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

The partnership would not end well for either party, but in 1758 business looked promising. In May of that year, Silvester Gardiner wrote to his business partner William Jepson in Hartford, Connecticut about importing medicinal supplies to New England from London for the upcoming trading season. After assuring Jepson that he would provide the raw materials for making many of the day’s common remedies, Gardiner reminded him that “as you have now a negro boy I hope you will be able to make most of your Plasters and Unguents Tinctrs and Elixirs.” ¹ This line, delivered by Gardiner with expectancy to his partner, connects the labor of an unnamed enslaved assistant to the commercial production of medicines. What precisely he did toward the production of those medicines has been omitted from Gardiner and Jepson’s business records. Nor can it be assumed that the term “boy” is necessarily describing a youth or child in this context. Yet, what is clear is that his labor, in whatever form, is directly tied to the transatlantic pharmaceutical trade: in Gardiner’s planning, Jepson’s participation, the financial proceeds, and in the consequences of failure. (Re)centering the unnamed assistant in the social, legal, and medical fabric of colonial New England recovers an overlooked historical reality that dependent laborers, and especially enslaved people, were not only present in but contributed critical labor and skill to a commercializing medical marketplace. His story, even in fragments, embodies the mutual dependence of slavery, science, and medicine in the North American colonies and Atlantic world.

The person enslaved by Jepson would hardly have appeared out of place in Boston, Hartford, Newport, or any of New England’s busy port cities that featured small but notable Black populations by the eighteenth century. He does, however, appear out of place in many histories of science and especially histories of pharmacy. Although a robust literature has recovered enslaved people’s practices of treating illness by preparing dressings, ointments, powders, and other medicinal substances, neither their expertise nor labor has figured prominently in histories of the commercializing medical marketplace of eighteenth-century Europe and North America. ² In part, this reflects how contributions of the unseen and unfree were often omitted from the business records of relevant enterprises around the Atlantic world. It also reflects the often-deliberate denigration of enslaved or indigenous knowledge systems, especially those pertaining to medicine, in many eighteenth-century European scientific texts. ³ Recovery of these people’s labor, then, for historians of science likely requires an attention to the materiality and embodiment of that labor given the nature of the archive. What can a recipe, such as Gardiner’s for a conserve (or paste) of red roses, reveal about the labor or experience of preparing it: picking a pound of rosebuds, grinding them in a mill, mixing the roses in powdered sugar, and then kneading the resultant mixture, being careful to preserve the red color? ⁴ We can perhaps find a sense of the effort, attention, and skill required in a recipe or laboratory manual, even if someone’s specific experience has not been preserved with the same level of detail.

To do so, however, also requires understanding the political, cultural, and legal organization of labor that enabled the systemic erasure of entire groups from the histories of science and medicine. A characteristic of the institution of slavery, this kind of erasure also pervaded contexts, such as medicine, not typically associated with large-scale enslavement in the early modern period. Overcoming the hold of this logic demands new questions of old sources and the search for dependent laborers in places not previously investigated. This article attends to the critique of archival recovery that has predominated slavery studies in recent years, while also mobilizing longstanding social history conventions of recreating worlds out of archival fragments, considering multiple possibilities and outcomes, and trying to center the lived experiences of marginalized people from sources often designed to erase those experiences. ⁵ In other words, it foregrounds the materiality and intimacy of records that document the men, women, and children enslaved by Silvester Gardiner and William Jepson to redefine the work of pharmacy, even in Europeanized/colonized spaces, as not only the purview of the physician, chemist, surgeon, or apothecary. The New England medical marketplace thereby appears more expansive and inclusive from this vantage but also more exploitative and extractive, which is reflective of the relationship between slavery and science in this period.

These circumstances did not foster neat distinctions between unfree/free or waged/enslaved labor that have been deployed by historians. Triangulating the history of science, labor history, and slavery studies to recover workers in the New England medical marketplace reveals a spectrum of precarious persons encompassing indentured servants, apprentices, contract workers, African captives, and enslaved children in the eighteenth century. Dependency in these cases stemmed from legal status and custom intertwined with hierarchies based on categories of race, class, age, and gender, and would have varied in form as a result. ⁶ Though the argument that labor and coercion were more of a spectrum in the Anglo-Atlantic world has long been made by historians of Atlantic slavery, studies of servitude and bound labor have helped expand the vocabulary with which to make those claims, offering a model for historians of science to adapt to ongoing work in the field. ⁷ Enslaved men, women, and children have begun to be incorporated into narratives of innovation and industrialization, showing the influence of slavery studies on the history of science, for example. ⁸ This move also reflects an ongoing trend in the history of science to erode divisions between philosophers and mechanics (or, put another way, between headwork and handwork) that had been erected for hierarchical purposes centuries ago. ⁹ Such work recently has engaged the field of labor history to recover the people whose sweat and skills enabled mainstream science in a range of pursuits from mining to chemistry, helping the history of science move beyond the invisible technician paradigm. ¹⁰ In the context of pharmacy, recognizing the gradations of dependence among apprentices and indentured servants or between enslaved people, on one hand, offers a more nuanced view of the labor demands of an imperial care economy and, on the other, presents an opportunity to investigate how that dependence was reproduced and how it might be reconceptualized.

The glimpse of the unnamed enslaved assistant in Gardiner’s letter to Jepson shows an aspect of Black life seldom seen in colonial North America and infrequently captured by the history of science: that of enslaved men, women, and children both directly and indirectly engaged in commercialized pharmacy. ¹¹ Commercialized pharmacy in this period helped sustain the labor demands of the British plantation economy, transatlantic slave trade, and fiscal-military state, while its practitioners relied on those institutions for materials, patients, and profits. Though most evidence in this article derives from New England, legal records from across the British Atlantic colonies suggest that the arrangement was hardly a regional one. Whether the person Jepson enslaved rolled pills or not, others bound like him underwrote a burgeoning medicine trade in the eighteenth-century Anglo-Atlantic world with their labor by preparing remedies, stoking fires, shipping goods, collecting herbs, and much else. He is but one of many people from across the spectrum of dependency whose experiences of birth and death, kinship and community, toil and injury, and desperation and fear were constitutive of early modern medicine and ought to be included in labor histories of science and medicine.

While some medicines arrived in the British North American colonies in their packaged, salable forms, others needed to be assembled from their ingredients before they could be used. This dynamic created the possibility of medicine shortages when shipments were delayed or supplies ran low, but it also presented opportunities for a local economy of collecting, making, buying, and selling medicinal substances. By the time of Silvester Gardiner’s letter to William Jepson in 1758, commercialized medicines in a European style had become the backbone of health care across the institutions that comprised the British empire. The scope of the labor to import and prepare medicines could be significant, especially as sugar plantations, armed forces, and trading companies became institutional buyers of medicines in bulk amid a dramatic expansion of the medicine trade in the eighteenth century. Yet, colonial medicine production had not yet matched the scale or capitalization of Europe’s pharmacies, workshops, and laboratories, so it largely continued to occur within households and shops that blended a range of business pursuits and labor arrangements. ¹² In Silvester Gardiner’s household in Boston, Massachusetts, apprentices, servants, family, and enslaved persons interacted daily in ways that enabled him to attain wealth and status by combining surgery, pharmacy, and land speculation. He was by some measures the most prominent medical practitioner and medicine vendor in mid-century New England, the proceeds of which he invested in land. Both directly and indirectly, enslaved people were involved in his business and the business of pharmacy more generally. The fluidity of the household as a site of dependent labor and medicine production necessitates establishing who filled these spaces and contributed to the expansion of colonial pharmacy.

In the eighteenth-century Anglo-Atlantic world the household remained the basic economic unit of society and a foundation of the social and political order. As a commercial space, it was defined by the mobilization of familial, bound, and paid labor for domestic production and market-facing commercial participation. The household has typically been portrayed as characterized by authority concentrated in the household head and reinforced by women’s unpaid domestic labor. ¹³ In Western Europe, for example, apothecary shops often included the apothecary, his wife and children, servants, and apprentices all working in ways that blended domestic, manufacturing, and commercial roles. ¹⁴ Over time, however, historians’ interpretation of the colonial household has become more expansive, recognizing that many homes contained multiple businesses and did not always have a conventional male head of household, especially in urban areas. Households have been identified not only as sites of dependence but also as sites of economic negotiation. ¹⁵ A similar arrangement can be seen in Gardiner’s household that embodied both the work of preparing medicines in kitchens or small shops and the larger-scale work characteristic of early modern pharmaceutical manufactories and chemical laboratories that had begun to proliferate in Europe’s urban areas, though not yet as much in the North American colonies. ¹⁶

Enslaved servants, indentured servants, and apprentices co-mingled in New England households where they contributed to the household-based economy and became part of the family in some ways. As historian Joanne Pope Melish describes, however, “the family provided a site that was in some ways ideal for making difference compatible while keeping it different,” leading to divergent experiences of household labor. ¹⁷ For example, dependent or bound laborers would often be given dirty, repetitious, and menial tasks that could carry the threat of injury or death depending on the venture. ¹⁸ That Gardiner’s business blended surgery, pharmacy, and land speculation meant that the household was a busy place with a range of work to be done at all hours of the day. John Denison Hartshorn, from nearby Concord, arrived at Gardiner’s house on Marlborough Street at the age of sixteen to begin a five-year apprenticeship in 1752. When he arrived in Boston, Hartshorn observed that Gardiner’s household included Gardiner, his wife, Anne, their sons, William and James, and their daughters, Abigail (Nabby), Hannah, Rebecca, and Anne; as well as Gardiner’s younger brother, Joseph, also a physician, fellow apprentices William Jepson, John Frizell, and John Roberts, and Betty Young, the only servant Hartshorn mentions in his diary. He does not directly note any enslaved persons, though they were certainly there, and were there alongside apprentices, indentured servants, and kin in other Boston households too. ¹⁹

Boston, the hub of Gardiner’s business, was a port connected to the transatlantic slave trade that by the mid-eighteenth century featured an economy based on the labor of enslaved Africans and African Americans who managed to build resilient communities in the city. ²⁰ Slavery already existed as a daily part of life across New England, whereby humans were legal chattel to be bought, sold, rented out, or mortgaged at the turn of the eighteenth century, though they also at least nominally retained their personhood before the law. There followed between 1700 and 1750 a significant expansion of Boston’s enslaved population that reached, according to the 1754 Massachusetts Slave Census, around one thousand men, women, and children compared to a total population of more than 15,000 in the 1750s. ²¹ As a result, most bound labor in Boston became enslaved labor rather than indentured. Enslaved people comprised a greater portion of the work force and many learned a trade for artisanal or proto-industrial production. They also formed ties of friendship and family within and across urban households despite their bondage. ²²

Though not surprising in some senses, Hartshorn’s omission of the enslaved men, women, and children who also lived and worked within Gardiner’s household reflects the broader erasure of enslaved people’s labor and social lives from accounts of mercantile and, in this case, medical success. During the 1750s, the household would have included Benjamin and Pharaoh, who were each described as a “Negroe Servant to Silvester Gardiner,” Mingo, a child who was baptized at King’s Chapel in 1758, and Stepney, who died at the age of eight in 1759. The term “Negroe Servant” implied an enslaved person, as the term “slave” was not commonly used in colonial New England. Gardiner’s household was hardly a unique arrangement for merchants and artisans in Boston at the time as almost twenty-five percent of all Bostonians who had an estate inventory taken between 1700 and 1775 were enslavers. ²³

We can see how Gardiner’s household layered commercial and social spaces that were at once fluid and maintained by strict hierarchy through an entry from Hartshorn’s diary. On March 11, 1755, Hartshorn noted that “Lank made a grand frolick here & they had fiddling &C.” A month later, Lancaster “Lank” Hill, a member of Boston’s free Black community who had come to Boston across the river from Charlestown as a free man in 1751, married Margaret, an enslaved woman in Gardiner’s household. Together they had at least five children, several of whom survived to adulthood. We cannot know what they felt when a daughter, Margaret, was delivered by Gardiner’s colleague Doctor Pecker on January 13, 1756, or when Lancaster Junior perished in infancy. However, we can speculate that losing Lancaster Junior, and then young Margaret when she was eight, was devastating, leaving them full of despair and misery. ²⁴ Though Margaret and Lancaster’s match legally had not required Gardiner’s approval, they received it but could not cohabit upon marriage due to Margaret’s enslavement. Margaret and her children would have remained Gardiner’s property for the duration of their lives, and the family would have had to negotiate being divided between multiple households, each structured by slavery. Margaret and her children, however, were never sold and managed to maintain a family in bondage for decades. ²⁵ Whether the music Hartshorn noted was on behalf of Margaret or for some other occasion we can only speculate, but the reference to music, dancing, and company suggests a degree of mobility and the ties Margaret and Lancaster were able to establish. ²⁶

The hierarchies between the members of Gardiner’s household remained stark during daily activities, despite the evidence of sociability and mobility. Hartshorn, for example, “had a great dispute with Ben about making the fire,” he noted in his diary, and it was likely not the only such occurrence. A few months later in May 1754, he wrote that Anne Gardiner had told him that “‘if I stay’d here this 7 years I should always be treated as a Negro.’” ²⁷ This note perhaps reflects Anne Gardiner’s disdain for her husband’s sometimes clumsy and often carousing apprentices, but it also speaks to the tacit understanding that to be Black would represent a more degrading position within the household hierarchy for a young man like Hartshorn despite a shared dependent status. Her comment to Hartshorn suggests that the treatment of bound Bostonians still ultimately depended on slave status, but that slippage was possible regardless of one’s precise situation if one was dependent in some way.

Slavery existed in Gardiner’s household through other business as well. Enslaved persons regularly visited Gardiner’s house for treatment of an illness or injury, or to pick up medicines for someone in their enslaver’s household. Who would have answered the door in such cases? Would they have conversed before the visitor was directed to an apprentice for care or given a package of pills? How long might they have stayed? Who relayed the instructions for use or answered questions about dosage? ²⁸ Enslaved persons arrived at Gardiner’s door not just on errands but also for evaluation as chattel. In 1754, Gardiner inspected an enslaved man that Nathaniel Rogers had agreed to purchase, finding him “not sound.” ²⁹ Soundness connoted the capacity for labor that could be interpreted based on a variety of internal and external signs, including one’s humoral complexion. Under the humoral framework for understanding health, in which Gardiner would have been trained, visible physical markings reflected pathologies, behaviors, and innate traits, including suitability for work. The ability to analyze such evidence fell within the medical practitioner’s ambit and thus positioned Gardiner as someone who could be asked to inspect an enslaved person in such a way. ³⁰ That this encounter would have occurred in Gardiner’s household where enslaved men, women, and children lived and worked would only have underscored their status despite whatever opportunities – to marry, socialize, move about – they may have secured for themselves in Boston.

By performing domestic labor, as well as reproductive labor in Margaret’s case, Benjamin, Pharaoh, and Margaret supported Gardiner’s business, given that it emanated from the household. Yet, it is also possible that they more directly engaged with pharmacy, as did the enslaved assistant grinding and boiling herbs in Hartford, 100 miles to the southwest. This possibility becomes more evident through the experience of Isaac Hazard Stockbridge, the most archivally visible person enslaved by Gardiner. Isaac Hazard appears in the King’s Chapel vital registers only briefly in 1761 at the time of his marriage on August 11 to Cooper(a) Young, a free woman of color. ³¹ Despite his marriage, Isaac Hazard continued living in Gardiner’s house and would have faced similar challenges as Margaret and Lancaster by being unable to cohabit with his wife, especially after they had children. Many of the references to him are based on secondhand accounts and incorporate a significant degree of embellishment given the events that transpired. No record of his voice remains to offer another side of the story.

The few details that we have about the early life of the man called Isaac Hazard Stockbridge come from an 1820 court case in Maine involving the residence of his granddaughter Harriet Lewis. According to the case: “Hazard was a negro man, imported from Africa about the year 1740, when a child, and was claimed as a slave by purchase by Doctor Sylvester Gardiner.” ³² The early 1740s were a pivotal moment in the history of Northern slavery. Before this period, most captives imported to New England arrived from the West Indies as part of the sugar trade (intercolonial slave trade); afterwards voyages began to directly connect New England and West Africa to fulfill demand for enslaved labor across the region, especially in Rhode Island, in response to changes in labor availability and economic conditions. The population of African captives in that colony correspondingly swelled in this period. Silvester Gardiner came from a slaveholding family in South Kingston, Rhode Island, where his family had connections through business and marriage to the Robinson, Hazard, and Updike families who were large landowners and enslavers in the region. Gardiner’s access to medical education reflects the opportunities afforded sons of Rhode Island’s principal families: they could visit Europe and train to become lawyers, merchants, or doctors (as Gardiner did) – all of which was in part based on wealth generated from slavery. ³³ Given these familial connections and naming conventions at the time, it is plausible that Isaac Hazard had been enslaved by a member of the Hazard family in Rhode Island before his purchase by Gardiner and had perhaps even been initially purchased in Newport after capture in Africa, given that it was often the family name of the first owner that was forced upon newly disembarked captives. Gardiner had also sought to purchase enslaved persons in Rhode Island during the 1750s, which supports this interpretation. ³⁴

The names Isaac, Hazard, and Stockbridge were not uncommon in New England, so they can only suggest a conceivable early history for Isaac Hazard that otherwise remains concealed. ³⁵ Nevertheless, these early experiences would have informed those in Silvester Gardiner’s household. Sometime before 1761, when he is recorded as marrying Cooper(a) Young, Isaac Hazard was purchased by Gardiner in Boston, though there is some disagreement on this exact date. ³⁶ Gardiner, as Isaac Hazard’s enslaver, agreed to his marriage to Cooper(a), a free woman, which he had also done six years prior for Margaret’s marriage to Lancaster Hill, a free man. Both marriages occurred at King’s Chapel in Boston where Gardiner was an active parishioner alongside many of Boston’s elite. White churches offered access to literacy and numeracy for enslaved and free persons of color in New England. ³⁷ What might the possibility of these skills have meant for Isaac Hazard’s labor in Gardiner’s household, especially given the mobility and sociability, but also tensions, that could occur in a household featuring a spectrum of bound labor?

John Denison Hartshorn’s tasks as an apprentice can guide us in looking for what labor Isaac Hazard may have performed. When he became responsible for medical duties in his second year of apprenticeship to Gardiner, Hartshorn largely treated patients considered more marginal or less lucrative, namely the poor, soldiers, sailors, immigrants, and the enslaved. He wrote that many of his house calls were made at night but does not mention whether he had any assistance in this work. ³⁸ Hartshorn prepared prescriptions for Gardiner’s patients, compounded medicines in bulk for sale in the shop, and packed wholesale orders of medicines for shipment. He also undertook tasks for Gardiner that did not strictly fall under a medical purview, which would not have been atypical for medical apprentices, especially in the North American colonies. He kept accounts, served as a scribe and messenger, and even collected debts. We can only speculate, but perhaps Isaac Hazard participated in some of this labor given that in New England men enslaved to artisans were known to assist them in their various pursuits of wood or metalworking, for example. ³⁹ Would he have carried aromatic barks or handled corrosive acids? Perhaps Isaac Hazard pounded together antimony, laudanum, nitric acid, rock salt, and charcoal for Hartshorn when he grew tired or indolent (as Anne Gardiner often accused him of being). Did he assist in making an antimonial diaphoretic to induce sweating that Hartshorn had copied down from Gardiner? It called for twenty pounds of pulverized, crude antimony to be mixed in small quantities with sixty pounds of potassium nitrate, an inorganic salt, and then to be repeatedly boiled, dissolved, cooled, and purified in a “large iron kettle first made almost red hot.” The physical exertion and careful attention required of this preparation are apparent in the recipe. Such an arrangement seems to have been the case when James Derham helped his enslaver, Doctor John Kearsly, compound medicines and administer them to patients in Philadelphia around this time. ⁴⁰

Within a few years of his marriage, Isaac Hazard reappears in the archive through a series of incidents that led to his expulsion from Gardiner’s household. Nineteenth-century court records say that in the early 1760s Isaac Hazard set fire to Gardiner’s house in an act that was often a capital offense in eighteenth-century New England. ⁴¹ There remains no “official” record of Isaac Hazard’s alleged arson, though a fire did occur in an “Out-Building at the back of Dr. Gardiner’s Dwell-House” in 1764 and was extinguished “without doing any considerable Damage,” according to the Boston Evening-Post. ⁴² Whether Isaac Hazard set this fire or was simply blamed for it we cannot know, though the memory of it persisted within the Gardiner family for generations. Around this same time, Isaac Hazard was also accused of attempting to poison Gardiner’s family by putting a substance into the breakfast coffee, which was only discovered, the story goes, because he warned Gardiner’s daughter Hannah “one morning not to drink of the coffee.” ⁴³

Though the source of this account renders its accuracy questionable at best, it offers several lines of analysis to explore. Does this accusation of poison imply that Isaac Hazard worked with medicines in Gardiner’s home? Perhaps. It does suggest his familiarity, or at least perceived familiarity, with the location of and ability to access medicinal substances in Gardiner’s shop since most common medicinal substances could be poisonous, depending on the dosage. Preparing medicines, or poisons for that matter, remained quite like preparing food, a task that most enslaved servants would have performed in some capacity in Boston. Gardiner’s recipe for a conserve of roses, recall, included a direction to knead the sugar, rosebud paste with one’s hands “as Dough is worked to make Bread.” ⁴⁴ A historian of science might recognize the closeness in headwork and handwork across the possible work Isaac Hazard may have done in Gardiner’s household. The accusation also illuminates some of the relationships in Gardiner’s household: that Isaac Hazard may have trusted Hannah, and that he was confident, or audacious, enough in that trust to undertake this task.

One way to consider this incident is to understand the threat that poisoning was seen to pose in societies dependent on bound labor. Given the act’s gendered and racial connotations and association with plots, poisoning was codified as a serious offense in many British Atlantic colonies. Encounters across the Atlantic world had fostered an intense European fear of African poisoning, accompanied by a fascination with African plant knowledge and medicine. This fear often became manifest around rebellions. Two major mid-eighteenth-century events, Makandall’s conspiracy in Saint-Domingue and Tacky’s Rebellion in Jamaica, featured spiritual medicine or spiritually protective rituals that were interpreted by enslavers as a form of poison. ⁴⁵ It was apparent in more mundane circumstances as well. A Virginia law of 1748, for instance, stipulated the death penalty for any “negro, or other slave, [who] shall prepare, exhibit, or administer any medicine whatsoever.” Based on this law, more enslaved Virginians stood trial for poisoning than for any other crime except stealing between 1740 and 1785, with punishments ranging from death to physical mutilation. ⁴⁶ A similar South Carolina law enacted in 1740 and strengthened in 1751 restricted the sale of poisonous substances (many of which were also medicinal ingredients) and prohibited druggists from employing enslaved or free persons of color in jobs that involved making or dispensing medicines. ⁴⁷ These medicine laws could reflect the prevalence of Black doctors and pharmacy in those locations, or they might embody a specter of fear rather than its reality. Nevertheless, they do speak to a key reality of the medical experience, as historian Sharla Fett puts it: these “laws implicitly recognized that medicine had dangerous as well as beneficial uses” that were at least believed to be within reach of enslaved people to deploy. ⁴⁸

While there were no laws criminalizing medicine in such a way in Boston, cultural practice surrounding poison was a different story. Isaac Hazard’s alleged attempt to poison Gardiner’s family came less than a decade after a sensationalized case of poisoning had engulfed the city’s medical, mercantile, and enslaved communities in 1755. In both cases, the details are sparse and mediated by an unreliable archive where they can be found, though the earlier instance has received more scholarly attention. Few stories captured the popular attention like the suspicious death of John Codman, a prominent merchant residing in Charlestown across the Charles River from Boston. Boston’s newspapers published updates, and Gardiner’s apprentices gossiped about it. Of the three people found guilty of Codman’s murder in Middlesex County Court, Mark and Phillis were publicly executed while Phoebe was sold out of the colony. All three were enslaved by Codman; Mark and Phillis also struggled to maintain families outside his household. ⁴⁹

The poison identified in Codman’s death, arsenic, was determined to have come from the inventory of one of Boston’s established medical practitioners. Accounts vary but either Mark or Phoebe first sought to acquire arsenic by asking Kerr, a man enslaved by Doctor John Gibbons who had helped train Silvester Gardiner and then become his father-in-law. A relatively common substance, arsenic was used medicinally at the time and would likely have been accessible in Gibbons’s household given the medical work that occurred there. Medical texts described not only the ways to prepare the substance safely for remedies but also its effects at higher dosages as a poison. Kerr apparently did not provide any arsenic, perhaps after hearing from Phoebe of the group’s plans to kill Codman. Instead, Mark acquired arsenic from an enslaved man identified as Robbin, who was enslaved by Doctor William Clarke. Robbin, according to Mark and Phillis’s testimonies, had also told Mark how to use the arsenic powder he had given him. People in Boston trusted enslaved people to handle their medicines and seek their own medical treatment, so the mobility of enslaved people or access to arsenic are not the significant points here. Rather, this example illustrates that those enslaved by medical practitioners were perceived by others in the Black community to have access to and knowledge of pharmaceutical substances. In another circumstance, perhaps Mark or Phoebe would have asked Margaret, Benjamin, Pharoah, or Isaac Hazard in Gardiner’s household for arsenic rather than Kerr and Robbin. ⁵⁰

By contrast, Isaac Hazard’s attempted poisoning of Gardiner’s family, if it happened, did not appear in any newspapers in the early 1760s. Nor did he seem to receive any extraordinary corporeal punishment. Perhaps Gardiner hoped to keep the incident discrete to avoid damaging his reputation since he saw that the Codman case lingered in Boston’s collective memory. ⁵¹ Nevertheless, Isaac Hazard and Cooper(a) did face consequences for his alleged actions. According to Gardiner’s grandson, Robert Hallowell Gardiner, writing nearly a half-century later, the attempted poisoning and arson became too much of a risk to bear for Gardiner’s neighbors who sought Isaac Hazard’s punishment, “saying that the doctor might submit to be poisoned if he chose, but when it came to incendiarism, it was more than they would endure.” ⁵² Gardiner, perhaps heeding their calls, sent Isaac Hazard to his property in Gardinerston (later Pittston, Maine) where he worked a farm on the west bank of the Kennebec River until his death in 1780. While Gardiner never seems to have formally manumitted Isaac Hazard, he did not separate him from his family either. According to the court documents, Isaac Hazard was soon joined by Cooper(a) and their children. Borrowing here from historian Tiya Miles’s approach, what might Isaac Hazard, Cooper(a), or their children have valued enough to “save, pack, and carry” on their journey north to a new household where they could live together under one roof? ⁵³

Being sent with one’s family to northern New England seems far from the typical punishment in cases of suspected arson and poisoning. That the punishment did not include family separation reflected, perhaps, goodwill Isaac Hazard had accumulated over years supporting Gardiner’s business, or it may have reflected that the accusations were fallacious or hyperbolic, though the outcome still seems exceptional. Isaac Hazard had helped build Gardiner’s pharmacy whether he rolled pills or not, and he likely did, by providing labor throughout his household featuring mixed economic activity. In response, he may have sought to emancipate himself from Gardiner on several occasions before he turned to other forms of resistance. In the April 24, 1755 Boston Weekly News-Letter appeared a notice that a man named Hazard had “run away this Morning from his Master,” though did not name that enslaver. Hazard could read and spoke good English, had been inoculated against smallpox, and had “formerly belong’d to Dr. Stevens,” the notice adds. The same man had also run away two years earlier in 1753. If not Isaac Hazard, these notices describe someone with a similar life history in the Anglo-Atlantic world who also labored within Boston’s medical marketplace, contributed to its growth, and sought to escape it. ⁵⁴

Isaac Hazard’s experience likely was not unique. Enslavement was visible among medical practitioners across Massachusetts. Benjamin Stockbridge, a physician in Scituate, enslaved Abraham Colden and likewise prepared medicinal spirits, among other remedies, using chemical techniques. ⁵⁵ In terms of medicine production and distribution, however, Gardiner’s business achieved higher volume, profits, and overseas connections than his regional peers. He imported goods from London and maintained wholesale customers across New England amid an even broader correspondence network. He also left more records than his peers. ⁵⁶ Recovering Isaac Hazard’s legal, cultural, and family lives enables an examination of his laboring life, especially as it pertains to the history of science and medicine given the paucity of sources that record his presence, let alone his skills or acumen, in the New England medical marketplace. Using what we can surmise of Isaac Hazard’s experience in Gardiner’s household, we can turn our attention southwards to consider the enslaved assistant preparing medicines for William Jepson in Harford, Connecticut.

Entangled as they were with trends in exploitation and profit-seeking, medicines were shaped by the kinds of punishment and resistance that comprised the institution of Atlantic slavery. Dependency too informed the ways labor was deployed to deliver goods and services within the New England medical marketplace and, thus, underlay the very practice of pharmacy itself. The enslaved assistant, for example, prepared medicines that William Jepson sold on behalf of his partnership with Silvester Gardiner. He was not the only person Jepson enslaved. Though those men, women, and children shared a common status with Isaac Hazard, Margaret, and the others enslaved by Gardiner, they faced divergent futures when their enslavers faced economic hardship.

Born in the city of Boston on April 12, 1733, William Jepson trained as a surgeon and apothecary under Gardiner, living in his house with Gardiner’s family and other apprentices, as well as Margaret, Pharoah, Benjamin, and perhaps Isaac Hazard in the 1750s. He would have tended enslaved people who came for treatment and worked alongside them in the household. After finishing his training, Jepson served as a surgeon in a Massachusetts regiment during the Seven Years’ War in 1756 and the following year set up an apothecary shop in Hartford, Connecticut with Gardiner as a partner upon his return from the war. Hartford and Boston were close enough to enable easy communication and transportation but sufficiently distant to prevent Gardiner from checking on Jepson in person. For seven years they would share the profits of their endeavor, with Gardiner providing ingredients and some medicines at no markup, and Jepson responsible for preparing products and transacting all the local business. Jepson’s shop displayed the same sign as Gardiner’s, that of a unicorn standing over a mortar (a common motif for apothecaries), which makes sense given that the partnership shared inventory, costs, earnings, and a reliance on bound labor, such as the enslaved assistant mentioned by Gardiner in 1758. ⁵⁷

We know that this one enslaved person was expected to prepare medicines for Jepson and thus can speculate as to what that might have entailed. He was likely not the only one doing so in Jepson’s shop either. Jepson debited the partnership £12 annually for the “service of my negro man in the Company’s Business” from May 1763 to December 1764. ⁵⁸ This unnamed man may have been the same person referenced as a “boy” in Gardiner’s letter five years earlier, or perhaps it was someone else given that Jepson enslaved several people during these decades. Per Gardiner’s letter to Jepson, the enslaved assistant would have made plasters, unguents, tinctures, and elixirs. ⁵⁹ Plasters and unguents (or ointments) were common categories of medicines applied to the skin whereas tinctures and elixirs, also common categories, were ingested for internal matters. They could be found in retail shops packaged in small doses or stored in bulk aboard ships or in military hospitals. They were common forms of medicine. Jepson, for instance, carried a wide range of such products from Gardiner’s shop with him during the Seven Years’ War. ⁶⁰ That Gardiner advised Jepson to have an enslaved person prepare these items suggests that he believed that person possessed sufficient literacy and numeracy to follow written instructions and identify measurements. It also suggests that Gardiner felt the enslaved assistant was familiar with distillation, boiling, and preservation processes. Producing the rosewater Gardiner sold, for example, required more than a week of preparation per batch and significant quantities of rose petals, salt, fire, and, perhaps most crucially, attention. ⁶¹ Gardiner’s shop in Boston would have blended chemistry, alchemy, and cooking in a space that was at once preindustrial and organized for scale but also quite artisanal. Something similar can be said for Jepson’s shop.

Plasters and unguents share common steps in their production, as described by one of the most common pharmacy manuals at the time, Robert James’s Pharmacopoeia Universalis (New Universal English Dispensatory). Such manuals circulated the Anglo-Atlantic world carrying information vital for preparing and using European medicines. Gardiner imported copies of James’s Pharmacopoeia from London, which he sold to medical practitioners in New England. Jepson would have likely read it in Gardiner’s house and thus would have used some of the recipes contained therein at his shop. ⁶² Plasters and unguents first required animal or vegetable matter, typically lard or oil, to be carefully boiled without burning it to achieve an unctuous or sticky consistency. To this base would be added gums, essential oils, powders, or metallic compounds, such as white lead or ammoniacum, to provide aroma, taste, and color. The desired consistency of a plaster or unguent varied with its ingredients and intended use, so someone doing this work would have had to make judgments during preparation to reach the intended physical characteristics, either in line with the recipe or deviating from it depending on the desired outcome. This was not always a simple task when substances could melt too quickly or burn easily. Knowing precisely when to stop heating a vessel to ensure an optimal consistency and color would indeed have been a skill acquired through practice. In Gardiner’s shop, Hartshorn had prepared spirits using distillation and handled hazardous chemical acids that sometimes spilled or overflowed. Once, a bottle of oil of vitriol (now known as sulfuric acid) “broke & did much damage,” ruining Hartshorn’s shirt, though we can imagine that it easily could have had more serious consequences – either for his skin or for his status in the household. After the work of boiling, mixing, straining, and cooling came the labor of rolling and kneading the plaster or unguent into its salable form. This part of the process could require both fine motor skills to form small strips of plaster and muscular strength to manipulate pastes. ⁶³

Given Gardiner’s commercial reputation and the scale of his partnership with Jepson, he likely would not have suggested an enslaved person make these products unless he trusted that they would be made to his satisfaction. Each step required attention and evaluation to make decisions about how long to heat or how much of an ingredient to add since these recipes were not typically recorded with exact measurements. For tinctures and elixirs, the most common forms of liquid remedies commercially available, “the whole Work depends upon well regulating the Heat,” writes James, who described the process of digesting ingredients into a solvent as a form of art. The art required knowing what liquids would best extract qualities from the pharmacological ingredients, which would, in turn, determine the effects and efficacy of the medicine. Elixirs were larger solutions than tinctures, requiring “a gentle Heat to evaporate the Moisture” from an initial mixture of herbs or spices and oil followed by several rounds of digestion (the equivalent of pressure cooking or fermentation when more ingredients would be added) that would last for two to four days – a significant investment of time and energy. ⁶⁴ Consider the physical motions of mashing the fifty-six pounds of myrrh for an “elixir of propriety” or boiling the twenty-eight pounds of guaiacum gum and forty pounds of Peruvian bark that Gardiner received from London for an “elixir of many virtues.” The ingredients would then be simmered and mixed repeatedly before a final evaporation step in a specialized vessel to remove excess liquid. Powdered or liquid opium would have been added to many of these tinctures and elixirs, usually in a small production space with poor ventilation that could be operated by one or a handful of people. ⁶⁵

Gardiner soon sought to provide Jepson with additional bound laborers for the shop, given these labor demands. Locating labor was constitutive of entrepreneurship in the eighteenth century when legal status did not necessarily determine who performed which jobs. Scarcity of skilled hands for hire encouraged masters to train servants and enslaved people in a range of trades, such as pharmacy in this case. ⁶⁶ He wrote to Jepson that “I should beg you to know whether Doctr Langfell’s widow will sell her negro and whether he is a good one, if you can set your self with a negro there let me know, and the price, and I will Enable you to buy one.” ⁶⁷ Written one year after the enslaved assistant’s appearance in a similar letter, this request raises the question of whether something had happened, such that Jepson needed a replacement, or was business such that additional hands were required? Given that the person in question had been enslaved by Doctor Langfell, a medical practitioner, did they also possess knowledge or skills that would have been valuable to Gardiner and Jepson’s partnership? This seems likely. About a week later, Gardiner also agreed to terms with a man he described as “a good natured well behaved Irish man Nam’d Timothy Malony” bound to Jepson per the terms of “£14 lawfull money a year for two years” with Jepson “to find him meat drink washing & lodging.” This seems like an ordinary arrangement for a servant or apprentice, though £14 was a decent sum for his two years of bondage given that the typical annual wage for a laborer in a London laboratory usually started around £10–12 and the estimated per capita income in Massachusetts was £12 in 1771. ⁶⁸

Indentured servants were a critical part of New England’s labor pool which added to the region’s economically diverse society and wealth. In 1765, a Philadelphia merchant remarked that “the chief articles that answer here from Ireland which can be bought are Linnens . . . Beef, Butter, Men, Women & Boy Servants.” The merchant’s remark reflects that the demand for indentured servants had burgeoned in the eighteenth century, despite the drastic increase in slavery. ⁶⁹ Malony’s annual wage, however, differs from most other arrangements of the time, which raises questions about the nature of his work for Gardiner and Jepson. Indentured or convict servants were not typically given annual wages since their employer had purchased their term of servitude, but they could be incentivized to produce more labor if they had recognizable skills. ⁷⁰ Malony may have had experience with medicines or even have been trained as an apprentice, which was common in New England. ⁷¹ As a contractual laborer, however, Malony would have faced criminal penalties for failing to fulfill the terms of his agreement with Gardiner and Jepson. Apprenticeships and indentures offered similar pitfalls for the person selling their labor. ⁷² Jepson’s shop thus featured a range of dependent and precarious labor – embodied by Malony, the unnamed assistant, and others Jepson enslaved – that reflects the idea of property in persons already integrated into colonial medical practice and medicinal production.

Despite his advantageous relationship with Gardiner and the early promise of their partnership, Jepson faced mounting debts in the 1760s. For one, his seven-year partnership with Gardiner had failed to yield the returns that either man anticipated. Gardiner claimed he was owed at least £2,800 in 1765 after supplying more than £4,000 of medicines over the course of the partnership leading to a public dispute between the two men. ⁷³ During this time several enslaved people in Jepson’s household had died. First Dinah, “negro servt to Dr Willm Jepson,” in September 1760, and then “a Negro Infant female Child, servt to Doctr Jepson” in April 1764. These are the only references to Dinah and the infant child in Jepson’s records or in the records of the First Church in Hartford, where Jepson was a parishioner. ⁷⁴ Following the 1767 collapse of transatlantic potash prices that had hurt some of his investments, Jepson placed several notices in the Connecticut Courant trying to recoup money owned him, but his debts only continued to mount. By 1772 Jepson had declared himself bankrupt. ⁷⁵ Outstanding debt endangered the families and communities painstakingly constructed by enslaved persons since, as property, they could be sold to cover those debts. In Jepson’s case he advertised an enslaved girl for sale on February 23, 1773, possibly for this reason, and a boy of about fifteen years of age in 1780, “remarkable for strength” (a sign of labor capability) the notice said, without recognizing any of his skills. ⁷⁶ The absence of skill in this advertisement is notable but hardly unique since enslavers often did not admit that their servants or slaves possessed artisanal skills, though this may have dampened their value to potential buyers in Hartford. ⁷⁷ Financial woes would continue to follow Jepson until the end of his life, with consequences for those he enslaved that we can only speculate upon.

The probate inventory of Jepson’s estate after his death in 1783 at the age of fifty lists no enslaved people but does enumerate surgical instruments and other items indicative of medicine production. The estate’s value of about £100 in terms of effects pales in comparison to the £1,300 in claims against it, emphasizing the extent of Jepson’s debts and, by extension, the precarity faced by enslaved persons in his household. ⁷⁸ In light of their absence from his estate, what had happened to the men, women, and children Jepson enslaved over the preceding decades? Had they also been sold to satisfy Jepson’s creditors? If so, we must consider the human cost of Jepson’s failure: families broken up, fictive kin and friends separated, and even death. Had Malony completed the terms of his contract and received his compensation, or had Jepson failed to honor the agreement, leaving him few avenues for recourse? These are the negative externalities that never end up on a balance sheet, but that displace the risk of commercial enterprise onto the most vulnerable. Isaac Hazard managed to preserve his family through a crisis, but those enslaved by Jepson likely lacked the same possibility when faced with their enslaver’s financial woes.

Dinah, Isaac Hazard, or the others Gardiner enslaved were hardly the only ones supporting the business of medical practitioners and medicine producers in the eighteenth-century Anglo-Atlantic world. There are other examples from across New England. Daniel and Joshua Lathrop, for example, operated a lively apothecary business in Norwich, Connecticut, with greenhouses, gardens, warehouses, and a laboratory all requiring manual labor including from several enslaved men and boys. ⁷⁹ In Newport, Rhode Island, William Hunter enslaved two men, Mark and Quash, who were listed alongside the contents of his apothecary shop in an inventory of his estate. Would they have helped prepare the medicines that Hunter sold to some of Newport’s most prominent slave traders like Aaron Lopez? Hunter also supplied medicine chests for Lopez’s slaving voyages. A single “Medicine Chest for the Coast Guinea” cost more than several months of medical goods and services in an indication of the amount of material that went into one. ⁸⁰ In Barbados, enslaved men, women, and children can be found in the wills of apothecaries and medical practitioners. ⁸¹ Enslaved laborers can also be identified among the property of London’s physicians, surgeons, and apothecaries who employed the working poor in the city’s larger manufacturing laboratories. ⁸²

Such examples offer a clearer picture of the dependent labor involved in the co-creation of health and medicine in the early modern Anglo-Atlantic world, especially in spaces not typically associated with bound labor. Enslavers such as Gardiner, Hunter, and Lathrop all had formal medical training (a relative rarity in the North American colonies at the time) and amassed considerable wealth during their careers due to a confluence of factors that included their ability to deploy bound labor. They therefore represent only an elite segment of a much larger group of people involved in healthcare and pharmacy. Nevertheless, across the Atlantic world we can find men, women, and children enslaved to, or otherwise dependent on, a range of medical practitioners and producers of medicine, suggesting that a reliance on dependent labor was even more pronounced in the realm of medicine than has been previously described. By extension, this suggests that the logics of dependence, including enslavement, pervaded the patterns of medical commerce that arose in the Atlantic world.

The business archive has shed light on what historian Stephanie Smallwood calls slavery’s “hidden, internal transcript,” and the same can be said for records from the medicine trade, though they still raise more questions than answers. ⁸³ For example, if the assistant Jepson enslaved did indeed produce the plasters, unguents, tinctures, and elixirs as Gardiner advised, how did he learn to turn out the consistent, quality products that we know mattered in the eighteenth-century medical marketplace? Was his inability to do so – either real or imagined – a cause for Malony’s hire, or was it his contributions to a growing business that led Gardiner to seek more hands? Did the enslaved assistant converse with Malony or Jepson about medicines as they worked in the relatively cramped quarters of the Hartford shop? If the household remained a key site of medicinal production, how did the spectrum of labor (and spectrum of values placed on that labor) influence the organization of that household production? In what ways did the costs of dependent labor shape the costs of healthcare in New England? Was the enslaved assistant’s body marked by his work? Did handling corrosive and noxious substances have long-term health implications? Did these affect the broader community of free and enslaved people of color in Boston, Newport, or Hartford? Isaac Hazard’s example illustrates the extent of mobility and interaction despite the strictures of eighteenth-century Boston society. How did enslaved persons with some access to medical practice spread or apply whatever information they gained? Bringing together the histories of medicine, science, labor, and slavery offers a way to begin answering some of these questions by identifying the embodied work that might have been occurring in pharmaceutical spaces at a crucial time for the development of Black communities and the medicine trade in the North American colonies.

Even if not directly rolling pills or distilling elixirs in every case, people in precarious – and often coercive, violent, and extractive – labor arrangements fulfilled tasks that enabled the expansion of the transatlantic medicine trade and laid the foundation for a more self-sufficient and industrialized pharmacy that would develop in the nineteenth century. Their systemic erasure from the archive of medicine contributed to the centuries-long project of privileging some kinds of labor over others in the practice of science broadly construed. Considering the unnamed and unacknowledged contributors to the production and distribution of medicines illuminates a core component of early modern healthcare that servitude and enslavement affected the costs, availability, and understandings of products believed to be lifesaving and palliative. A new labor history of pharmacy more attentive to the unseen and unfree begins by asking new questions of old sources to better chart the global expansion of a particular kind of pharmacy and the role of dependence in that expansion. Only then can historians erode some of the hierarchies that have customarily structured that business in terms of both study and practice. Here that means writing the enslaved and unnamed into histories of science and medicine and, conversely, writing their medicinal labor into histories of slavery.