Pharmaceutical anthropology calls for moving beyond the conventional divide between folk remedies and modern pharmaceuticals and applying the same analytical lens to both. The biographical approach to objects helps to understand the various transformations and interactions that govern a medicine within a specific context. This study traces the life story of Aureomycin in Morocco from its initial introduction, through physical production, marketing, and distribution, to consumption. It shows that the medicine had not been used as its producers had anticipate. It has rather been subject to the logic of “pharmaceutical heretics” who treat Aureomycin as a folk remedy and integrate it into a new, intermediary treatment process that is neither fully modern nor wholly traditional.
