Ads for The Montpellier Little Bolus and Burchell’s ads for his Anodyne Necklace appear in the same papers, sometimes right next to each other. As I mentioned in the Sugar Plums post, Burchell gave away free almanacks – so did Russel, whose publication was called the Thee and Thou Almanack. The adverts say it offered answers to common questions about Quakers:<\/p>\n
Why we are called QUAKERS?
\nWhy we’ve Silent<\/em> Meetings? Why Women Preach as well as Men?
\nWhy we use THEE and THOU? Why we never Put off our Hats<\/em>?<\/p><\/blockquote>\nRussel also resorted to poetry:<\/p>\n
This ALMANACK has Nothing Writ twice o’er
\nWhat’s in’t, No ALMANACK e’er had Before :
\nIt is quite NEW, Year Thirty-EIGHT its Date is,
\n‘Twill Nothing Cost, for Thee may’st have it GRATIS,
\nAt the Green Hatch, ‘gainst Gray’s Inn Gate in Holborn,
\nIf to ASK for’t, Thee will not be too Stubborn.<\/em><\/p><\/blockquote>\n(both bits quoted from the London Daily Advertiser<\/em>, Feb 4 1737)<\/p>\nMy favourite aspect of the ad at the top is that it offers a free dose to anyone whose name appears in the Venereal and Gleet Patient’s Directory.<\/p>\n
‘Gleet’ (the word derives from the Middle English for slimy, and is related to the Latin gluten, meaning glue) refers in this context to a mucopurulent discharge from the urethra or vagina as a result of gonorrhoea. It lingered after the acute symptoms had subsided, and although clearly the result of the clap, was viewed as a condition in its own right. It is described as follows by William Buchan:<\/p>\n
…when the quantity of running is considerably lessened, without any pain or swelling in the groin or testicle supervening; when the patient is free from involuntary erections; and lastly, when the running becomes pale, whitish, thick, void of ill smell, and tenacious or ropy ; when all or most of these symptoms appear, the gonorrhoea is arrived at its last stage, and we may gradually proceed to treat it as a gleet with astringent and agglutinating medicines.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n
Such astringent medicines included white vitriol (zinc sulphate) and preparations of lead injected up the affected parts. The great John Hunter wasn’t overly enthusiastic about astringents – he advised that introducing a simple, unmedicated bougie (a slender instrument) into the urethra would be enough to cure most gleets (in men, that is – he dismisses women’s gleets in a couple of paragraphs). The bougie ‘need only be five or six inches long<\/em>‘ and required ‘a month or six weeks application<\/em>.’ Hunter also mentions gleets cured by electricity, but does not specify how the cure was carried out.<\/p>\nFor people putting up with this nagging condition, and faced with a variety of embarrassing and eye-watering cures, quack pills were worth a try, but the real genius of Russel’s modus operandi<\/em> lies in the free pamphlet. The mid-18th-century sufferer was not expected to be loyal to a specific doctor and to blindly accept whatever he advised, so the average individual with a gleet might well have done the rounds of several practitioners and nostrum vendors. The idea that somewhere along the way you’d got on a published list of venereal patients was rather alarming.<\/p>\nWhether Russel’s directory contained real names or made-up ones, I don’t know, but once people arrived at the Green Hatch for a furtive shuffle through the pages, they were a captive audience for the Montpellier Little Bolus at 2s. a pop.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Source: The General Advertiser, 6 March 1744. Click here for transcript. I wonder if this advert looks familiar to regular readers. The writing style and capitalisation, and even the medicine’s name, are reminiscent of Mr. Burchell’s Famous Little Sugar Plums, and here again we see a proprietor tempting punters with freebies. Dr Russel of the […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"om_disable_all_campaigns":false,"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"_uf_show_specific_survey":0,"_uf_disable_surveys":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[500],"tags":[38,57,167,4,10,98,136,166,35],"class_list":["post-2908","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-patentmeds","tag-1740s-advertising","tag-18th-century","tag-almanack","tag-books-pamphlets","tag-embarrassing-ailments","tag-georgian","tag-quacks","tag-venereal-disease","tag-youthful-indiscretions","eq-blocks"],"aioseo_notices":[],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/pKwhj-KU","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/thequackdoctor.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2908","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/thequackdoctor.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/thequackdoctor.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thequackdoctor.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thequackdoctor.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2908"}],"version-history":[{"count":12,"href":"https:\/\/thequackdoctor.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2908\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2931,"href":"https:\/\/thequackdoctor.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2908\/revisions\/2931"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/thequackdoctor.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2908"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thequackdoctor.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2908"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thequackdoctor.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2908"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}
![\"Montpellier](\"http:\/\/quackdoctor.wordpress.com\/files\/2010\/01\/bolus.jpg\" "\\"Montpellier")
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