From Bohemia with Drugs: Jesuit Pharmacy Networks in Central-Eastern Europe

Abstract The article focuses on the development of the network of Jesuit pharmacies across the Habsburg Monarchy and the Polish–Lithuanian Commonwealth from the early seventeenth century to 1773. This process occurred under social, political, and economic circumstances that favored the creation of religious pharmacies rivaling secular ones. Against this background, the author analyses a group of more than six hundred Jesuit apothecaries from the Habsburg Monarchy and the Polish–Lithuanian Commonwealth. He adopts a prosopographic approach based on the full set of personnel catalogs from the Austrian, Bohemian, Polish, and Lithuanian provinces, analyzed through RStudio, an integrated development environment based on the R programming language. The research focuses on the total number of Jesuit pharmacists in each province, their regional distribution, mobility, and geographic origin. Although the first Jesuit pharmacies emerged in Poland, the Bohemian Province had the largest number of apothecaries and pharmacies for most of the analyzed period. The total number of pharmacies increased until the mid-eighteenth century. At that time, it began diminishing due to restrictions introduced by Austrian authorities, which, however, were consistently applied only in the Czech part of the Habsburg Monarchy. In turn, Jesuit pharmacies in Poland–Lithuania thrived until 1773. Overall, the article demonstrates the crucial role of Bohemians and Silesians, who joined not only the Bohemian Province but also the Austrian and Polish ones, thus contributing to the dissemination of medical knowledge across Central-Eastern Europe. It also challenges the traditional historiographic thesis that the Counter-Reformation policies implemented by the Habsburgs in the Kingdom of Bohemia after the Battle of the White Mountain (1620) caused the neglect of sciences and cultural stagnation.