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Welcome to the History Extra podcast, fascinating historical conversations from the makers of BBC

History magazine.

How did we go from sharing homegrown cures free of charge to buying commercially produced

medicine from strangers on the open market?

This transition is more complex than you might think,

and it's something that Karen Bloom-Gavert explores in her book, The Apothecary's Wife, The Hidden History of Medicine, and How It Became a Commodity.

I spoke to Karen to find out more. Thank you so much for joining me, Karen, to talk about your new book

in which you re-examine, and I would say in many ways, rewrite the history of medicine.

So you're challenging this idea of a triumph of modern medicine narrative.

I wonder if you could tell us, to start us off, a bit more about that traditional

narrative and why you think it needs challenging. Yes. So it's so familiar to people that it's

almost kind of baked into the culture. This idea that we lived in a very dark time when

people didn't know anything and sort of improvised crazy

cures and ways of treating illness. And then, ta-da, the scientific revolution came along.

Everything was modernized and boom, medicine became useful and effective.

And some versions of the story are much more explicit that medicine was more

...