SEMINAR ANNOUNCEMENT: FRIDAY, OCTOBER 31 at LCP “Marketing Medicine: Apothecary Elizabeth Weed’s Economic Independence during the American Revolution” Susan Hanket Brandt, Temple University and 2012-2103 MCEAS Consortium Fellow Susan has provided the following abstract of her paper: During the American Revolution, apothecary Elizabeth Dickinson Weed asserted her entrepreneurial expertise to maintain her economic viability and to secure her son’s financial future. After her husband’s sudden death, Weed took over the family apothecary shop amid the political upheaval of the 1777/78 British occupation of Philadelphia. Weed’s newspaper advertisement emphasized that she retained her husband’s secret medicinal recipes, and had in fact “been employed these several years past in preparing them herself.” Weed was so successful in marketing “Weed’s Syrup” that it gained brand-name recognition and was counterfeited by another drug vendor. She responded by suing her competitor and lambasting him in the press for this “basest act of forgery.” In a period when Enlightenment natural philosophers argued that a woman’s mind was innately inferior, Weed used the press and the courts to assert her exclusive intellectual property rights in her product. This paper recovers free Euro-American women’s active participation in pharmaceutical-related trades in Philadelphia. In response to increasing consumer demand for medicinal panaceas, Weed and her fellow female drug vendors developed manipulative pharmaceutical marketing strategies to assert their products’ efficacy and authenticity, and to shape customers’ expectations that health was something that money could buy. Despite the economic fluctuations of American Revolutionary period, Weed’s pharmaceutical knowledge and marketing savvy were valuable commodities that translated into income and financial security for her family. This paper is a draft for a chapter in a forthcoming book titled Women in the Era of the American Revolution, edited by Barbara Oberg and Rosemarie Zagarri. I look forward to your comments. Friday, 31 October 2014 3:00-5:00 p.m. The Library Company of Philadelphia, 1314 Locust Street Everyone attending the seminar should read the paper in advance. For increased security, seminar papers will be individually password protected. Papers will be available for downloading for a limited time. Please contact [email protected] for access.
Posted on: Fri, 24 Oct 2014 15:41:11 +0000
Trending Topics
Recently Viewed Topics
© 2015