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This article explores the relation between proprietary drugs and state interests in early modern France by following the career of the medical entrepreneur Adrien Helvétius (1662–1727). Helvétius began as a private practitioner, but his successful remedy against dysentery and his access to the world of the French court enabled him to become a pharmaceutical monopolist and large-scale pharmaceutical contractor supplying the French army, and later, state-funded poor relief efforts. Rather than seeing his distribution system as an instance of proto-public health or a simple case of military “spinoff” into civilian medicine, I argue that his various roles are an outgrowth of “court capitalism” and that he tapped into existing infrastructures of military and charitable care to find a new market for his drugs. In this view, the state emerges as a bulk consumer purchasing drugs from a private entrepreneur, distributing them to civilian and military populations that do not have access to the urban medical marketplace.

Secret Remedies and the Medical Needs of the French State: The Career of Adrien Helvétius, 1662–1727