Interview: The Quack Doctor December 3, 2014
Author: Beach Combing | in : Contemporary, Modern , trackback
Caroline Rance set up her website, The Quack Doctor, in 2009 as a way of cataloguing historical medical advertisements and stories of health fraud. Since then, her book The Quack Doctor: Historical Remedies for All Your Ills has been published by The History Press and she also recently compiled a pocket trivia compendium, What the Apothecary Ordered, for Old House Books. She is on twitter as @quackwriter, has a Facebook page at and a tumblr blog A huge thanks to Caroline for joining us today.
Hi Caroline, whenever I find someone studying something so interesting, in your case the medical oddities of the past I always want to know, how did you stumble upon such a fascinating area of study?
I was in hospital a lot as a kid and at some point realised that, if I’d been born a century earlier, I‘d be a goner. So I became interested in how people travelled from cradle to grave in the past. Later, while researching the early voluntary hospitals, I acquired a grainy photocopy of an eighteenth-century newspaper (this was before digital archives), and noticed an advertisement for Dr Richard Rock, one of the most high profile medicine vendors of the time. At first his ‘viper drops’ sounded funny, but I found that such remedies were an important part of people’s health experience and I set out to discover more about the relationship between the proprietors and their customers.
You’ve made a speciality of looking at strange cures from the past, first, are there any quack cures that by genius or design hit on a truth long before mainstream medical science?
Up until the nineteenth century, the lack of a distinct boundary between ‘quackery’ and orthodox medicine makes it difficult to say that one got to something before the other. Advertised medicines often weren’t that different from mainstream ones, it’s just that the ingredients were kept secret and they were aggressively promoted with extravagant claims.
Obviously a lot of these cures have no basis in science, how powerful do you think placebo is in explaining the success of these medicines?
For some remedies, it was a significant factor – indeed, it was the quack treatment ‘Perkins’ Metallic Tractors’ that famously featured in John Haygarth’s experiments showing the placebo effect in 1800.
Often, however, medicines’ success relied on them being aimed at diseases that got better anyway – or at least appeared to, such as when syphilis goes into a latent stage. Symptoms could improve just the same whether the patient went to a qualified doctor or bought something from an advertisement, and the latter option was convenient, cheaper and more discreet.
Do you have any particular favourite bizarre cure?
It’s the Tapeworm Trap invented by Alphaeus Myers in the US in 1854. The patient had to swallow a bait-filled capsule, leaving a string dangling out of their mouth. The tapeworm obligingly had to stick its head in the trap and get stuck, allowing the patient to pull the whole length of the worm out via the string. It wasn’t commercially viable for some reason! I like this one not only because it’s revolting, but also because it was considered just as bizarre in 1854 as it is now.
That’s just so absolutely brilliant that I have to ask you for another one?
Nothing can top the tapeworm trap, but another of my favourites is Harness’ Electric Corset, on sale in London in the 1890s. Cornelius B Harness didn’t invent it – he adopted an American idea – but his audacity and marketing budget made it a brief success in the UK. The corset was magnetic rather than actually electrical but some of the magnetic parts turned out to be ordinary metal buttons stitched on to make it look more technical. Harness advertised widely and I find that whatever I’m researching, he’s never far away – I turn a page and there he is again!
How do you think we will look back at our own age of medicine: are we still surrounded by quacks (mainstream and offstream) or are we living in a golden age?
If it’s a golden age of anything, it’s probably quackery. The internet enables the fast dissemination of the latest health fads; the same techniques that you find in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century advertising now appear on slick websites. Glowing testimonials, claims about the ancient/exotic/natural origin of remedies, the discrediting of mainstream medicine, dodgy qualifications… the similarities are striking. And the people of the future will probably have their own version.
With regard to medicine in general, I hope future societies will have global equality of access to effective healthcare and will wonder why we allowed economic and political factors to leave the most vulnerable people suffering, but maybe that’s a little idealistic. Our descendants might be too busy dealing with antibiotic-resistant disease to bother about what we got up to.
I’m particularly interested in folk cures or spells that make their way into the modern age: on the blog we’ve often publicized cauls for examples (including in newspaper adverts), dragon blood is another example: have you found much example of folk ‘wisdom’ coming down to the age of popular print?
The teething necklace is one traditional idea that has passed down in different incarnations. Teething was long considered dangerous – no wonder, as it coincides with a highly vulnerable time of life. As newspapers proliferated in the early eighteenth century, an ‘Anodyne Necklace’ became one of the most widely advertised products. They were made from henbane root rather than amber – it’s interesting how the materials differ but the charm-like idea of the necklace persists through the centuries.
My own personal experience is that without the internet and digitization of archives, it would be impossible to do research in popular lore. How have you seen your discipline change in the last ten to fifteen years?
Because newspapers were such an important medium for advertisers, the digitisation of news archives is particularly exciting. There’s potential, for example, for tracing the language of advertising across many decades. It’s also easier to see what else was going on in the world around these remedies. Of course there are gaps in coverage and a risk of neglecting other ways medicine vendors reached their customers (e.g. street advertising and word of mouth), but digitisation is an extremely positive development. It’s also making it possible for more people to connect with history, and to discover that a lot of it is about ordinary people like us, doing what they could to get by.
Thanks so much, Caroline!
