacuanha’s status as Helvetius’s discovery. Like most of his academic memoirs, these are extremely dry descriptions of chemical analyses, part of a systematic investigation into purgative drugs between 1700 and 1712.[footnoteRef:67] To have articulated criticisms of Helvetius in that forum would likely have invited a counter-attack upon himself. Worse, within the royal academy, it might be construed as a critique of the monarch’s decision to dispense patronage to the Dutch doctor. But in his memoir for Brosseau, transmitted to Leibniz via the Palatinate kinship network spanning between Paris and Hannover, Boulduc offered a detailed and damning account of the relationship between Helvetius and his supplier in Paris.[footnoteRef:68]  [65:  Leibniz (1923-, Series 1, Vol. 11), Letter 244 (1695, 28 Mar): Christophe Brosseau to Leibniz. As Dear (1990, p. 666) notes, “A statement of experience was acceptable because, at least ideally, it was what everyone knew. It was a universal statement of common experience…[but] private experience would have to be communicated and established as an authentic item of knowledge by means of a report”.]  [66:  Warolin (2001, p. 341). ]  [67:  Specifically on ipecacuanha, see Simon Boulduc, “Analise de l’Ipecacuanha” and “Suite des Analises de L’Ipecacuanha”, “Procès-verbaux”, 1700, Archives de l’Académie des Sciences, Paris, fl 1r-6r, 115r-117v; Fontenelle (1703, pp. 46-8); Boulduc (1703, 1704).]  [68:  As Yale (2011, p. 195) observes, “Precisely because trust was so important, manuscript exchange left naturalists vulnerable to each other in a way that print publication did not”. ] 


V: The merchants’ revenge
Boulduc’s memoir was a fine combination of overtures towards epistolary liaison with his famous German interlocutor, judicious caution in navigating the political hazards of Louis XIV’s France, and indignant desire to establish the truth within the public domain.[footnoteRef:69] It challenged the physician’s discovery claim, reasserting that of the merchant. Ipecacuanha was “none of [Helvetius’s] invention, work or discovery: it was pure chance and, you might say, his lucky star that brought it to him”. Yet while casting doubt on Helvetius, Boulduc nonetheless confirmed ipecacuanha’s reputation, mentioning his own trials and inserting the drug within a heroic discovery narrative as “truly a Sovereign Remedy and a specific… against these incommodities [dysentery and bloody flux]”. According to Boulduc, 150 pounds of the drug had been purchased by Grenier in Spain in around 1687. Having informed himself of its proper dosage and the diseases it treated, the merchant brought his cargo to Paris. But here he had no legal right to sell his drug, being neither a grocer nor an apothecary. He therefore needed a medical intermediary to capitalise on his investment. “Helvetius was mentioned to him as the most enterprising and adroit, [so] they agreed to carry out trials here”. Young and lacking in capital, the Dutch physician stood to benefit from becoming Grenier’s urban agent, prescribing the secret root and splitting the profits with the investor according to a legal contract dated June 21, 1688.[footnoteRef:70] [69:  Boulduc’s memoir is preserved in Leibniz-Handschriften, LH III 4,4a Bl. 30-32, Niedersächsisches Landesbibliothek Hannover (henceforth NLH). Dated April 5, 1695, it reached Leibniz later the same month (Leibniz, 1923-, Series 1, Vol. 11, Letter 265 (1695, 8 Apr): Brosseau to Leibniz).]  [70:  This original contract is missing from the files of the notaire before whom it was signed, François Arouet—who happened to be Voltaire’s father (étude LVII, AnF, MC). ] 

But “Doctor Helvetius had the ambition of making himself known as the author of the said discovery” at court. To succeed in this undertaking, it was crucial to edit his trading partner out of the story. Grenier, piqued, felt obliged “to publish to all Parisian apothecaries and across the [medical] profession, that the Remedy... offered by the Dutch physician against flux of the belly and dysentery was not his own discovery”. That is, Grenier rendered Helvetius’s privilege worthless by turning his secret knowledge of the root into public information, which rapidly spread through the medical marketplace: “a great many Paris apothecaries are distributing it with equal success, and I confess to being one of those who has sold it ever since and continues to do so”, said Boulduc. Later portrayed as offering his secret to the king for the public good, in fact Helvetius had it published for him by a vengeful merchant.
In their next exchange, Boulduc sent Leibniz a transcript of Helvetius’s letters patent of 1688, copiously annotated with incendiary claims that “the people is being injured by the said Helvetius” through vastly overinflated prices, that “he did not make the discovery”, and like utterances. Grenier had also added “other far stronger things I’ve not judged it necessary to put down here”, said the author of these remarks, probably Boulduc himself. He further warned that although Grenier had provided Helvetius with “the secret and substance [of the drug] at Paris”, the merchant “has not given him everything”. Helvetius’s printed instructions on the preparation and use of the drug were a mere fiction of publicity, calculated to disguise rather than reveal truth, resembling “information” but medicinally worthless: “cete methode est deguisé et non naturelle”.[footnoteRef:71] Secrecy, in other words, continued to flourish behind the mask of publicity. [71:  Leibniz-Handschriften, LH III, 4,4a, fl 11r-15v, NLH.] 

In this correspondence, Boulduc seemed to be casting Leibniz as judge of a different kind of lawcourt, the Republic of Letters, possessing the power to reassert intellectual equity and restore “the glory of the discovery of this remedy to him to whom it belongs”. He explicitly reframed the priority dispute between Grenier and Helvetius as a clash between courtly abuse of power and commercial good faith. But even for Boulduc, the solution to commercial and intellectual injustice was not full disclosure. He remained committed to a pharmacological culture centred upon discovery and the ownership of secrets, even invoking secrecy in his own defence by asking Leibniz to “spare my name[,] not wishing to come to blows with the said man [Helvetius], even though I’m not really that bothered”. Helvetius’s aggressive tactics against Grenier to protect his courtly reputation, coupled with his growing royal favour by 1695, made him a dangerous enemy, as Boulduc understood. This appeal to the Republic of Letters therefore aimed at mobilizing a different sort of public power, independent of the more localised ability of princely courts to control knowledge, and operating across Europe via networks of men of letters. Boulduc’s willingness to disclose the story to Leibniz suggests an awareness of the latter’s extensive contacts around Europe, and a hope of engendering widespread condemnation of Helvetius’s actions outside France. In other words, the ipecacuanha episode highlights a clash between two discrete sources of epistemological authority circa 1700.
It is impossible to say whether Boulduc’s claim that Grenier had distributed his pamphlet to all Parisian apothecaries was accurate, but certainly the medical entrepreneur Nicolas Blegny had seen it: in an advertisement published the very month of the court case, he claimed ipecacuanha’s “secret was brought to France by Mr Grenier”.[footnoteRef:72] It seems very likely that Grenier’s complaint encouraged other public articulations of doubt, like Pomet’s 1694 attack upon Helvetius’s priority claim, or a 1693 play in which the character Momus advises Pierrot to go to Paris and sell “your balm and your mithridat, and then suddenly, on the strength of some poorly-understood simples, applied even more poorly, you'll be sure of a good carriage and income for the rest of your days: that's the spirit of the century”.[footnoteRef:73] Publishing evidently served as a weapon for merchants and apothecaries against physicians, particularly those meddling in the drugs trade. [72:  Mercure Galant (1689, Sep), p. 33.]  [73:  Gherardi (1707, pp. 53-4).] 

These doubts, clustering between 1690 and 1695, constitute the printed face of a deeper campaign against Helvetius which, despite his continuing rise at court, permanently stained his medical reputation.[footnoteRef:74] Tauvry’s decision to remove the reference to Helvetius in the second edition of his book, while increasing the number of references to ipecacuanha, epitomises a subtle shift in representations.[footnoteRef:75] Helvetius’s credit at court followed an inverse trajectory. Soon after he had received his letters patent, the courtier Roger de Rabutin, comte de Bussy, cousin of Madame de Sévigné, would remark critically that the death of one courtly patient “does no honor to the Dutch physician, for it wasn’t an extraordinary disease”.[footnoteRef:76] But by 1695, Helvetius had become “our Oracle” among de Sévigné’s courtly circle.[footnoteRef:77] [74:  Julien Offray de La Mettrie ([1746], pp. 20-22) would claim that Helvetius’s sole full-length medical work (1703), a short recipe book, was ghost-written by Nicolas Blegny. See also Verdier (1763, pp. 152-3). ]  [75:  Tauvry (1695, passim). Weston (2013, p. 61) notes: “Ipecacuanha was frequently prescribed in physicians’ consultations, but only once as Helvetius’s proprietary product”.]  [76:  Sévigné (1862-76, Vol. 8, p. 354), Letter 1063 (1688, 15 Sep): Roger de Rabutin, comte de Bussy, to Jean Corbinelli, Coligny.]  [77:  Sévigné (1862-76, Vol. 10, p. 328), Letter 1435 (1695, 11 Nov), Marie-Angélique du Gué de Bagnols, Mme de Coulanges, to Mme de Sévigné, Paris.] 

Though Helvetius won the fight in both legal and princely courts, he still faced the court of public opinion, in the form of print culture. Notably, his growing political power—for example in his appointment as premier physician to the duc d’Orléans—increasingly enabled him to close down printed attacks of the kind that had dogged him during the 1680s. In later editions of d’Argonne’s Mêlanges, the original caricature of Helvetius has been replaced by a new text, apparently stemming from the physician himself. This lists numerous courtiers treated by Helvetius with ipecacuanha prior to his encounter with Grenier, whose campaign is dismissed as prompted by “jealous Physicians”, along with the warning that the minister Louvois had punished the merchant with the full force of the law. To defend his reputation and priority claim, Helvetius thus invoked the architecture of crown authority in France. His strategy was to advertise how many important patrons he could muster to defend his version of events—courtiers, the king’s ministers, premier physician and confessor, priests—and to retell the history of his own relationship with ipecacuanha on more favorable terms.[footnoteRef:78] The game of powerful connections was one at which Helvetius became more successful with the passage of time. [78:  [D’Argonne] (1713, pp. 48-54). This version of events also found its way into later sources, e.g. Moréri (1735, p. 117); Lafond (1926, p. 24).] 

While some dissenting voices could be silenced in this way, alternative versions of events nevertheless persisted in appearing. According to the Lyon doctor Noël Falconet, writing in 1723, it was not Helvetius but rather an unnamed “Portuguese gentleman” who had brought ipecacuanha to court in 1686 to treat the Dauphin, only to find him already on the mend. Although written four decades after the fact, this account has credibility, since the same Portuguese, travelling through Lyon on his return journey, had given Noël and his father André, leading town doctors, “three or four ounces of the same ipecacuanha root he had supplied at court”, along with a memoir on the drug largely copied from a 1648 natural history of Brazil by the Dutch naturalist Willem Piso.[footnoteRef:79] In this version of the tale, Helvetius was not the reason ipecacuanha arrived at court.[footnoteRef:80] [79:  Falconet (1723, unpaginated preface); Piso & Marcgrave (1648). The fact that Piso’s text was in the hands of d’Aquin by 1686 refutes Helvetius’s claim to d’Argonne (1713, p. 52) that at the time of the trials, d’Aquin “did not yet know its use”.]  [80:  Despite his claim to the contrary ([D’Argonne] 1713, p. 51).] 

At this juncture, a notable anomaly of the Helvetian narrative must be signalled. What Piso had described were two roots, one grey, one white, both imported by the Portuguese from Brazil to Lisbon under the name of ipecacuanha. A sample of a Brazilian root, d’Argonne confirmed, was given by the extraordinary envoy to Portugal, Claude de Guénégaud, to the king’s premier physician, Antoine d’Aquin, on his return to the French court early in 1686.[footnoteRef:81] According to Falconet, the drug arrived with instructions as to its identity and uses; indeed, it would be most unusual for usage instructions not to be included in cases like this, involving a drug intended as a patronage gift. Brazilian ipecacuanha was thus already available to court physicians before Helvetius’s trials; its secret did not have to be bought at vast expense by the crown. Moreover, months before the Hôtel-Dieu trials in the summer of 1687, the minister de Seignelay had already dispatched several new drugs, including Helvetius’s specific, on a diplomatic-scientific mission to Siam, the eastern limit of French colonising efforts.[footnoteRef:82] Helvetius may well not have introduced ipecacuanha to court himself; but he was able to exploit its presence there for personal advancement even before the Hôtel-Dieu trials. His success at court, in other words, seems less a result of the demonstrative role of the trials than a precondition for the permission required to execute them. This suggests that permission to trial a drug was more important as a way of signalling crown support to the Paris medical world, than of demonstrating the efficacy of the drug in any modern clinical sense. Such a reading implies that in addressing the question of how European natural knowledge was made around 1700, attention must be paid not only to the fact of trials or experiments but also to their local epistemological status and purpose, as well as to the mediators who interpreted and shared news about them.[footnoteRef:83] [81:  [D’Argonne] (1713, p. 52). Guénégaud was already in Paris by January 1686 (La Cité, 1929, p. 454).]  [82:  The drug departed France in March 1687 for the court of King Narai, in the custody of fourteen Jesuit missionaries (Tachard 1689, p. 57-8). Most sources cite Claude de Bèze as Helvetius’s Jesuit contact, though Tachard suggests otherwise. On de Bèze, see Plug (2018). According to Hoefer (1854-66, Vol. 23, p. 873), they made contact via the King’s own confessor, François d’Aix de La Chaise.]  [83:  A point convincingly argued by Baldwin (1995) and Vermeir (2005).] 

Significantly, at the end of these trials, the crown asked Catalan for a sample of an entirely different root, known to the Spanish as “bexuguillo”. Like the cargo imported by Grenier, the golden-brown root Catalan sent came from Peru via Cadiz.[footnoteRef:84] As a Dutch physician, Helvetius may very well have known of Piso’s work before coming to Paris: both Piso and Helvetius senior were Amsterdam-based court physicians.[footnoteRef:85] But despite his later asseverations to that effect, Helvetius could not possibly have learnt of Grenier’s root by this means, for bexuguillo did not appear in Piso’s book—as some contemporaries noticed—and nor did it grow in Brazil.[footnoteRef:86] Ipecacuanha and bexuguillo were distinct plants: they came from opposite sides of a very large continent, and they travelled via different trade routes. [84:  Leibniz-Handschriften, LH III 4,4a, NLH, fl 14v.]  [85:  JStor Global Plants (n. d.).]  [86:  Piso & Marcgrave (1648, Book IV, Chapter LXV, p. 101); Pomet (1694, unpaginated “Apendix”); Fontenelle (1703, p. 69); [D’Argonne] (1713, p. 52). On the identity problems produced by distance, see, especially, Walker & Cook (2013); Boumediene (2016); Winterbottom (2015); Griffin (2020).] 

Under these circumstances, it is therefore significant that from around 1690 public attention came to be directed towards a Brazilian rather than a Peruvian root. In French medical writing, Peru and Brazil, Helvetius and discovery, bexuguillo and ipecacuanha fused and hybridised.[footnoteRef:87] The drug “ipecacuanha”, as it was known in France after 1689, appears to have been partly an artefact of this priority dispute. As Boulduc observed to Leibniz, “since this root has been in use here, three sorts have been imported, one blond or brown, a blackish one, and a white one”. Although “the one of the three that we have recognised to be the best is the one enclosed, which is the brown one”, the cheaper Brazilian root made a passable substitute for the more effective, yet rare and costly bexuguillo.[footnoteRef:88]  [87:  Pomet (1694, Part I, p. 46; Part III, p. 147). See also Journal des Sçavans (1702, 7 Aug, pp. 537-8); Marais & de Vaux (1690); Geoffroy (1703, p. 136). The conflation of the two drugs is already made in Bernier (1689, p. cx). It is not made in the legal descriptions of the court cases in 1689 and 1690, but this was presumably because Grenier himself was either trying to keep his drug’s name a secret, or possibly himself did not know there was a difference. All he admitted to Boulduc in 1689 was that it “comes from Peru in the West Indies” (Leibniz-Handschriften, LH III 4,4a, NLH, fl 15v).]  [88:  Leibniz-Handschriften, LH III 4,4c, NLH.] 

The breakdown of Helvetius’s relations with Grenier in 1689 left him in a difficult position when it came to supplying his eager clientèle with bexuguillo, for despite his monopoly, there were few Parisian sources of goldroot. He forcibly extracted the final twenty-five pounds owed him under the terms of their original contract from Grenier’s premises, and at some point the elderly stock in Poulain’s attic came to his attention.[footnoteRef:89] Whether or not he was personally responsible for the conflation of ipecacuanha with bexuguillo, Helvetius’s purposes were clearly well served by encouraging an equivalence with a cheaper Brazilian substitute. In so doing, he fostered a grey area of the history of drugs that persists to this day. Most dictionary entries on ipecacuanha mention Helvetius, and some mention Grenier. But the integrity of “ipecacuanha” as a commodity and medicine, as a continuously existing natural kind, passes unquestioned in such works. “Ipecacuanha”, in being processed into “information”, preserves a secret complexity, a fractured identity attesting to the complex historical circumstances of its coming-into-being as the product of a turf war within the Parisian medical marketplace. Print is the medium whereby that seemingly stable and homogeneous unit of information, the drug “ipecacuanha”, has been transmitted and reaffirmed since 1690. [89:  X1A 6481, AnF, fl 115. Claquenelle’s date of death is unknown. Bernier (1689, pp. cx-cxi) does not mention it, but in later work (1691, p. 84), he specifically mentions ipecacuanha being present in Claquenelle’s stock at the time his probate inventory was drawn up. ] 


VI: Publishing ipecacuanha
The d’Argonne case shows that Helvetius eventually acquired the power to stop up some leaks in the world of print. Ipecacuanha highlights processes at work that would gradually restructure the medical marketplace in France between the 1690s and the 1720s, bringing it under crown control to a greater extent than in the better-known British case.[footnoteRef:90] But outside the boundaries of the medical world over which the French crown was able to exert authority—which is to say the French medical world—other forms of information exchange worked differently to establish the epistemological status of the drug; and these had the power to destabilise an entrepreneurial reputation crafted in a single court. In the hands of Leibniz, arch-newsmonger of the Republic of Letters, the dissemination of the Grenier story scaled up by an order of magnitude. Leibniz’s Latin article on ipecacuanha, heavily based on Boulduc’s memoir, was heralded in the Leipzig journal Acta eruditorum in December 1695. A full-length version appeared in Miscellanea the following March. This text was then despatched in multiple directions: both to Republicans of Letters like Rudolf Christian von Bodenhausen, tutor to the Florentine ducal family, or Johann Bernoulli in Groningen, and to courtiers: Maria Aurora, Gräfin von Königsmarck, carried the news to the Saxon court; Ernst Friedrich, Graf von Windisch-Grätz, to the Habsburg court; Franz Menegatti, confessor to the Holy Roman Emperor, took it to his patron; and Sophie von der Pfalz herself brought it to the Prussian court.[footnoteRef:91] Leibniz also appended the memoir to the German edition of his own Latin translation of a work by the English physician Martin Lister.[footnoteRef:92] With Bernoulli, he had a lengthy exchange concerning the best source of the drug.[footnoteRef:93] His text also travelled to Gießen, where Michael Bernhard Valentini, personal physician to Elisabeth-Dorothea von Hessen-Darmstadt, would publish a version in his 1700 Polychresta exotica.[footnoteRef:94] Leibniz utilised his network of courtly connections to recruit medical correspondents like Behrens to investigate the drug further.[footnoteRef:95] [90:  Successive waves of royal enforcement of the brevets system and clampdowns on unlicensed medical practice, beginning in 1694, did not quash the French medical marketplace, but royal support for the authority of university medical faculties ensured that during the eighteenth century, Paris’s licensed physicians had a power to dictate the terms of medical practice to a degree that the London College of Physicians never reacquired (Cook, 2011; Ramsey, 1988; Brockliss & Jones, 1997, Chapter 4; Hannaway, 1976; Rivest, 2016, 2019).]  [91:  Leibniz (1695, 1696). On the text’s transmission, see Leibniz (1923-, Series 3, Vol. 6, pp. 579-80), Letter 187 (1695, 13/23 Dec): Leibniz to Rudolf Christian von Bodenhausen, Hannover; pp. 719-20, Letter 218 (1696, 20 Mar): Bodenhausen to Leibniz, Florence; for all other recipients, Leibniz (1923-, Series 4, Vol. 6, p. 570). On Bodenhausen, see Wahl (2014); Peifer (2008).]  [92:  Lister (1696). This book was originally published in London in 1694. For a discussion of Leibniz’s correspondence on ipecacuanha, see Leibniz (1923-, Series 4, Vol. 6, pp. LXV-LXVI).]  [93:  Leibniz (1923-, Series 3, Vol. 6, p. 645), Letter 292 (1696, 28 Jan/7 Feb): Leibniz to Johann Bernoulli, Hannover; p. 678 (1696, 3/13 Mar): Bernoulli to Leibniz, Groningen; pp. 710-11: Letter 214 (1696, 8/18 Mar): Leibniz to Bernoulli, Hannover; pp. 740-41, Letter 224 (1696, 7/17 Apr): Bernoulli to Leibniz, Groningen; see also Letters 229, 241 and 243, extending the exchange into June 1696.]  [94:  Valentini (1700, pp. 15-29). On Valentini, see Enke (2007).]  [95:  Their exchanges are in Leibniz (1923-, Series 1, Vol. 12, p. 222), Letter 156 (1695, 6/16 Dec); p. 391, Letter 260 (1696, 24 Jan/3 Feb); pp. 484-5, Letter 313 (1696, 12/22 Mar); p. 575, Letter 370 (1696, 27 Apr/7 May).] 

What was the end goal of this assiduous multiplication of information about, and trialling of, ipecacuanha? Although Leibniz’s correspondents included physicians, he also sent news of ipecacuanha to mathematicians and librarians and courtiers across Europe, to the German and Italian lands, Switzerland, England and the Netherlands. The editor of Leibniz’s correspondence attributes his interest in the drug to concern for his own health.[footnoteRef:96] It is true that this kind of trialling and information exchange, operating through both print and correspondence, in networks which transected national boundaries, was ubiquitous among the European learned élite.[footnoteRef:97] But in the Republic of Letters, ipecacuanha also took on a greater significance, becoming a symbol of the end goal of scholarly endeavor generally. As Volckamer put it, thanking Leibniz for his Miscellanea query concerning the drug: “One might wish there were more people among the ranks of the Curiosi of nature who considered themselves born not just to serve themselves, but also the State, and who took the view that they should serve their neighbor and the common good, so that, even if they didn’t publish on such matters, at least they didn’t despise the assertions of others”.[footnoteRef:98] That is, Leibniz’s actions were explicitly a making public of the new specific: above and beyond its political or private uses, trialling, reading and knowing about it was a way of constituting a useful and enlightened European public sphere.[footnoteRef:99] And, as his list of recipients shows, he undertook an extensive publicity campaign in respect of ipecacuanha. [96:  Leibniz (1923-, Series 3, Vol. 6, pp. LI-LII). Smith (2011) notes Leibniz’s intense interest in trialling this drug.]  [97:  For the French case, see my more detailed discussion of these practices in Spary (forthcoming); see also Cavallo & Storey (2013); Hanson & Pomata (2017); Leong (2019, esp. Chapter 3).]  [98:  Leibniz (1923-, Series 3, Vol. 5, p. 169), Letter 38 (1691, 5/15 Sep): Johann Georg Volckamer to Leibniz, Nürnberg.]  [99:  On Leibniz’s ideal of the Republic of Letters as an autonomous state, consisting of men of letters “exchanging information, reflections and discoveries” in a “cultural community”, see Roldán (2010); Ramati (1996). In the early 1670s, Leibniz had himself been involved in a priority dispute concerning a mechanical invention at the Royal Society, in which he invoked the principle of openness to defend his own interests (Iliffe 1992, pp. 37-8). One may therefore see publicity as another kind of strategy for producing (personal) intellectual property, but in the case of ipecacuanha it had the advantage of falling outside the courtly sphere controlled by Helvetius.] 

This essay has addressed the fate of a medical secret before 1700, a time of transformation in print culture thanks to the expanding news market. Yet publishing did not spell the demise of secrecy: the relationship between print and knowledge was far more complex. Though an important medium for laying claim to, and circulating information about, new drugs, print did not guarantee the transparency, completeness or neutrality of that information. Ipecacuanha’s knowledge itinerary displays interference effects between contemporary understandings of commercial profit, personal credit, princely patronage and public advantage. Thanks to Leibniz, Grenier’s priority claim eventually came full circle back to Paris. In August 1702, the Journal des Sçavans, reviewing Valentini’s Polychresta exotica, recorded how Grenier, an honest French merchant, had given a sample of his new drug to an unnamed physician in good faith to conduct trials, but “no sooner did the doctor have the remedy to hand than he attributed the discovery to himself, thereby obtaining an exclusive privilege for it”.[footnoteRef:100] The episode confirms the Janus-faced nature of print culture. From the standpoint of the medical entrepreneur, print was at once central to creating knowledge about one’s drug, yet potentially hazardous as a medium for defending priority claims or medical reputation. Alongside this we can set a more familiar image of print as represented by Leibniz and his interlocutors, an image that has become integral to Enlightenment historiography: print as a means of creating an authentic and reliable shared truth, serving the common good and innocent of either personal or political interests. This essay has shown that print could serve commercial and political ends at exactly the same time that it made available new information, concerning which judgments of truth or falsehood were required. The case of ipecacuanha thus exposes tensions between distinct ethics of publicity in the early modern period.[footnoteRef:101]  [100:  Journal des Sçavans (1702, 7 Aug, pp. 539-40). Helvetius’s name was mentioned by Valentini, but edited out for the Parisian readership!]  [101:  Keller (2015). On print culture and the question of public trust, see Pettegree (2015, Chapters 12 & 14); Johns (1998); Alcorn Baron, Lindquist & Shevlin (2017, pp. 1-20). My argument is indebted to Mah’s reflections on the rhetorical construction of publics (2000), as also to Hirschmann (1997); Pocock (1985). On Leibniz’s own view of print culture and journals as a corrective to it, cf. Warner (1998, pp. 135-6); Eisenstein (2011, p. 87).] 

This interplay between secrecy and publicity, manuscript and print, could be harnessed for profit; it afforded not only the assertion of particular natural facts, but also strategic elisions and silences about them. At issue in this article is not the establishment of a definitive version of events surrounding the acquisition and implementation of ipecacuanha, but rather the means by which credible information and reputation were produced in the early modern public domain.[footnoteRef:102] While there is a sizeable literature on medical secrets in the reign of Louis XIV, this essay is less concerned with secrecy as such, than with exploring how entanglements of power shaped the stabilisation of medical “information” within the public domain, and the work that print versus manuscript, secrecy versus publicity performed in that stabilisation process. The ipecacuanha dispute by no means marked the end of medical secrets, which endured as a feature of medical practice. But it may be seen as an instant when publication allowed royal favour to black-box a particular version of natural knowledge. The “black box” of ipecacuanha has remained unopened ever since; over three centuries of print culture, its efficacy and identity have appeared to constitute neutral historical facts.[footnoteRef:103]  [102:  As exemplified in Shapin (1995).]  [103:  Cook (2017, p. 101).] 

The ipecacuanha case also reveals how a situation in which men of letters depended upon established commercial networks for access to distant objects of knowledge created incidences of conflict between medical entrepreneurial culture and fragile early modern programmes for creating matters of fact. Ipecacuanha, as it became “known” within the early modern French medical world, was a chimera; the process of stripping a natural object of local significance, in order to endow it with new powers to circulate as a “fact” within the complex evidential culture of early modern medical practice, was the same process that made it possible for the distinction between ipecacuanha and bexuguillo to be strategically effaced.[footnoteRef:104] Insofar as the genre of commodity history depends upon claims that commodities have stable identities through space and time, and that historical records concerning them provide reliable testimony concerning the way past cultures used, valued and understood them, the ipecacuanha case challenges such historiographical assumptions.  [104:  Cook (2007).] 

In following the trajectory of the drug and of information about it, sharp social and political divides within the medical marketplace are thrown into relief. Merchants like Boulduc, Grenier or Blegny were the chief challengers to Helvetius’s story. For them, commercial injustice was sufficient cause to mount an epistemological challenge to his priority claim, in the form of rival accounts that reasserted merchants’ intellectual priority over the drug. Yet Helvetius was able to secure his claim in the teeth of their attacks by allying himself with political power and courting élite patronage, as well as by fostering a grey area of knowledge about what continued to be termed his “arcanum”: a loose definition of “ipecacuanha” to which everyone—including merchants—subscribed.[footnoteRef:105] Courtly power affected knowledge production by helping to silence Helvetius’s critics through the instrument of the lawcourt, by securing a supply of the drug, and even by shaping how and where it could be used. But the power of any one court over the transnational learned world was also geographically constrained. The ipecacuanha study thus offers an opportunity to examine how the Republic of Letters and the court differed in their ability to control information flow. [105:  On ipecacuanha as Helvetius’s “arcanum”, see, e.g., Hoefer (1854-77, Vol. 23, p. 873); Leibniz (1923-, Series 1, Vol. 12), Letters 156 (1696, 6/16 Dec) and 313 (1696, 12/22 Mar), Conrad Barthold Behrens to Leibniz, Hildesheim.] 

 Around Europe, other constituencies were also using print culture for various goals: self-advancement, profit, justice, community. Though apparently accepting the veracity of Grenier’s story, and in a position to publicise it, in the event Leibniz took a more temperate view of Helvetius’s actions than Boulduc, portraying him as the useful broker of a drug originally made known to Europeans by Piso. This stance may be understood in the light of Volckamer’s remarks: dissemination of knowledge about new drugs was in itself an act of public virtue. Boulduc’s hope that Leibniz would set the record straight by restoring Grenier’s status as discoverer was confounded by Leibniz’s view of drugs information as common property, and commercial secrecy as an obstacle to public benefit. In this model of the public domain, “discovery” was not the story’s end.


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