Health for sale: mountebanks, doctors, printers and the supply of medication in eighteenth-century Ireland

Abstract

The eighteenth century in England has been described as the 'golden age of physic' due to the availability and consumption of vast amounts of medicine in that period.This exploration of the public's access to proprietary medicine, and of its engagement with, and reliance on, quacks, empirics and other irregular practitioners, reveals that the appetite for such medication was no less strong in Ireland.The retail of such commodities began fi tfully in the late seventeenth century, and took off in the 1720s when Richard Dickson adapted existing distribution networks, and developed new ones, both to expand the market and, as it grew, to meet the vigorous demand.Most proprietary and patent medicines sold in Ireland were of British origin, but 'exotic' European products were also sought after as the market, the number of retailers, and the range of products increased dramatically in the course of the century.This examination of the supply of quack medicine in eighteenth-century Ireland explores the little-known worlds of medicine and con sumerism.As well as identifying the importance of proprietary medicine in health care, it reveals that the demand for medication was an important, and underacknow ledged, engine of the eighteenth-century consumer revolution.The eighteenth century sustained a medical marketplace in which those who could afford it, and were willing to pay, had access to an unprecedented range of medications and medical practitioners offering an ostensibly bewildering array of remedies for illness and infi rmity.In part, the consequence of the development of a scientifi c approach to illness, which promoted a culture of curing that was both medicinal and surgical, 1 it owed more, paradoxically, to the obvious frailties of this emerging system than to any of its strengths.The diagnostic and therapeutic limitations of even the most eminent practitioners, who were still anchored fi rmly to a humoral approach to illness, illustrate starkly the defi ciencies of contemporary medicine.Those inadequacies were compounded by problems of access, deriving in the fi rst instance from the shortage of qualifi ed personnel, which meant that, even at the end of the eighteenth

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