Chapter 4 Working with Fire: Remedy Making from the Shop to the Garden in the Apothecaries’ Guild (Eighteenth Century, Paris)
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Abstract
In this chapter, I will present the multiple aspects of fire management in the apothecaries’ daily lives in eighteenth-century Paris. The apothecary emerges as a singular type of artisan and as a double-faceted figure through his multiple uses of fire, since he worked both on his own and as part of a larger guild at the same time. By “traveling” between the apothecary’s shop and the communal garden, I argue that fire becomes a scientific, technical, economical, teaching, and social object simultaneously. Using post-mortem inventories and the Traité de pharmacie written by the apothecary-chemist Guillaume-François Rouelle (1703–1770), I will first look at the place of remedy making, whose function fluctuates between the laboratory and the kitchen, where fire is a practical instrument as well as an instrument for the pursuit of knowledge. Then, drawing on administrative ledge books (finances and deliberations), I will focus on fire as a “shared material” by the corporation in the context of the newly built chemistry laboratory in the communal garden located in rue de l’Arbalète in 1700. At the logistical level, fire becomes a technology at the heart of an artisanal network as it requires artisans (masons, carpenters …) to set up furnaces, ovens, and even a portable furnace. At the corporative level, fire management entails collective questions beyond remedy making such as finances, supplies, and utensil damage and fixing, and it gathers a socio-professional group around a teaching activity.