Medicine, Quackery and the Free Market: The ‘War’ against Morison’s Pills and the Construction of the Medical Profession, c. 1830–c. 1850

Abstract

For many ‘regular’ medical practitioners in mid-nineteenth-century England, the spectre of unlicensed practice loomed large. In the ancet in 1836, Thomas Wakley claimed that ‘[n]ever have quacks, quackish doctrines, and quack medicines, exercised a greater influence over the minds and bodies of the people of this country, than they exert in the present epoch’.² Such sentiments are given comparatively little treatment in scholarship on the medical marketplace. The normal assumption is that the medical marketplace was an early modern phenomenon which ended in the mid-nineteenth century, but the nature and extent of its supposed demise remain unclear.³ Roy Porter’s Health for Sale, which unusually took the marketplace into the nineteenth century,⁴ suggests that a key factor in the demise of ‘quackery’ was its supersession by ‘fringe’ medicine such as homeopathy, hydropathy and medical botany. Porter argues that while ‘quackery’ ‘clung to the regulars’ coat tails’, ‘fringe’ medicine was an ideological movement whose opposition to ‘orthodox’ medicine ‘had designs on men’s minds more than their pockets’.⁵ There is much truth in this: many nineteenth-century popular medical ‘movements’ were ideologically opposed to conventional medicine. However, this change did not end the medical marketplace. If anything, the nineteenth and twentieth centuries constituted, economically and ideologically, a more competitive arena for the practice of medicine than the preceding ones.⁶

The medical wreath of laurel is now in dispute between the Hygeists and the Doctors and Surgeons. The public must be the great gainers from this competition, and will award the prize to the most deserving, notwithstanding the antiquity of their diplomas¹