Abstract
After introducing John Newbery and Dr. James’s Fever Powder, this chapter explains why Georgian patent medicines were panned by later generations as trivial exhibitions of quackery and so have not received the attention they deserve as a major component of Georgian healthcare. The provision of all types of medicines is explained, and the confusing term ‘patent medicines’, most of which were not actually patented, is defined. The chapter introduces and justifies the concept of an industry by summarising the following chapters, emphasising that the book studies the medical market from a commercial perspective and that the question of whether patent medicines ‘worked’, in twenty-first century terms, is irrelevant.
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Mackintosh, A. (2018). Introduction. In: The Patent Medicines Industry in Georgian England. Medicine and Biomedical Sciences in Modern History. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-69778-9_1
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-69778-9_1
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