In the early modern Atlantic World, pharmacopoeias—official lists of medicaments and medicinal preparations published by municipal, national, or imperial governments—organized the world of healing goods, giving rise to new and valuable medical commodities such as cinchona bark, guaiacum, and ipecac. Pharmacopoeias and related texts, developed by governments and official medical bodies as a means to standardize therapeutic practice, were particularly important to scientific and colonial enterprises. They served, in part, as tools for making sense of encounters with a diversity of peoples, places, and things provoked by the commercial and colonial expansion of early modern Europe.

Drugs on the Page explores practices of recording, organizing, and transmitting information about medicinal substances by artisans, colonial officials, indigenous peoples, and others who, unlike European pharmacists and physicians, rarely had a recognized role in the production of official texts and medicines. Drawing on examples across various national and imperial contexts, contributors to this volume offer new and valuable insights into the entangled histories of knowledge resulting from interactions and negotiations between Europeans, Africans, and Native Americans from 1500 to 1850.
 

In the midst of a fast-paced profession, it is increasingly a challenge to pause and reflect on where a person’s life is heading. All can feel overwhelming. In these moments, when nothing seems stable, it can be instructive to pause and study individuals from previous generations who lived fully and left a lasting legacy. To find valuable lessons and perspective on the present, author Dr. Phillip Diller has often turned to man, citizen, writer, educator, and physician, Dr. Daniel Drake, who lived from 1785-1852.
 

Designed to appeal to early and mid-career professionals, particularly those in the medical field, Drake and Diller offer readers a way to enhance life with small actions that can leave a legacy in any community—professional or personal. Documented previously as a man whose life was remarkable for the breadth and depth of his professional accomplishments, Drake’s countless contributions are showcased here to demonstrate the impact he truly had in his time and for generations to come. Engaging with Drake and Diller’s thoughtful and principled voices provides a lasting perspective for those trying to find their purpose in the present.  


 

Diabetes, referred to as an epidemic for more than a decade, remains one of our most significant health issues in the twenty-first century. Because self-management is an important component of living with the disease, the biomedical concept of patient agency has long stressed notions of individual responsibility and autonomy. However, dramatic shifts in both health care and cultural practices call for a reassessment of traditional definitions of patient agency.

Lora Arduser’s Living Chronic: Agency and Expertise in the Rhetoric of Diabetes answers this call with a unique rhetorical examination of one of the most critical issues in contemporary health: how we live and work with being chronic. Through her perceptive analysis of the discourse of both people with diabetes and health care providers, Arduser presents a new model for patient agency—one that advocates for a relational, fluid concept of agency that blurs the boundaries between medical experts and patients. Her thought-provoking use of bodily and rhetorical plasticity crafts a multidimensional picture of patient agency that profoundly affects how rhetorical scholars, people living with chronic illness, and health care providers can forge patient-centered discourse and practices.