'For private families, put up in the compleatest manner, with ample directions': domestic medicine chests
Date
2000
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Publisher
University of Delaware
Abstract
Medicine chests, also known as apothecary chests or physick closets, are not particularly rare objects. They appear in many probate inventories, newspaper advertisements, and account books. Historic documents reveal their use from ancient times to the present. In America, they were carried on to the battlefield to treat Revolutionary and Civil War soldiers and they were a prerequisite for sea travel. Apothecaries and doctors used both portable and permanently fixed chests, to store the medicines with which they treated their patients. Few researchers, however, have focused on the acquisition, outfitting, and domestic use of these chests. This study will explore the role of domestic medicine chests between the mid-eighteenth and the mid-nineteenth centuries; a time when the field of medicine was becoming professionalized. ☐ This study of medicine chests reveals medicine was treated as a commodity not unlike fashionable clothing and elegant houses. In addition to their medicinal purposes, some chests indicated the gentility and social status of their owners. In the eighteenth century, apothecary chests were not mass-produced objects. Most were imported from England and were rarely produced by American cabinetmakers. This thesis explores the process by which a customer decided to request a chest, determine its ultimate form, finish, dimension and utility, and acquire the knowledge to use the object and its contents. Further, it argues that elites used medicine chests to exhibit fashionability in a novel furniture form. Jean Skipwith and David Harper, two eighteenth-century persons, will serve as case studies of medicine chest users. This study is based on extant medicine chests, probate inventories, craftsmen's account books, newspaper, diaries, cookery and recipe books, published medical sources, botanical literature, and home remedies.