Web of Healing

Primary Source Commentary

For students and teachers, this section provides an example of a primary source document.  It is also meant to serve as an example for how historians can make use of these sources.  In general, this page offers a glimpse into the Web of Healing through local archival materials.

Advertisements (courtesy of the Library Company of Philadelphia)

Medical Quackery

These two advertisements appeared in Benjamin Franklin’s Pennsylvania Gazette throughout the year of 1772.  They exhibit a number of elements upon which commentary may highlight aspects of quackery in 18th-century America.

Among the things readers unfamiliar with texts of this time period notice is the symbol “ſ”.  This symbol is an alternate representation of the letter “s”.   Its appearance in printed materials reflected the prevailing convention in handwriting.  This should draw our attention to an observation that precedes even the analysis of the content itself, which is the fact of the source’s existence as an artifact.  Printing was a technological capability of great import to quackery.  Mass printing and distribution of handbills were a means of distributing word about quacks’ products and services which actually preceded the introduction of newspapers in Europe.  In the mid-to-late 18th-century, broadsides and pamphlets lauding the nostrums increasingly became used as protective wrapping for the glass bottles in which they were sold (Young, Toadstool Millionaires, 11).

Glass was another vital technology in the business of quackery.  James Young notes that every popular nostrum was sold in a glass of distinguishing shape and color (Young, 12).  Young argues that nostrum selling in the eighteenth-century may have exhibited the first example of mass-marketing.  The listing of “brand-name” patented nostrums from England in the second advertisement, “Dr. Sanxay’s Medicines,” further supports Young’s point. The combination of distinctive name and bottle meant that even illiterate consumers would be able to identify the product and distinguish it from others. 

This advertisement also contains traits that can help us further understand the state of medical knowledge at the time.  For one, differences among the various seasons, genders, races, and locales (swamps, enclosed spaces, and certainly over water or land) could be factors into the health of individuals and the efficacy of cures. Notice the text regarding the medicines, “they are taken by the most delicate of both sexes, at all seasons of the year, and by fishermen in water, without any hurt to the constitution.”  This passage reveals the extent to which in the late-18th century health was thought to be dependent on a number of factors, in particular the individual’s constitution and the status of the individual’s environment. 

The mention of “salivation” (which the ad claims, “is rarely wholly unnecessary”) refers to the frequent use of mercury in the treatment of venereal disease (Helfand, 22-23).  “Rarely did a quack bill reveal what a nostrum contained — though often the proprietor boasted of the cesspit of harmful ingredients, such as mercury, from which his particular compound was free” (Porter, 126).  Helfand suggests that some nostrum-maker’s or seller’s claims that their medicine was free of mercury were often false (Helfand, 22-23). 

Unlike the advertisement for “Dr. Sanxay’s Medicines,” Thomas Anderton’s ad is more cryptic, at least to our present-attuned eyes.  We can only speculate what Anderton’s cure entailed.  It would not be surprising that a glassmaker would also sell nostrums as we recall that glass was important in the merchandizing of nostrums, especially during and after the Revolutionary War, when the trade in bottles was brisk (Young, pp 14, 15).  

However, Roy Porter’s discussion of venereal disease allows for perhaps a more plausible interpretation.  Porter emphasizes that both the experience of disease (swelling, pain, oozing sores), and, if mercury was used, the cure (excessive salivation and sweating) were not only physically taxing but were physical cues readily discernable to any outside observer.  “Quack venereal-disease cures thus exemplify one further appeal of the commercial practitioner: secrecy” (Porter, 138).   Services promising secrecy and ease of treatment likely garnered reasonable demand.  The themes Porter highlights in the treatment of venereal disease — shame, secrecy, the need to be alone — are all present in Thomas Anderton’s advertisement.  In this light we understand why someone might take Anderton up on his offer of his “large commodious house” as a respite from public life while recuperating from an embarrassing and shameful disease. 

So what do we make of the status of those who posted these advertisements?  While Dr. Sanxay’s ad makes lofty promises in his first paragraph, all Anderton promises is comfort and discretion.  We can tell nothing about the treatment from the ad.  Neither is the fact of the advertisement itself an indicator — faculty of the local colleges advertised their lectures in newspapers (Binger, p. 81).  But the logic behind Porter’s maxim, “a quack is as quack does,” (Porter, 5) seems apposite.  Many people in 18th-century Britain denounced “quacks” (as termed by laypeople — dishonest or opportunistic medical practitioners) even while they patronized quacks (as termed by doctors to mean, in overly simple terms, non-credentialed medical practitioners).  Only further study of the American situation, where divisions of economic class and levels of expertise held less sway than in Britain, can ultimately set our minds at ease concerning the ways in which people thought about the care they received from irregular medicine.