Priest-Pharmacists and the Domestic Medical Archive in the Heart of Paris, 1660-1730: Material Technologies and the Medical Community

In this paper I will present a collection of secrets gathered between around 1660 and 1730 in the Oratorian house on the rue Saint-Honoré, the heart of Paris’s growing culture of consumption. While the identities of receipt authors and compilers cannot often be ascertained, studying the collection as a material technology allows a focus on the intersection between curing and being cured, shopping and healing, and the relationships between medical self-help and communal medical practice. In the priestly world, such practice spanned across the charitable, domestic and commercial domains; I will argue that collective autoexperimentation allowed the performance of other categories of medical practitioner to be scrutinised and critically evaluated. The ‘paper tools’ of the Oratorians show how the practice of cure—the arts of the body—depended on the ability of healers to shift knowledge between the individual body, epistolary/natural philosophical networks, books and the material object of the ’secret’.