Abstract
The newspaper advertisements and other printed material achieved their two functions of enhancing sales and exploiting the imagination by increasing the consumer’s confidence, promoting familiarity and preserving a degree of mystery. Confidence in the medicines was generated predominantly by a low-key style supported by the authority of the patent and the excise stamp, rather than the ‘hard sell’ which has often been considered an essential component of patent medicine advertising. Testimonials were used sparingly, and the security of the medicine’s composition by a single expert was emphasised. Repetition of advertisements and branding encouraged familiarity, but this did not reduce the potential benefits of mystery, as hardly any details of the recipe or the mode of action were allowed to emerge.
This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.
Access this chapter
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
Bibliography
Newspapers and Journals
Aris’s Birmingham Gazette (ABG).
Leeds Intelligencer (LI).
Leeds Mercury (LM).
Medical and Physical Journal (MPJ).
Salisbury and Winchester Journal (SWJ).
Stamford Mercury.
Printed Primary Sources
Adair, James, Essays on Fashionable Diseases (London: T. P. Bateman, 1790?).
Blair, Hugh, Lectures on Rhetoric and Belles Lettres, 6th edn, 3 vols. (London: Strahan and Cadell, 1796).
Early English Books Online, http://0-eebo.chadwyck.com (accessed 7 June 2016).
Gurney, Joseph, and William Blanchard, Trial of Jane Butterfield (London: Owen & Kearsley, 1775).
Hawes, William, An Account of the Late Dr. Goldsmith’s Illness, 3rd edn (London, 1774).
Henry, Thomas, A Letter to Dr. Glass (London: Joseph Johnson, 1774).
Quack Doctors Dissected (Gloucester, c.1805).
Spilsbury, Francis, Free Thoughts on Quacks and Their Medicines (London, 1776).
Secondary Sources
Barker, Hannah, ‘Medical Advertising and Trust in Late Georgian England’, Urban History, 36 (2009): 379–398.
Barry, Jonathan, ‘Publicity and the Public Good: Presenting Medicine in Eighteenth-Century Bristol’, in Medical Fringe and Medical Orthodoxy 1750–1850, edited by W. F. Bynum and Roy Porter (London: Croom Helm, 1987), 29–39.
Basford, Jennifer, ‘A Commodity of Good Names: The Branding of Products, c.1650–1900’ (PhD Thesis, University of York, 2012).
Brown, P. S., ‘The Venders of Medicines Advertised in Eighteenth-Century Bath Newspapers’, Medical History, 19 (1975): 352–369.
Cody, Lisa Forman, ‘“No Cure, No Money,” or the Invisible Hand of Quackery: The Language of Commerce, Credit, and Cash in Eighteenth-Century British Medical Advertisements’, Studies in Eighteenth Century Culture, 28 (1999): 103–130.
Cox, Nancy, The Complete Tradesman: A Study of Retailing, 1550–1820 (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2000).
Cranfield, Geoffrey, The Press and Society: From Caxton to Northcliffe (London: Longman, 1978).
Creighton, Charles, ‘Hulse, Sir Edward’, rev. Patrick Wallis, ODNB (accessed 10 June 2017).
Ferdinand, C. Y., ‘Selling It to the Provinces: News and Commerce Round Eighteenth-Century Salisbury’, in Consumption and the World of Goods, edited by John Brewer and Roy Porter (London: Routledge, 1993), 393–411.
Giddens, Anthony, The Consequences of Modernity (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1990).
Goldgar, Anne, Impolite Learning: Conduct and Community in the Republic of Letters 1680–1750 (London: Yale University Press, 1995).
Hancock, David, and Patrick Wallis, ‘Quacking and Commerce in Seventeenth-Century London: The Proprietary Medicine Business of Anthony Daffy’, Medical History, Supplement 25 (2005).
Isaac, Peter, ‘Pills and Print’, in Medicine, Mortality and the Book Trade, edited by Robin Myers and Michael Harris (Folkestone, Kent: St. Paul’s Bibliographies, 1998), 25–47.
Lane, Christel, ‘Introduction: Theories and Issues in the Study of Trust’, in Trust Within and Between Organisations: Conceptual Issues and Empirical Applications, edited by Christel Lane and Reinhard Bachmann (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998), 1–30.
Luhman, Niklas, Trust and Power (Chichester: Wiley, 1979).
Mackintosh, Alan, ‘Authority and Ownership: The Growth and Wilting of Medicine Patenting in Georgian England’, British Journal for the History of Science, 49 (2016), 541–559.
Muldrew, Craig, The Economy of Obligation: The Culture of Credit and Social Relations in Early Modern England (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 1998).
O’Gorman, Frank, The Long Eighteenth Century: British Political and Social History 1688–1832 (London: Hodder Arnold, 1997).
Porter, Dorothy, and Roy Porter, Patient’s Progress: Doctors and Doctoring in Eighteenth-Century England (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1989).
Porter, Roy, ‘The Language of Quackery in England, 1660–1800’, in The Social History of Language, edited by Peter Burke and Roy Porter (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987), 73–103.
Porter, Roy, Health for Sale: Quackery in England 1660–1850 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1989).
Shapin, Steven, A Social History of Truth: Civility and Science in Seventeenth-Century England (London: University of Chicago Press, 1995).
Storm, Erica M., ‘Gilding the Pill: The Sensuous Consumption of Patent Medicines, 1815–1841’, Social History of Medicine, advance publication online, https://doi.org/10.1093/shm/hkw133.
Strachan, John, Advertising and Satirical Culture in the Romantic Period (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007).
Styles, John, ‘Product Innovation in Early Modern London’, Past and Present, 168 (2000): 124–169.
Vaisey, David, ed., The Diary of Thomas Turner 1754–1765 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1984).
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Corresponding author
Rights and permissions
Copyright information
© 2018 The Author(s)
About this chapter
Cite this chapter
Mackintosh, A. (2018). Harnessing the Potency of Print. 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_8
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-69778-9_8
Published:
Publisher Name: Palgrave Macmillan, Cham
Print ISBN: 978-3-319-69777-2
Online ISBN: 978-3-319-69778-9
eBook Packages: HistoryHistory (R0)