Funds are sought to support research into selected aspects of medical and pharmaceutic practice in the Middle Colonies for the period 1730 to 1820.
The specific aims of the proposed study include research in a wide range of American colonial depositories in conjunction with material obtained from European archives. These will be used to document and analyze the structure and types of medical services and pharmaceutic usage in German Lutheran congregations in the middle colonies (Pennsylvania, New Jersey, the Delaware counties, and southern New York). A particular focus is on a set of pharmaceutica which were imported from the Halle Orphanage Institutions, a major charitable foundation which was the Mother House of the Pietist German missions to the Middle Colonies. A further aim of the study is to classify the types and assess the therapeutic uses of these medications on the basis of a comparative analyses of several 18th- century German formularies, using current research into the materia medica and the therapeutic armamentarium of the American colonial period as a basis of classification and comparison. The study will illustrate as well the academic background, theoretical orientation, and the actual practice of medicine and pharmacy by a core group of Pietist pastors and associated medical practitioners in the Middle Colonies, in particular Gotthilf Heinrich Ernst Muhlenberg and Justus Heinrich Christian Helmuth, both graduates of the Halle Orphanage Foundations and subsequent members of the Philadelphia scholarly establishment. Their interaction with the evolving academic and medical trends of the new republic will be traced within the general development of colonial medical practice and the directions of changing therapeutic theory at the end of the 18th century.
