19th century

Busy curing a man in America

I have no background to the following newspaper story – I don’t know who the tailor was or even whether he really existed. The newspaper’s purpose in printing the tale is clearly to amuse readers and allow them to congratulate themselves that they aren’t among the supposed gullible masses who would consult quacks. The implicit criticism […]

A Wife is the Peculiar Gift of Heaven

This advertisement for Eno’s Fruit Salt appeared in the special Royal Wedding Edition of the Penny Illustrated Paper on 8 July 1893. The edition commemorated the nuptials of Prince George, Duke of York and Princess May of Teck – the future King George V and Queen Mary. Click the image to enlarge.

John Gardner, Image Courtesy of Wellcome Library, London

The Worm-Doctor of Shoreditch

It’s a while 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 […]

The Electropathic and Zander Institute

Regular readers might remember Cornelius Bennett Harness, who carried on a lucrative business in electro-magnetic products in London in the 1880s and 1890s. I have blogged about his Electric Corsets and the Ammoniaphone, an inhaler promising artificial Italian air to singers and public speakers. Harness’s showrooms, known as the Electropathic and Zander Institute, were on […]

The Ear-Doctor Fraud

A deaf person seeking treatment in 1850s London appears to have had plenty of options, judging by these advertisements in Reynolds’s Weekly Newspaper. The only problem was, the advertisers all belonged to the same gang – and if you knew what was in their medicine, you would not let it anywhere near your ears. Multiple […]

Tuna – a vegetable compound

There’s often something a bit fishy about patent remedies, but this one appeared before the advent of canned tuna and, for the average non-sea-going punter, the name did not have the piscatorial associations it has now. A company called Fels and Davis began promoting it in 1879, but by the following year Davis had quietly disappeared […]

Mother’s Friend

In honour of the birth of The Quack Doctor’s new baby niece, who arrived early Saturday morning in the car park of Harlow Hospital, this post looks at a liniment that claimed to make labour a doddle. Mother’s Friend was on sale in the US and Canada by the mid-1880s, though some adverts said it […]

Sago Jenkinson and the Case of the Witched Child

When Nancy Harborough took her sick child to a local celebrity doctor in 1844, she probably didn’t expect to receive advice worthy of Matthew Hopkins two centuries earlier. As it was, the whole sad episode ended up in court, and as the Hull Packet put it: The facts of the case speak but little indeed […]

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, […]

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 […]