In most histories of medicine, the problem of therapeutics receives scant attention. When it does appear, the story usually goes like this. Until late in the nineteenth century, medicine had only a handful of effective remedies to offer cinchona for malaria, ipecacuanha for dysentery, and a few more. While surgery occasionally saved lives, the internist relied on a battery of useless and even dangerous drugs. In the realm of therapeutics, physicians were hardly distinguishable from empirics. This cliche ignores the critical re-examination of the traditional pharmacopoeia that began in the Enlightenment, and the scrutiny to which self-styled "enlightened physicians" subjected the remedies used by both medical personnel and empirics. This paper examines one point of contact and conflict between enlightened and traditional therapeutics: the licensing of "secret remedies" (proprietary remedies) in France at the end of the Ancien Regime. The analysis centres on a basic corpus of archival documents, the petitions from owners of secret remedies who sought governmental approval, together with the responses of the commissions appointed to examine them. Where official medicine had once been strikingly tolerant, the medecins eclaires set out to impose rigorous controls; by approving only a handful of remedies, they distanced themselves from the routine empiricism that had characterized a large part of professional and popular medicine alike.
