Unnamed, not unskilled: Toward a new labor history of pharmacy.

By recovering the dependent, often enslaved, laborers who helped to make European medicines commercially available in the New England colonies, this article offers a new history of early American pharmaceutical knowledge and production. It does so by considering the life and labor of an unnamed, enslaved assistant who was said to make tinctures, elixirs, and other common remedies in a 1758 letter between two business partners, Silvester Gardiner, a successful surgeon and apothecary in Boston, Massachusetts, and William Jepson, his former apprentice, in Hartford, Connecticut. Using strategies from slavery and critical archive studies, as well as from social history and the history of medicine, this article emphasizes the materiality and embodiment of pharmaceutical production and follows fragmentary evidence beyond the business archive to reverse the systemic erasure of enslaved and indentured laborers from the records of eighteenth-century manufacturers of medicines. The medicine trades of men like Gardiner and Jepson appear more reliant upon dependent laborers - named and unnamed - who not only performed rote tasks but brought their experience and judgment to their labors as well. Their contributions could be obviously medical (preparing remedies) or more ambiguous (stoking fires, shipping goods), but these actions together constituted early modern pharmacy, enabled the expansion of the transatlantic medicine trade, and laid the foundations for the more self-sufficient and industrialized pharmacy that developed in the nineteenth century. Centering the skill and knowledge among subordinated laborers in one facet of an emergent transatlantic care economy affirms the entanglement of slavery and science and underscores the necessity of asking new questions of old sources.

(Un)making labor invisible: A syllabus.

From industrial psychology and occupational therapy to the laboratory bench and scenes of "heroic" fieldwork, there are important connections between the science of labor and the labor of science. Participants in the 2022 Gordon Cain Conference explored how greater attention to these connections might deepen historical understanding of what constitutes "science" and what counts as "labor." Our conversations circled around themes of vulnerability (of systems, individual bodies, historical testimony), affect (pertaining to historical actors and ourselves), and interdependence (e.g. across human groups, species, political boundaries, and time). For the members of this group, which grew out of a panel discussion, these themes and motivations coalesced around a topical focus on invisibility, which helped us to articulate - in the form of a co-created syllabus - research questions about science and labor from multiple angles pertaining to practice, archival preservation, and scholarly representation. This syllabus is organized into six thematic modules that aim to challenge and historicize the concept of invisible labor by facilitating comparisons across geographic, temporal, conceptual, and disciplinary boundaries. The goals of this collaborative syllabus, in sum, are manifold: we seek to facilitate more inclusive histories of science through critical engagement with "invisibility" and thereby promote a more expansive understanding of what constitutes scientific labor; to highlight the constitutive role of gendered labor practices in the scientific enterprise; to draw attention to interdependencies that make all forms of production (knowledge or material) possible; to elucidate systems of remuneration for scientific labor over the longue durée and through pointed comparisons; and, finally, to promote self-reflexivity about the methods we use to narrate the history of science and make sense of our own labors.

That "Bulky Commodity, Tobacco".

Tobacco, like other popular commodities, both reflected the rhythms of early modern empires and contributed to them. People, goods, and ideas crossing the Atlantic Ocean often traveled as freight in vessels bound upon other business, and much of that was tobacco business. Using a variety of historical examples, the current article explores tobacco's economic, cultural, and labor-related worlds to show how one plant shaped institutions of human enslavement, altered colonial ecologies, offered new sensory possibilities, and ruined fortunes. Although now perhaps better known within medical contexts as a significant, preventable cause of death, tobacco as it is understood today is also a highly political, economic, and cultural product, characteristics that have shaped human relationships to the commodity over the centuries. The 17th and 18th centuries, for example, saw a dramatic rise in tobacco consumption in Europe alongside an influx of colonial natural products across the continent. The tobacco trade offered power and profit to some, exploitation and enslavement to others. It underwrote the rise of prominent merchant and political families while shaping the daily routines of countless enslaved men, women, and children tasked with growing the plant. Tobacco leaves also offered hopes of medical treatment and trustworthy business dealings, as well as a moment of respite on a long voyage. At every stage of its evolution into a global commodity, tobacco's meanings and roles changed, becoming more fully integrated into European empire and its structures of power and profit in the process.