Abstract
In 1998, Damien Hirst opened Pharmacy, a trendy concept restaurant in collaboration with Matthew Freud, Liam Carson and Jonathan Kennedy, respected figures in the food industry. The interior was designed by Hirst, coinciding with his installation of the same name at Tate Britain. Both works featured contemporary medicines and their packaging as their key materials. Pharmacy’s restaurant interior included aspirin bar stools and an aspirin print bar illuminated by a light box. The restaurant, like many of Hirst’s projects, enjoyed much publicity. The Royal Pharmaceutical Society accused Pharmacy of being misleading to the public, causing its creators to change the name to Pharmacy Restaurant & Bar. The turning point, according to Hirst, was a customer asking for an aspirin.1 Hirst’s installations, if only for a short time, propelled the mundane aspirin into the public arena, alongside other quotidian pills and potions.
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Notes
Diarmuid Jeffreys, Aspirin: The Remarkable Story of a Wonder Drug (London: Bloomsbury 2005)
Jan R. McTavish, Pain and Profits: The History of the Headache and its Remedies in America (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 2004).
This is described particularly in the case of cancer by Susan Sontag, Illness as Metaphor (New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1978), 3.
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Michel Foucault, The Will to Knowledge: The History of Sexuality, vol. 1 (London: Penguin, 1988).
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Wolfgang Schivelbusch, Tastes of Paradise: A Social History of Spices, Stimulants, and Intoxicants (trans. David Jacobson) (New York: Vintage Books, 1992), 19.
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Peter Melville Logan, Nerves and Narratives: A Cultural History of Hysteria in Nineteenth-Century British Prose (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997), 18.
Mark Pen der grast, For God, County and Coca-Cola: The Definitive History of the World’s Most Popular Soft Drink (New York: Thomson Texere, 2000), 9.
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Elaine Showalter, Hystories: Hysterical Epidemics and Modern Culture (New York: Columbia University Press, 1997), 15.
Mark Micale, Hysterical Men: The Hidden History of Male Nervous Illness (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2008), 123–53.
Elaine Showalter, ‘Hysteria, Feminism and Gender’, in Sander L. Gilman et al. (eds), Hysteria Beyond Freud (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993), 286–344
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Zygmunt Bauman, Liquid Modernity (Cambridge: Polity, 2000), 77.
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© 2014 Sheena Culley
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Culley, S. (2014). Killing Pain? Aspirin, Emotion and Subjectivity. In: Boddice, R. (eds) Pain and Emotion in Modern History. Palgrave Studies in the History of Emotions. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137372437_8
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137372437_8
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