Doctors and Patent Medicines in Modern Britain: Professionalism and Consumerism

Abstract

In the late nineteenth century professionalism and consumerism collided in a vociferous debate over the commodification of health. In medical journals, before government panels and through independent publications, doctors condemned “quackery,” especially patent medicines—the Victorian appellation for over-the-counter drugs. They dismissed myriad pills, tonics and appliances as addictive, dangerous, or useless. This professional critique, doctors claimed, was an altruistic defence of patients. Their commercial opponents, patent medicine men (and frequently the press), countered that the professional critique was rooted in a pecuniary struggle to achieve monopoly. While ascribing different motivations to each other, both sides assumed that medical professionals were unanimous in their condemnation of so-called “secret remedies.” Peter Bartrip has shown, though, that professional opposition to patent medicines was far more complex and muddied by self-interest. The British Medical Journal, while criticizing patent medicines, carried ads for them, which made the BMA the focus of allegations of hypocrisy in the Journal of the American Medical Association and before the Select Committee on Patent Medicines (1912). At the organizational level, Bartrip has established that the financial interests of the British Medical Association undercut its opposition to patent medicines. This compromised position, I will argue, permeated the profession. If the British Medical Association could not resist the advertising revenue derived from patent medicines, it was equally true that many doctors could not resist recommending patent medicines to patients. Far from epitomizing professional altruism, the patent medicine question demonstrates the reluctance of doctors to abandon individual self-interest in the wake of consumerist challenges that would ultimately transform twentieth-century medical practice. In doing so, the patent medicine debate engages and complicates arguments about the role of collective social mobility in the history of the professions.

Blinded by science? Constructing truth and authority in early twentieth-century Virol advertisements

“…Indeed, in the context of patent medicines, such vague references were often fake and relied on consumer trust in a brand to be honest and ethical. 52 Nonetheless, weight is added to Virol's testimonials by the accompanying images of smiling, healthy-looking babies, often with blonde hair and no clothes to signal their purity 53 , who are framed in such a way that they can be easily interpreted as the children referred to in the testimonials. Naked children were a common feature of Victorian and Edwardian advertising, used particularly during the 'pure foods' campaign against adulteration.…”

“…94 In other cases, advertisements make explicit references to doctors, giving the impression that the product has been medically approved. However, these references are deliberately vague, making it challenging to disprove (or indeed prove) them: 'The doctor is the best friend of Virolax'; 'the doctor knows that … '; 'the doctor informs that … ' Bartrip 95 and Loeb 96 have explored the use of doctor testimonials in patent medicine advertisements and have found that many were, in fact 'figments of the advertising imagination' extorted or taken out of context. The British Medical Journal even warned of this practice in a 1912 article, 97 advising consumers to be aware of endorsements by doctors whose names were not in the Medical Register, as well as 'vague titles' and 'misapplied quotes'.…”

From Schenectady to Shanghai

“…12 George Fulford, who 'purchased Jackson's patent for the paltry sum of $53.01' in 1890, 13 reportedly amassed a fortune of over £1.6 million after just sixteen years of marketing the pills. 14 Though it had become an object of contempt and a symbol of quackery in England and North America by the early twentieth century, the company existed until 1989. 15 According to an 1899 Illustrated London News advertisement, Dr Williams' Pink Pills could cure a vast range of ills: anaemia, consumption, scrofula, rickets, fits, chronic erysipelas, bronchitis, lumbago, rheumatism, rheumatic gout, sciatica, eczema, paralysis, locomotor ataxy, neuralgia, St Vitus's Dance, and nervous headache.…”

The Business of Surgery

“…The historiographic trend towards scrutinising divisions (or lack thereof) between 'orthodox' and 'unorthodox' practitioners, and in thinking about the commercialisation of medicine through the prism of patent medicines, has generated significant work. 5 But as a trend it also suggests historians have been embedded in-perhaps even confused by-the Victorian profession's guarded attitude towards money matters. To focus upon patent medicines, devices, advertising and other of medical men's forays into explicitly commercial medicine is to draw away from explorations of the implicit role money played in all areas of medicine-including operative surgery.…”