Digestive System

Smith’s Live-Long Candy

Sometimes, patent remedies killed people. The Live-Long Candy did manage to get mentioned at an inquest, and there’d be a particular irony in a product of this name carrying someone off – but I reckon it’s innocent. Eight months before this ad appeared, 16-year-old Belinda Balls, housemaid to Mrs Waspe at Gusford Hall in Suffolk, […]

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The Worm Has Returned

Regular readers of The Quack Doctor might remember that back at the end of September last year, I blogged about a news story surrounding the National Archives’ Surgeons at Sea project. The Archives’ press release focused on a 12-year-old Irish girl, Ellen McCarthy, who apparently had the misfortune to vomit up a whopping 87-inch parasitic worm […]

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Paul Gage’s Tonic Antiphlegmatic Elixir

Source: The Liverpool Mercury, 30 December 1851 . Phlegm is generally white, greyish, or of a yellow colour, with streaks of black; its consistency varies from the limpidity of water to the thickness of jelly. This vivid description is from Parisian chemist Paul Gage’s Treatise on the Effect and Disorders produced by Phlegm in the […]

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Girl vomited 87-inch worm – or did she?

The dearth of posts on The Quack Doctor over the last couple of weeks is owing to the fact that I was away in Israel and the occupied Palestinian territory – not on holiday exactly, as I got paid to go and write about it, but nevertheless much more fun than staying at home! For […]

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Dr A Wilford Hall’s Hygienic Treatment

From the Pittsburgh Dispatch, 2 Jan 1890 Alexander Wilford Hall wasn’t trying to flog a potion or contraption. His secret to health and longevity was something that people could do for themselves, for their whole lives, at very low cost. That is, if they really had the stomach for it. On sending in a stamp, […]

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Something to show and scare the people

TAPE WORM Removed ALIVE IN TWO HOURS with HEAD or no charge. (No Fee in Advance.) No fasting. Have cured over 2,000 people of Tape worms with this harmless infallible specific, 50 per cent of which were doctoring for various other diseases, thereby eking out a miserable existence as thousands are doing. (Also cured two […]

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Mayr’s Wonderful Stomach Remedy

Some secret remedies remain secret for centuries. Not Mayr’s Wonderful Stomach Remedy. Within about a year of it becoming famous, a Chicago newspaper was describing its promoter as a ‘comical quack’ and ‘one of the most entertaining medical fakers in Chicago.’ The Stomach Remedy was inspired by the methods of the itinerant con-artists who worked […]

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The Aqua Antitorminalis for Griping in the Guts

Having formerly Published an Advertisement of an Excellent Remedy, Called Aqua Antitorminalis, which has been Experienced to be an Infallible Cure for that Reigning Distemper, called The Griping of the Guts, which several Persons have made use of, with great Success at this Season, wherein it Appears by the London Bills of Mortality, that this […]

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The tragic story of Ching’s Worm Lozenges

    ..   What is any self-respecting quack to do in the face of criticism?   The answer in 1804 was exactly the same as it is now – turn nasty and threaten to sue the arse off everyone.   The name ‘Ching’s Worm Lozenges’ might suggest that this will be an icky-parasite post, but in a way […]

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Laxora

Source: The Graphic, Sat 23 August 1879 Laxora was introduced to Britain by its French proprietor, P. Guyot, in 1877, and at once attracted positive attention from the medical press. It sounds a pleasant medicine to take – The Medical Times and Gazette described it thus: They consist of a core, or centre-part, of compound […]

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