Phillippa Pitts

Leveraging insights from critical disability theory, this project explores the surge of artistic production around health and wellness that coincided with the establishment of a medical democracy in the antebellum United States. This legal framework—predicated upon the Jacksonian laissez-faire economic ethos and buyer-beware market culture—freed individuals to choose their own remedies, albeit at the expense of all oversight, regulation, and consumer protections. To create meaning around the myriad substances subsequently sold as pharmaceuticals, artists imbued drugs with dreamworks of desire, virtue, self-reliance, and empire. In doing so, they bound pharmaceuticals to these larger cultural discourses. By extending our analysis of pharmaceutical imaginaries beyond the conventional subjects of packaging and promotions into print culture, botanical illustration, and grand landscape painting, this project models how an expansive disability studies approach can enhance our understanding of even well-studied topics in American art.

Like queer or critical race studies, disability theory does not aim to deepen our knowledge of one discrete group. Rather, it works in concert with these methods to destabilize our understanding of society as a whole. Although often framed as scientific fact, health is an unstable cultural construct that is shaped and upheld by systemic forces. Moreover, debility, sickness, and medical treatment recur in unfixed and changeable ways across almost all lives. These are not marginal, but marginalized experiences. By reconceptualizing ableism as a societal structure rather than an individual behavior, we see how rhetorics of health and wellness manifest within a wide range of cultural and visual production.

As substances defined by their capacity to transform—or reform—our bodies, pharmaceuticals reveal this ongoing process of categorizing aspirational, aberrant, and acceptable human form. Over the course of five chapters, this project develops the reader’s ability to separate biochemical drugs from the cultural discourses that surround them. As the case studies progressively distance themselves from the physical substance of drugs, they push the reader to reconsider the narrowly circumscribed sphere to which a topic like pharmaceuticals is usually assigned. In doing so, this project offers a portable methodological toolkit that models how critical disability theory can expand our understanding of visual and cultural production, even in the absence of direct referents to either health or sickness.