The Quack Doctor

CLEVELAND, O., Dec. 23—.Two live lizards three and a half inches long, several smaller ones, and a number of lizard eggs, were taken from the stomach of Lovel Herman, nineteen, four days before she died. A postmortem examination showed that the wall of the stomach had been attacked by the animals, the doctors say. The heart had enlarged to three times its normal size.

For several years she had been ill, complaining that something was clawing at her stomach. Specialists were puzzled until finally Dr. McIntosh, working on the theory it was a tapeworm, found the lizards.

Miss Herman drank water from a spring in which there were lizards, when she lived at Millersburg, 12 years ago, and it is believed that she swallowed the eggs or the young animals at that time and that they grew while in her body. She craved meat and eggs during the last months of her life, and it is believed she demanded such nourishing food because the lizards, as well as her body, had to be fed. She ate ravenously, but weighed only 80 pounds.

Incidentally, the health officials refuse to accept the certificate of death based upon the lizards theory, declaring that no such case has been reported since the days of primitive medicine.

The Tacoma Times, (Washington), 23 December 1910

If your Easter chicks aren’t looking too chirpy, why not perk them up with a dose of this 20th-century Kentucky remedy?

From The Champaign Democrat, 6 Sept 1912

As a 1911 advert put it:

Sick fowls don’t pay,
Droopy hens won’t lay

and the Poultry Cure was a bargain at only 50 cents for a quantity that could be diluted to 12 gallons. The product claimed to be effective against a variety of conditions, but prominent in the advertising is ‘the gapes’, a disease affecting both domestic poultry and wild birds. When suffering from the gapes, the victim holds its mouth open and gasps for air as if it has something stuck in its throat.

Regular readers of The Quack Doctor might not be surprised to learn that the ‘something’ is parasitic worms. Without going into too much detail, gapeworms are blood-red, lodge in the bird’s trachea, and appear to be Y-shaped because they exist in a permanent state of copulation. No wonder the chickens look surprised.

The Xenia Daily Gazette, OH, 1 June 1910

Testimonials for the Poultry Cure emphasised that it was the secret of success for experienced farmers – i.e. those who would not be fooled by any dubious flash-in-the-pan products. Mrs D A Brooks in 1908, for example, wrote:

I have been using your Bourbon Poultry Cure and I think it fine. If you induce our druggist here to keep it in stock I will recommend it. I am an old time chicken raiser and so many people come to me for pointers on poultry.

Whether the Poultry Cure was good or bad for neighbourly relationships is difficult to tell from Illinois farmer Ellora Sonnemaker’s testimonial:

I have eighty head of fine Bourbon Turkeys. My neighbours lost all of theirs. They all raise Bronze Turkeys and say that mine are better bred is all the difference. I feed Bourbon Poultry Cure twice a week and tell them if they will use it they will have as good luck with their turkeys as I have with mine.

Meanwhile, the product enabled Mrs Cox of Lawrenceberg, KY, to win first prize in the best gobbler at Kentucky State Fair.

The Bourbon Remedy Company also sold a medicine for hog cholera (swine fever) but if the pigs and chickens had swapped notes, they might have discovered that there was no difference between the mixtures. According to analyses made when the FDA seized a consignment in 1919, both solutions contained aloes, free sulphuric acid, sulphates of iron, copper and magnesium, colouring and flavouring. Neither would be effective against the wide range of diseases they were supposed to cure.

The Bourbon News, Paris KY 12 September 1913

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.

Surgeon P Power's handwriting. Image via www.canada.com

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 while voyaging to Quebec in 1825.

Except that, in my opinion, she didn’t. To me, it looked as though the ship’s surgeon, Mr P Power, had scribbled his notes so hastily that he made a rather workaday 8½-inch ascarid look like a monster. (Though frankly, chundering up an 8½-inch ascarid would be quite sufficient to fuel a lifetime of nightmares in anyone’s book.)

Over Christmas and New Year, I spoke to a Canadian journalist, Randy Boswell, who had also looked at the digitised records and concluded that the worm was indeed a measly 8½-incher. He contacted the National Archives, who responded politely and promptly, alluding to the possibility that their experts had misinterpreted the records. Randy ran a story across his group of newspapers, complete with quotations from your very own Quack Doctor, and here it is:

Monster parasitic worm may have been only a fraction of the size

Surgeons at Sea is a brilliant project and I own up to being a total killjoy over this one small aspect of it. I love a good story as much as the next person, and I’m glad that this worm captured enough journalists’ imaginations to give Surgeons at Sea so much publicity.

That it turned out to be only 8½ inches might be disappointing, but c’est la vie.

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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 anyone interested, there are some pics here.

While I’m trying to catch up with everything, this brief post is a departure from the usual advertising-related stuff. Today the Guardian and various other newspapers reported on the National Archives’ wonderful Surgeons at Sea project, which has catalogued the records of Royal Navy surgeons and assistant surgeons during the period 1783 to 1880. Selected records have been digitised and are available for download – big files but well worth looking at.

The papers have understandably picked up on a weird and icky story – that of 12-year-old Ellen McCarthy from Cork, who while travelling to Quebec on the ship Elizabeth apparently vomited up a worm 87 inches long. Surgeon P Power, who recorded the case in 1825, displays better penmanship than many of his medical and surgical brethren before and since, but he was scribbling quickly in note form and perhaps the movement of the ship didn’t help either – with the result that I think the case has been misinterpreted.

I’m going to be a killjoy, but I believe the original document says the worm was 8½ inches long, not 87. Disappointing, but there you go. I’ve compared other examples of Mr Power writing ‘½’ and ’7′ and I’m afraid this instance looks very much closer to the ‘½’. (If I’m wrong, fair enough, but I’m pretty sure.) Several days later, Ellen McCarthy expelled two more worms – one 13½ inches long, the other 7. These must have been Ascaris lumbricoides and it is reasonable to suppose that the first one was too.

As for the treatment, described in the Guardian as oil of ‘terebouth’ – well, Power’s handwriting once again leaves a little to be desired but it’s clear he has put ‘terebinth.’

So that’s me being a bit grumpy in my post-holiday er… I mean post-business-trip slump. I’m not usually one to advocate spoiling a good story, but for me the original source wins. And it’s a good reminder that if you want your own words of wisdom to survive the interpretations of posterity, make sure you write neatly!

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To view the original document, go to http://www.nationalarchives.gov.uk/surgeonsatsea/ and download ADM 101/76/9. (28mb)

Thank you to regular reader Michael Power (no relation to P) for pointing me in the direction of this story.

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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 persons of LIZARDS.) Send stamp for circular.
Dr J. G. SHIPLEY
Montezuma, Iowa, Tape Worm Specialist of over twenty years’ experience.

Source: The Burlington Hawkeye, Iowa, 9 July 1895

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Tapeworm specialists advertised widely in late 19th-century American newspapers— Wait, what?… LIZARDS?

I wondered if ‘lizards’ was a colloquial term for some variety of parasite, but it seems Dr Shipley wasn’t the only one claiming to remove actual lizards from people’s innards. In 1900, Dr H D Rucker advertised that his medicine, ‘Korak Wonder’, had caused one Mrs E. J. Welker to expel a lizard ‘well formed and having four legs and feet.’

Tapeworm specialists had a variety of techniques and potions, but Charles Oleson, M.D, in Secret Nostrums and Systems of Medicine, describes a common method used by irregular practitioners. Oleson, though cataloguing the formulae of dodgy remedies, was not afraid to stand up for those he believed would work. This was one of which he heartily approved.

The patient must fast for a day, taking only a saline cathartic to empty the bowels. The next morning, he or she would take a teaspoon of the essential oil of male fern (whose Latin name, Dryopteris filix-mas, is one of the few things I remember from A-level biology) in a cup of warm milk. Milk was supposed to be ‘an article of food in which the tape-worm greatly delights.’

After this, the patient had to lie down for a few hours, keeping a slice of lemon handy in case of nausea, and then take a dose of castor oil, turpentine and croton oil – the latter being toxic and a rather drastic purgative. The spectacular effects of this mixture can be imagined. If you put a piece of mosquito netting over your chamber pot, ‘the worm itself can be easily retained for further examination,’ or for keeping as a pet or whatever.

Some tapeworm specialists did medicine shows in the street, and for this they needed to impress the punters by displaying preserved worms of enormous length. The Decatur Review (Illinois) in 1903 printed an anecdote about a worm doctor called Joe Bowen, who had given up a successful career as an auctioneer in order to go into the lucrative worm business. When he started out he did not have any specimens to display, and as the newspaper said:

If these tapeworm specialists haven’t something to show and scare the people, there is no use for them to set up.

Mr Bowen found an inventive solution:

He borrowed a crimping machine then he went to the slaughterhouse and gathered a lot of entrails. In a few hours after that, Joe had the finest exhibit of tapeworms that ever went on the street.

The exhibit did the trick and Bowen earned a fortune.

Less successful in the fight against tapeworms was an invention from earlier in the 19^th century — Alpheus Myers’ Tapeworm Trap.

This small metal capsule, about ¾ of an inch long and half an inch in diameter, was patented in 1854. It had a hole in one end and, inside, a sprung trap. The patient had to insert some bait – when making fun of the invention, newspaper reporters suggested cheese, but in fact the patent says any nutritious substance will do. The brave sufferer, having fasted for a couple of days to get the worm hungry, had to swallow the trap, keeping a string dangling out between their teeth. The peckish parasite was supposed to lunge for the bait and get its head stuck, after which all you had to do was pull the whole length of worm out through your mouth. It was important that the trap wasn’t too vicious:

… care should be taken that spring g, is only strong enough to hold the worm, and not strong enough to cause his head to be cut off.

The invention was about as effective and popular as you might expect – i.e. not very. Whether it would also work on lizards, I don’t know.

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The Hull Packet, 1 November 1803

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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 I wish it were. Instead, this story is incredibly sad.  

There were two kinds of lozenge – yellow and brown – that had to be taken at different times of day. Both contained white panacea of mercury. The travelling sales agents, however, were under strict instructions to assure customers that ‘not a single particle’ of mercury was in them.  

On 4 December 1803, a little boy called Thomas Clayton, aged 3, was given the Lozenges, followed three days later by a repeat dose. He went into a high state of salivation – one of the symptoms of mercury poisoning. His parents sent for medical help, but to no avail.  

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…the mouth ulcerated, the Teeth dropped out, the Hands contracted, and a Complaint was made, of a pricking Pain in them and the Feet, the Body became flushed and spotted, and at last Black, Convulsions succeeded, attended with a slight delirium; and a Mortification destroyed the Face, which proceeding to the Brain, put a period (after indescribable Torments) to the life of the little sufferer, on Sunday, the 1st instant, Twenty-Eight Days after he had taken the Poisonous Lozenges.  

The coroner’s verdict was ‘Poisoned by Ching’s Worm Lozenges’ and the above description is from a handbill written by the child’s father, also called Thomas Clayton. Clayton was a printer and bookseller, so was able to produce loads of these leaflets and personally deliver them all around his local neighbourhood in Kingston-upon-Hull. In them, he noted that the main Hull papers (the Packet and the Advertiser) had ignored both the death and the coroner’s verdict – probably because they received so much advertising revenue from Ching’s.  

John Ching himself had died in about 1800. The business was ostensibly carried on by his widow, but really came under the control of a dodgy cove called Mr Butler.  

Signing himself R. Ching, Butler responded with a broadside of his own, attacking the grieving father and threatening to prosecute him for publishing the case. He called Clayton’s words ‘malicious invective,’ ‘AN INFAMOUS ASSERTION and ABOMINABLE FALSEHOOD,’ and said he had ‘FLAGRANTLY LIBELLED TRUTH.’ These handbills were printed by Robert Peck of the Hull Packet – who, like many newspaper printers, was a vendor of patent remedies and was firmly on Butler’s side.  

I don’t know whether Clayton’s grief and campaigning activities led him to neglect his business or whether he was already in financial trouble, but he was declared bankrupt about a month after his son’s death. Although the newspapers hadn’t reported the poisoning, they were quick to advertise the sale of all the Claytons’ property. In a particular act of despicableness, Robert Peck allegedly turned up at the sale and boasted to Mrs Clayton that her husband would not get away with the libel.  

Clayton wanted to take the precaution of getting a written copy of the coroner’s verdict, but when he went to pick it up, he discovered that the coroner ‘had not time’ to do it. The Deputy Town Clerk was equally unhelpful, but it turned out that Butler was all talk and never went ahead with the prosecution.  

By 1805 Clayton must have managed to get back in business as a printer, because he published An Essay on Quackery, and the dreadful consequences arising from taking advertised medicines; with remarks on their Fatal Effects, with an account of a recent death occasioned by a Quack medicine. The author is anonymous and is usually assumed to be Thomas Clayton himself, but I believe it to be his brother, M. J. Clayton. The 140-page essay appears cobbled together, is understandably emotional, and it reproduces lots of excerpts from other writers, but it also offers a measured, sensible list of recommendations for stamping out quackery by replacing the government’s quack-related income with duties on other activities.  

This government revenue was substantial and goes a long way towards explaining why dangerous medicines were allowed to continue. Each bottle or packet had to carry a stamp – some quacks portrayed this as being a mark of official approval but, like most things in life, it was solely a way for the government to get money. I only have figures for 1839, but at that point the government was making approximately £49,300 per year from stamp duty, advertising duty, licences, patents and paper duty (for the wrappers that many remedies were sold in). It’s an awful lot of money, but the price paid by families like the Claytons was much greater.  

In a letter to the Medical Observer, the Essay author is exaggeratedly humble about his literary talents, but hints at attempts to suppress the book, and confesses himself chagrined at the lack of interest from the medical faculty. He also says that his own two children narrowly escaped the same fate as little Thomas, and so the Essay‘s chilling curse on Butler clearly comes from the heart:  

Dire conscience all thy guilty dreams affright,
With the most solemn horrors of the night.
The screams of infants ever fill thy ears,
And injured heav’n be deaf to all thy prayers.  

This post departs from the usual because it’s not directly related to an advertised remedy, and no one involved is out to make money from selling cures. While I was researching the Sugar Plums for Worms, however, I came across many interesting stories showing the impact of parasites on individuals’ health, and the heroic efforts those individuals made to cure themselves. A mere two cases are given here – there are many more. I was intending to describe a third, but it was one that made even me feel sick.

In early 1757,  (though the case was not published until 1785 in the Medical Transactions of the College of Physicians, London), Daniel Neal, of Doddlestone in Cheshire, was

…attacked with uncommon pains in his stomach, attended with nausea, vomiting, constipation of the bowels, and an almost total loss of sleep and appetite. Under these circumstances he soon became greatly emaciated, and could neither stand nor walk uprightly ; his belly grew small and hard, and so closely contracted, that the sternum covered the navel in such a manner, it could with difficulty be discovered or felt with the finger; his urine was always milky, and soon deposited a thick white sediment; his excrements were very hard and lumpy, resembling those of sheep, only of a brown color, nor had he ever a stool of that kind without some medicine or other to procure it.

He continued in this state for some years, eventually going to hospital in 1761 and spending seven weeks there before giving up and going home. The following Christmas, he was advised by a neighbour to drink salt and water, so he immediately gave it a try, dissolving two pounds of salt  in two quarts of water and downing the lot in under an hour. The effect was rapid – he threw up ‘about half a pint of small worms, part ascarides, and the rest resembling those worms which are called the botts, and frequently met with in the stomach of horses, only much smaller, and about the size of a grain of wheat.’

More worms made their exit in the other direction but the salt affected the patient with ‘a most troublesome dysuria and strangury.’ Thankfully, this soon abated, and the undefeated Mr Neal repeated his adventure, ‘the effects of which were nearly similar to the former, only, that most of the worms were now burst, and came away with a considerable quantity of slime and mucus.’ ..

Five days after his first go at the treatment, Neal was up and about. He soon recovered completely, though he took the precaution of drinking salt water every so often, just in case.

A few years before Neal’s ordeal, in 1750, a ‘Gentleman at Lyons’ wrote to the Gentleman’s Magazine with an account of how he had rid himself of his tapeworm after years of unsuccessful medical treatment that had parted him only from his money, not from his passenger. Having determined that he would rather ‘die by poison, which I might ignorantly swallow in my search for a remedy, than to languish so long in bed,’  the gentleman set about recklessly eating every herb he could find, but nothing worked. At length, he decided drastic measures were called for.

Convinced that tapeworm (then more commonly called flatworms or broadworms) were oblivious to medicines because their heads were safely buried in the intestinal wall, the gentleman fashioned ‘some small hooks of lead, with 3 points, like an harping iron, and fastened them with a piece of thread to a leaden bullet, in order to swallow them.’..This innovative method

…brought away many pieces of these worms, without producing any ill effects, except that when the worms were entangled in the hook, they made such efforts to disengage themselves, as threw me into great agonies.

After moderate success, the gentleman redesigned the hook, attached it to a piece of thread like a fishing line and swallowed it, keeping hold of the end. His witnessing friends had

…such a compassionate sense of my sufferings and danger that, to avoid the pain of attending the issue of so dangerous an experiment, they chose rather to leave me, than to remain near enough to afford me such assistance as I might need.

Unable to pull the hook back up, he swallowed it, and at length it reappeared at the other end of his digestive system accompanied by a worm described – rather traumatisingly – as being 30 ells long with a head like a cat. Further use of the hooks eventually cured him. He concluded his account with:

The author of this letter has much more to add, both concerning the symptoms of this malady and method of cure, but feared to be tedious; he kindly intimates a readiness to satisfy those whose curiosity or distress may make them desirous of further information.

Source: The General Advertiser, 19 Jan 1748

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I mentioned the Purging Sugar Plumbs for Worms early in the life of this blog, but didn’t include much beyond the ad itself, and I hardly had any readers then anyway, so I think it’s worth revisiting – especially as this advert is so delightfully worded and cheerfully revolting.

At some point in the early 1740s, a Mr Burchell took over the ownership of another remedy, the Anodyne Necklace, which had been on sale for decades as a cure for babies’ teething pain. He built up his business on this and the worm remedy, fending off imitators with some innovative advertising methods – not least the eye-catching newspaper ads showing exactly what might be gnawing at your intestines (the inclusion of the insect thing on the right is an inspired bit of added horror).

One of Burchell’s methods was to entice punters to his premises by giving away free almanacks and pamphlets. In 1750 he was quick to exploit the fear caused by the earth tremors that had shaken London, by publishing:

ANOTHER EARTHQUAKE
Much Worse than the Two Last. When, and What Time to be Expected? With a Surer SAFEGUARD, Against it, than Going Out of Town. And, Why the Last Two EARTHQUAKES happened to be in this one particular Jubilee Year, more than in Any other Year?

The Almanack referred to in the ad above is intriguing – what could it contain that other almanacks left out? Although the content changed each year, a 1750 ad goes into more detail:

In the Month of Lent, is a large LIST of Other Fasters from FLESH CONVERSATION as well as FLESH DIET, Such as MISERS, WORN-OUT Sinners, etc.
The Miser’s CHAST, ’cause he won’t PAY a Wh—re
The Worn-Out’s CHAST, ’cause He can Sin NO MORE
And,  All the Other Months, have also their OWN proper TIMELY Observations, Not to be Met With, in Any of the COMMON ALMANACKS, but Only in THIS One, Which Tells What THEY Don’t.

Fun for all the family, by the sounds of it.

Later in the 18th century, the theme of free stuff continued, with Basil Burchell (who I think was the son of the original proprietor, but I’m not sure) issuing coin-like advertising tokens with the sugar plumbs on one side and the Anodyne Necklace on the other (he used the spelling ‘sugar plumbs’ in his ads too). The tokens usually had a hole in them so they could be worn on a ribbon.

Worm medicines were a good bet for a quack, because although intestinal worms were very common, especially in young children, this didn’t make them any nicer to have than they would be nowadays. The symptoms of untreated worm infestations were bad enough, but this was accompanied by the downright horror of being inhabited by living creatures. J Cook, a correspondent to the London Magazine in 1768, gave a description of the main varieties:

There are three sorts of worms which generally infest the human body. The round ones, the broad ones, and ascarides. Sometimes, but seldom, anomalous ones are discharged, viz. horned, hairy, with four feet, with two heads, with three, and some with four forked tails, etc.

The very thought of what might be in there led some people to go to extraordinary lengths to get rid of them, and I will blog about a couple of examples in my next post.

 Although Mr Lewis admits in this ad that the causes of sheep rot were imperfectly understood, he is on the right lines when he refers to “insects in the liver.”

The liver fluke, Fasciola hepatica L. was often noticed in sheep that had died of the rot, but there was a lot of controversy as to whether they were a cause of the disease, or a spontaneously generated symptom.

Back in 1749, Ellis, in his Shepherd’s Sure Guide, wrote of “plaise-worms” (so called from their resemblance to plaice), which, circulating with the blood, make their nest or lodgement in the fountain; that is to say, in the liver of the beast, where, if they cannot be killed, they will eat till they kill the sheep.

Well into the 19th century, however, new theories continued to be proposed, with many agriculturalists believing that some sort of humidity in the air was responsible for the rot. Because the early stages of the disease often caused animals to put on weight and temporarily appear to be in good condition, farmers who recognised the signs would send the sheep to market before they deteriorated, thus putting the diseased meat into the human food chain.

After a devastating outbreak in 1860, the Journal of the Royal Agricultural Society published an outstanding essay by James Beart Simmonds, Professor of Cattle Pathology at the Royal Veterinary College, which described the life cycle of the liver fluke and concluded that this was the cause of the rot.

Image: Sheep from the fourth edition of Meyers Konversationslexikon (1885-90)

              To be had of TREWMAN and SON, EXETER.
                                 To FARMERS, &c.
          MR. LEWIS’S incomparable SHEEP-DRENCH.
           An  effectual  and  safe  remedy,  is,  with  confidence,
now  offered  to  the  public, as  a  preventive  of   those  fatal
diseases  incident  to sheep, called the ROT and SCAB. The
true cause of  these  disorders is very imperfectly understood,
many have attributed it  to  moisture,  others  have ascribed it
to a certain principle of putrefaction, both  in  the  air  and  the
grass,  especially  in  May  or  June,  if  the  year  proves  wet,
causing insects in the  liver;  it  is  sometimes  occasioned by
obstructed  and  inspissated  bile.     Before   these   valuable
drenches  were  prepared,  which  never  fail  of a cure, a con-
siderable number of these useful animals  were  lost,  but  the
sheep so affected may now be preserved with so easy an ex-
pense as sixpence per drench.  It  has  been  found  so  bene-
ficial  to  the  farmers  in  Kent  and  Berkshire,  that  it  will  be
adviseable that no gentleman  who  keeps  a  breeding  stock,
should   be   without   it,   as   it   will  if  kept  dry,  be  as  good
at seven years’ end, as when first prepared.
It   is   sold,  wholesale   and   retail,   by   Mr.   Lewis,   No.  9,
Bartholomew-yard,  and  retail  by  Mess. Trewman and Son,
in Exeter,  in  packets  of  one  dozen  each,  at 6s. with direc-
tions  for  using,  where  bills  or  cash sent  to the amount of
the   order,   will  be  duly  attended  to,  and  the  orders  for
warded to any part of England.
   The  under-mentioned  gentlemen  will  attest  the  wonder-
ful  benefit  of  the  above  drench;  J.  Write,  and   A.  West,
esqrs.  Walton;   Mr.  Row,  Lee;   Mr.  D.  Wilson,  and  Mr.
L. Jackson,  Newbury;  Mr.  N.  Cole,  Marlow;  with  many
other respectable gentlemen, too numerous to insert.

Source: Trewman’s Exeter Flying Post, Thursday 29 June 1809