The Quack Doctor

From the Morning Post 18 August 1803

It must be at least a couple of months since we last heard from our old friend Ascaris lumbricoides, so it’s time he made another appearance on The Quack Doctor together with a few of his helminthic chums.

I’m putting together a talk about the career of John Gardner, a former soldier and picture-framer who became a medicine vendor and Methodist preacher in the 1780s. Gardner’s best-known nostrum was a vermifuge, relieving his patients of some spectacular parasites that he collected and preserved in his museums at Long-Acre and Shoreditch.

Last week I went to the Wellcome Library to have a look at a broadside (c. 1822) advertising Gardner’s collections, and its cheerfully disgusting exuberance was a joy to read. These specimens had the job of persuading new patients that their symptoms resulted from something equally revolting, and judging by the advertising, this would have worked a treat.

My useless attempt at taking a sneaky picture when no one was looking. The line under the address says 'Dr. G. aged 70 and without enemies - God has done much for him.'

Early 19th-century anti-quackery publications portrayed Gardner as a hypocrite whose conspicuously pious attitude was just a front for charlatanry. The specimens, they claimed, had not passed through any human sphincters but were made by Gardner himself out of everyday substances. His tapeworms were chicken guts and his roundworms vermicelli, while ordinary insects and lizards played the part of the other strange beasts.

Gardner’s shop displayed the sign ‘The Universal Remedy Under God,’ but a critic in the 1820s accused him of holding ‘a poisonous nostrum in one hand, and the Holy Bible in the other,’ and his Methodism perhaps provided him with a get-out clause for patients who weren’t cured. A correspondent to the Medical Adviser in March 1824 described a butcher going to complain that the worm remedy had made him worse. It transpired that the butcher worked on Sundays and didn’t go to church, so Gardner allegedly told him:

God help you, it is an affliction of the Lord for your wickedness. I can do nothing for you, it would be impious to attempt relieving you; good day, I am sorry for you, young man.

(The butcher replied ‘So am I: good day, doctor.’)

John Gardner at the age of 74.

There is another side to Gardner’s religion, however – he was the founder of the Stranger’s Friend Society for the relief of the poor in 1785. By his own account in The Grain of Mustard Seed (1829), he got the idea while visiting a destitute fistula patient in a garret. Gardner began to put by a penny a week to help those less fortunate, and encouraged his neighbours to do the same. The society grew, inspiring similar organisations across the country.

Back to the worms, however. The following is a small selection of the exhibits detailed in Gardner’s broadside. A. lumbricoides is here referred to as Teres – Gardner tended to use the term ‘ascarids’ for threadworms instead.

Worms, from 1 inch to 130 in length, some with 150 suckers; others in the form of caterpillars; another species like woodlice, 12 feet to each; a wolf of the stomach, expelled from a lady at Hoxton, who had nearly fallen victim to its ravages!!

One animal, with ears like a mouse, from a gentleman. Another with 4 horns, 6 legs, and 12 feet, which lived 9 days, from a child of 9 years; a Tape Worm, its edges like the teeth of a saw; a Stomach Worm by a lady’s mouth, 7 inches long, in the act of emitting its young; male and female Teres, one emitting her young, were preying in the vitals of a gentleman five years, who could find no relief in Paris, nor Edinburgh!!!

A round Worm, 10 inches long, from the mouth of a child, aged 20 months, at the Palace; a Worm, resembling a small snake from the bowels of a man; 44 round Worms, 9 inches each, from a child; a narrow Tape Worm from a young woman’s mouth, 18 feet—she also voided 40 feet downwards, had been afflicted 16 years.

An insect from a young woman’s stomach, of a caterpillar form: it lived 7 weeks in a bottle, and gnawed through two corks!!

Two hundred worms resembling wood-lice, expelled from Mr. A— Hollywell Mount, which had tormented him for many months; a Bamboo Worm, with 4 horns and 12 legs, expelled from a man, whom it had nearly destroyed. Worms from the mouth, nose and ears of Mrs. T.——, and in the milk of the breast of Mrs. P.——, Bishopsgate Road.

Source: Trewman’s Exeter Flying Post, 3 April 1823

Much of the evidence on this one is anecdotal, but the proprietor of the Balm of Zura, Dr A. Lamert, certainly sounds quite a character.

Lamert was the son of a London-based German quack who dabbled in ophthalmology before moving on to selling a Nervous and Rheumatic Balsam and treating venereal disease.

While Lamert senior worked solely from his Spitalfields address, his son branched out, setting up a dispensary in Bristol and travelling the country, announcing in each town’s newspaper that the lucky denizens were to be favoured with a visit. In the first four decades of the 19^th century he went far and wide, taking in Derby, Ipswich, Glasgow, Aberdeen, Newcastle, Falmouth, Exeter, Manchester and plenty of other places in between. While at Ipswich in 1811 he received some anonymous hate-mail with a Bury postmark. His dad advertised in the Bury and Norwich Post offering a 30 guinea reward for identifying the culprit, but the residents of Bury appear to have remained silent.

Lamert Jnr was the ostentatious variety of quack who flaunted his wealth and took every opportunity to publicise his miraculous cures. The Citizen (October 1 1829) described him as:

…a fearfully dashing gentleman, all powder, with a black servant, and drives a beautiful pair of greys. Vive la quackery!

…while the Medical Adviser in 1824 was typically indignant:

All Devonshire, and the next fifty counties, does not produce so arrant a humbugger as this: he is powdered from the occiput to the coccygis,—from one shoulder to the other —from the cape of his coat to the buttons of his waist,—a curricle a-la-Jordan, an eyeglass,—a bamboo, and a copper face. Thus he parades about, all outside, while if you tapped him upon the head it would sound like a drum, —so hollow, so empty, so brainless is the wight.

(‘a-la-Jordan’ refers to the proprietors of the Cordial Balm of Rakasiri.)

One of Lamert’s innovative ways of increasing his fame was to attend the theatre and, during the performance, instruct a servant to call out that he was wanted for some medical emergency.

‘These interruptions,’ grumbled the Medical Adviser, ‘always happen when some interesting part of the play is going on.’

Lamert’s theatrical connections, however, were not confined to sitting in the audience. In his youth he had sung at the Royalty Theatre in Whitechapel, but after being pelted with oranges, he changed his career path and went on to follow in his father’s footsteps as a quack.

His arrogance might have made him capable of drawing attention, but this was often from pranksters rather than admirers. In 1848, (after Lamert’s death) an anti-quackery lecturer called Mr Richardson told of a student going to consult the doctor, pretending to be deaf. Lamert, assuming he would not be heard, ‘made some very free remarks on the character of the student’, who soundly thrashed him and went on his way.

The Medical Adviser (who, once they had it in for a quack, didn’t tend to let up), tells the tale of a dissatisfied customer who – not quite literally – gave Lamert a taste of his own medicine. The patient had wasted £5 on the Balm of Zura and received no benefit, so he took the empty bottle along to a tavern where Lamert was regaling the drinkers with a song. When the doctor ‘had occasion to absent himself a short time from the company,’ the joker pissed in the bottle and topped it up with brandy and water. On Lamert’s return he complained to him that his last purchase of Zura had gone sour.

As the doctor tasted the mixture, a couple of the tavern-goers were ‘necessitated to quit the room, to give vent to their risible titillation.’ Then someone pretended to get angry that the sour mixture might be poisonous, so Dr Lamert drank the whole bottle in proof of its safety, to the hilarity of all concerned.

They let him in on the joke and the original prankster ‘prudently decamped’ in the face of his wrath.

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Source: Trewman’s Exeter Flying Post, 20 July 1826

In 2003, the Daily Mail ran a story titled: Beeswax is ‘miracle’ cure. The article referred to an 18th/19th-century ointment called The Poor Man’s Friend, a popular remedy for wounds and skin conditions. The reason it hit the 21st-century press was that its inventor’s original secret recipe had come up for auction.

Giles Laurence Roberts, proprietor of the Poor Man’s Friend, didn’t have a great start in life. Born in April 1766 in Bridport, Dorset, he contracted smallpox when he was nine months old. Although he recovered, he then got rickets and was unable to walk until the age of five.

Young Giles, however, pulled through, and by his early teens had developed a keen interest in medical botany, studying Culpeper and formulating his own herbal medicines. He achieved some local fame as a healer, particularly for cases of fever and ague, and was also fascinated by electricity, conducting experiments with a homemade electrical apparatus. Unable to make it work at first, he persevered and eventually managed to give himself an electric shock.

At 18, he went to work for a mechanic, but his master soon died and Roberts expressed a wish to become an apothecary’s apprentice. His family didn’t approve and he ended up in Bristol working for an optician. Sharing his lodgings was a respectable surgeon called Mr Pitt, who encouraged him in his interest in healing and anatomy.

Back home in 1788, Roberts set up shop as a druggist and, although unqualified, began practising as an apothecary. After six years’ successful business, he travelled to London to study Anatomy and Midwifery, attending lectures at Guy’s and St Thomas’s, and only a year later arrived back in Dorset as a fully licensed surgeon, apothecary and accoucheur. Only one thing was missing – the title ‘Doctor.’

King’s College Aberdeen awarded him a medical degree on 20 April 1797 – this appears to have been arranged by his tutors in London, and he did not have to do any further study or pass exams. Aberdeen was well-known for awarding medical qualifications on receipt of cash, so it’s possible that some money changed hands. Dr Roberts’s background of diligent study, however, made him far more deserving of his new title than many of the ‘Doctors’ featured on this site.

His successors describe his physical appearance as follows:

He was short in stature, being only about five feet high, dark complexion, a beautiful black eye, and in his younger days long black hair falling on his shoulders. In his dress, and appearance generally, he was singular and original, bearing mostly the character of a Quaker or Friend.

He began selling his own branded remedies at the end of the 1790s, starting with the Pilulae Antiscrophulae for scrophula and scorbutic eruptions. The Poor Man’s Friend remained a local product until about 1820 when it got an endorsement from an aristocratic patient and sales took off.

During the 1820s, Roberts began publishing a yearly pamphlet called the The annual mentor; or, Cottager’s companion: comprising concise maxims and golden rules for preserving the mind and body in health, and conducive to wealth, long life, and happiness, a Friend to the Poor, and a Companion for the Rich.

It’s no surprise that this free publication was mainly a plug for the Poor Man’s Friend and the Pilulae Antiscrophulae. At 32 pages, however, it contained a lot of other useful information. Short essays gave advice on health issues such as personal hygiene:

If dirty people cannot be removed as a common nuisance, they ought at least to be avoided as infectious. Superior cleanliness sooner attracts our regard than even finery itself, and often gains esteem where the other fails.

and there were lists of Wholesome Counsellings, including:

He that will not sail until all dangers are over, must never put to sea.
An ass was never cut out for a lap-dog
The wise man even when he holds his tongue says more than the fool when he speaks.
Marriage is a feast where the grace is sometimes better than the dinner.

There were also articles on choosing a wife, on the slovenly practice of burning green wood, on how to escape from a fire, and many more aspects of life. Although on the surface this all sounds tediously didactic, the information was presented in an engaging, accessible way that doesn’t come across as too worthy, and it beats Britain’s Got Commercial Breaks for an evening’s entertainment.

Roberts remained in Bridport for the rest of his life, dying in 1834. He left the recipes to Thomas Beach and John Barnicott, who took over the shop – the building is now Grade-II listed and houses a restaurant called Beach & Barnicott.

Roberts was in the middle of compiling the 1835 edition of the Annual Mentor when he died. Beach and Barnicott went ahead with publication, but in a shortened 24-page format. Later editions were reduced to 12 pages, most of which was adverts and testimonials. There were still a few general articles to draw the reader in, but the publication didn’t have the same entertainment value as when Roberts was alive.

The Poor Man’s Friend remained available until the mid-20^th century, but made the news in 2003 when Bridport Museum bought the secret recipe for £480. Its composition, in the words of the Daily Mail, was ‘nothing more than 95% lard and beeswax’. Nothing, that is, except the other 5% - a fragrant but dangerous concoction of mercurous chloride, sugar of lead, mercuric oxide, zinc oxide, bismuth oxide, red pigments and oils of rose, bergamot and lavender.

Above right: Mid 19th-century dispensing pot. Photograph courtesy of the Science Museum, London.

The Rowlands – a father and son team - mainly produced cosmetic products. The one shown below veers more towards the medical side of things, as did their Cerelaeum elixir for headaches and vertigo. They also sold a tooth powder called Odonto, a beauty preparation named Kalydor and a hair dye called the Essence of Tyre. Their most famous product, however, was Macassar Oil for the hair, introduced to Britain in the late 18th century and still in production as late as the 1940s. The Rowlands are therefore the ones to blame for those doily antimacassars on the back of your grandma’s sofas, and for you getting told off every time you sat down too exuberantly and made them fall down.

               A WONDERFUL DISCOVERY
For The TOOTH ACHE,  and  preserving  and  beau-
                 tifying the Teeth and Gums,
Patronized by his Excellency the Duke of San Carlos,
the Spanish Ambassador, and most  of  the  Nobility,
R O W L A N D’s   A L S A N A   E X T R A C T,  or
Abyssinian Specific for the Teeth and Gums.
   This invaluable Specific has been in high estimation
for many years, and  recommended by  the  first  phy-
sicians.   Its   properties  are   truly  wonderful;  it   im-
mediately   relieves   the   most   violent  Tooth  Ache,
cleanses and beautifies  the  Teeth  and  Gums,  and
preserves them from decay; prevents decayed Teeth
giving   pain,   removes   the  Tartar  from   the  Teeth,
fastens those that are  loose,  and  makes  the  Teeth
beautifully   white  and  uniform;  cleanses  the  scurvy
from the  gums,  renders  them  firm  and  healthy,  re-
freshes   the  mouth  during  disease  after  medicine,
and imparts  a  sweetness  to  the  breath.   It  is  per-
fectly   innocent,   so   that   a  child  may  take  it,  yet
contains  those  inestimable  properties  that,  if  con-
stantly used, will render the Teeth and Gums sound,
beautiful, and free from pain, to  the  latest  period  of
life.   It  is  an  excellent  Stomachic.    Price   2s.   9d.;
4s. 6d.; and 10s. 6d. per bottle.
   Sold wholesale,  retail  and  for  exportation,  by  the
sole  Proprietors,   A.  Rowland  and  Son,  corner  of
Kirby-street,   the  first  turning  on  the   right   in   Hat-
ton  Garden,  Holborn,   London;   and,   by    appoint-
ment, by
              Messrs. HALDON and LOWNDES,
                     At the Office of this Journal,
and   Messrs.   Munday  and  Slatter,  Oxford;  James,
Reading;  Butler,  Wycombe;   Watkins,   Cirencester;
and by all Perfumers and Medicine Venders.
        None  are   genuine   without   the   signature   “A.
Rowland and Son.”

Source: Jackson’s Oxford Journal, Saturday 13 April 1822

Image: Kavalkade vor Schloss Heiligenberg by Allbrecht Adam, 1831

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   WAINWRIGHT’s STAFFORDSHIRE CORDIAL,
        AND ROYAL ENGLISH MEDICINE FOR HORSES,
WHICH  has  been  given   with   unprecedented  success  in
the   most   dangerous   stages   of   the  Sleeping  or  Raging
Staggers,  Gripes,  Colds,  Coughs, Fevers,  and all disorders
originating in colds, or from grazing in  marshy  wet  meadows,
or after severe exercise in racing, hunting, working in coaches,
post chaises, or waggons, hard riding,  &c.  and  is  universally
acknowledged  to  be  the  greatest  restorative  to  exhausted
nature, and  the  most  valuable  horse  medicine  ever  known.
   Mr.  NEWMAN,  of   the  Green  Man  Inn,  Barnet,  near Lon-
don, one of the principal Posting Houses  on  the  Great  North
Road,  has  authorised   the   Proprietor  to  inform  the  Public,
that he has used the above medicine for several years  among
his own Horses with such complete success, that he feels him-
self warranted in recommending it  to  the  Notice  of  Post and
Stage Coach Masters, Carriers, Horse Dealers, Farmers, and
all others who employ a number of  Horses,  as  the  most valu-
able thing of the kind he ever met with.
   Sold  at  the  Original  Warehouse   for   Genuine   Medicines,
No.  10,    Bow    Church    Yard,    London;   also    by    Drewry,
Pike, Derby;  and  by   all   the   principal   Country   Booksellers
and Druggists—Price 2s. 6d. the bottle.

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Source: The Derby Mercury, Wednesday 27 March 1822