Harnessing the Potency of Print

An overlooked eighteenth-century scrofula pamphlet: changing forms and changing readers, 1760–1824

“…Mary Fissell (2007, p 126) suggests that such pamphlets served a dual purpose: they ‘were neither purely informational nor purely promotional but an extremely successful hybrid of the two’. A similar blend has been observed in eighteenth-century newspaper advertisements by Alan Mackintosh (2017, p 207): the authors of these adverts used measured lists of facts about a patent medicine, its creator, and use to convince buyers of its trustworthiness. Morley applied the same techniques to his person: by showing his understanding of medical theories and physiology, he could convince readers that he was an educated practitioner worth trusting.…”

“…Newman, 1994; Fissell, 2007, pp 120–27). Furthermore, recent work on other ephemeral medical forms, such as handbills (Guerrini, 2010) and advertisements (Forman Cody, 1999; Barker, 2009; Strachan, 2007; Mackintosh, 2017), has developed important insights into the ways that trust and authority were cultivated and the ways that academic discourse interacted with more widely accessible medical ideas. These studies all provide useful models for approaching Morley’s pamphlet.…”

“…But, lacking any formal qualifications, he may also have advertised his services in order to bolster his reputation and intellectual credentials. Susan Lawrence (1996, pp 36–38), Sandra Cavallo (1991) and Alan Mackintosh (2017, pp 91–97) have stressed the difficulty of unravelling the motivations of charitable acts in the past, arguing that self-interested motives concerning reputation and money need not always have cancelled out more benevolent medical aims. We should be aware, then, that the ‘medical marketplace’ was not just a market where patients and practitioners, negotiated economic circumstances, but a space where economic considerations interacted in complex ways with social factors like reputation and altruism (Jenner and Wallis, 2007).…”

“… 12 See, for example, the table of prices for medicines sold at a London shop in Whitehall Evening Post (2 January 1790–5 January 1790). On medical advertising in general, see Furdell (2002), pp 135–54 and Mackintosh (2017). …”

“Welcome to pure food city”: tracing discourses of health in the promotional publications of the Postum Cereal Company, 1920-1925

“…To date, much research on historical promotional pamphlets and books has been focused on their early use in the context of patent medicines (Young, 2015; Mackintosh, 2017; Petty, 2019; Segal, 2020) and their uptake by travel companies in the 19th century (Adams, 2014; Symes, 2016). This is in marked contrast to their trade card and handbill predecessors, where much academic work has been carried out on food products in relation to circulation and exchange (Wigston Smith, 2011; Hubbard, 2012), patterns of consumption (Black, 2009; Sims, 2012), rhetorical functions (Pettegree and der Weduwen, 2020) and multimodal content (Mullini, 2015).…”