The Golden Age of Quackery?:Unorthodox

practice

Lecture 3

Medicine, Disease and Society in Britain, 1750 - 1950

Lecture Outline1. Definitions of a ‘quack’ and ‘quackery’ and problems2. The market and types of ‘quack’

- General vs specialist- Famous and successful ‘quacks’

- ‘Quacks’ and sexual diseases- Female/local healers

3. C19th ‘quackery’- Continuation e.g. Morison’s Pills- New Systems of medicine:

- Mesmerism - Medical Botany

- Homeopathy- Hydropathy

4. Was the c18th the ‘golden age of quackery’?

Issues and Questions

• The range and type of services we place within this broad category

• The social, cultural and economic factors affecting provision and demand

• The responses of ‘regulars’ and patients• How we might define a border between

orthodox and unorthodox healers• How true is it to think of the C18 as the

‘Golden Age of Quackery’?

Samuel Johnson’s Dictionary 1755

• A boastful pretender to arts which he does not understand.

• A vain boastful pretender to physic, one who proclaims his own Medical abilities in public places.

• An artful tricking practitioner in Physic

Doctor Humbug, an itinerant medicine vendor, selling his wares from a stage with the aid of an assistant.

Coloured etching, 1799.

John Taylor, oculist, 1703-1772

He seems to understand the anatomy of the eye perfectly well; he has a fine hand and good instruments, and performs all his operations with great dexterity.’ Dr William King, Tunbridge Wells.

An example of ‘how far impudence may carry ignorance.’Samuel Johnson

James Graham (1745-94)

The Celestial bed at the Temple of Health, London c.1775

Graham lecturing at Edinburgh

James Morison (1770-1840)

made a fortune with

his Vegetable Universal Pills.

Nineteenth century alternative

medical systems

1. Mesmerism

2. Medical Botany

3. Homeopathy

4. Hydropathy

Mesmerism

A patient being

‘mesmerised’ late

c18th/early c19th

Led to hypnosis in the c19th

Medical Botany or herbalism

1. Health movement on vegetable-based therapies

2. All ills were produced by cold and any treatment generating heat would aid recovery

3. Seventy plant remedies in the Thomsonian material medica.

Jesse Boot (1950-1931)1863: Joins family business

in Nottingham selling herbal remedies.

1884: Opens shop In Sheffield

1892: Opens larger manufacturing site

1909: Jesse Boot knighted1913: 560 shops in Great

Britain1920: Boots Company is sold

to an American for £2.25m.

Nottingham flagship store, opened in 1904

Homeopathy

Samuel Hahnemann (1755-1833Laws of homeopathy

1. Let like be cured by like (exemplified in the folk wisdom that hot compresses were good for burns, or that cowpox vaccination immunized against smallpox).

2. Use of infinitesimals (serial dilution) - the smaller the dose, the more efficacious the medicine.

C18th Spa towns

Buxton

Vincent Preissnitz’ Graffenberg Hydropathy Model

• Environment– Pure cold water– Fresh air– ‘One must have mountains’ diet and exercise

• Regimen– No mental exertion– No ‘physic’ (drugs, bloodletting)– Diet– Exercise

• The Hydropathic Institution

Richard Claridge’s Hydropathic

Regime

•4 am, sweating•3 mins cold bath•Walk to springs•Breakfast•10 am, douche•Walk to springs•Sitz and foot bath•1 pm, dinner•4pm, douche•7pm, sitz and foot bath•Feet & legs bandaged •9.30 to bed

Hydropathic centres: Malvern and Matlock

• Targeting segmented markets ‘from posh to poor’

• Women • Variety of provision

Hydropathy as ‘quack’ practice

• Charles Hastings v. James Wilson at Malvern

• Provincial Medical and Surgical Journal 1842 - articles and responses

Richard Metcalfe, The Rise and progress of Hydropathy (1912),

p.iv.There are two kinds of quacks: 1. the quack who advertises remedies which

can do no good to anyone beyond transferring money from one pocket to another

2. the quack, so-called by the medical profession, who, though he cures pain and eases suffering, has the audacity to do it by methods of which the faculty is ignorant and is too superior to look into

Patients: popularity and publicity

• Patients at Malvern– 600 in first season– 6,000 per year by 1861– Networks important in early years

• Endorsement in published patient accounts– Edward Bulwer Lytton, Confessions of a Water

Patient (1845) – Richard Lane, Life at the Water Cure or a

month in Malvern (1846)

Alfred Tennyson in a letter to fellow poet Edward FitzGerald

“I am in a Hydropathy Establishment in Cheltenham (the only one in England conducted on pure Priessnitzian principles. I have had four crises (one larged than had been seen for two or three years in Gräfenberg – indeed I believe the largest but one that has been seen). Much poison has come out of me, which no physic would have brought to light…I have been here already upwards of two months. Of all the uncomfortable ways of living surely and hydropathical is the worst: no reading by candlelight, no going near a fire, no tea, no coffee, perpetual wet sheet and cold bath and alteration from hot to cold: however I have much faith in it.”

Edward Bulwer Lytton, Confessions of a water-patient,

1845.• ‘At the water-cure, the whole life is one

remedy’.

• ‘I threw physic to the dogs and went to Malvern’.

• ‘the impatient rush into the open air…a hope that the very present was but a step…into a new and delightful region of health and vigour’.

Conclusion• It is inaccurate to think of the c18th as a ‘golden age

of quackery’– Many practices/services/products continued into the c19th and

even increased– New systems of medicines emerged: attacked by profession,

accepted by patients• Problem with definition of ‘quack’ - associated with

fraud– Difficult for patients to distinguish– Some had a genuine belief in medicine/services they offered and

were effective, just not qualified e.g. community local healer– Only way to practice specialism e.g. oculists– Who was calling who a quack? Regular practitioners and

competition• ‘Quackery’ demonstrates the failure of the profession

to cure and consolidate