What Killed Jane Austen?: And Other Medical Mysteries (7 page)

Instead of receiving Dr Wainer’s information in front of two journalists, Mr Allan had to do so in front of two million viewers.

New South Wales police then raided many abortionists, forcing Sydney women to turn to backyarders. As a result, more and more women came to public hospitals with severe infections from their abortions.

Police raided the Heatherbrae Clinic in the Sydney suburb of Bondi and charged the two owners and three doctors on ten counts of
unlawfully
using an instrument to procure a miscarriage. If found guilty, they could face 10 years in gaol. But the implication was that in some cases, procuring a miscarriage could be lawful.

In 1972, Mr Justice Aaron Levine in the Darlinghurst Court House, ruled that, for a guilty verdict, the Crown had to prove that a doctor did
not
reasonably believe the operation to be necessary for the woman’s physical and mental health: ‘The termination of pregnancy by competent use of instruments in the hands of medical practitioners is not an offence in this state.’ This ruling reinforced the Menhennitt ruling of 1969 and drastically redefined key sections of the Crimes Act.

In 1986, in response to the liberalisation of abortion laws and their interpretation, Wainer said with surprise: ‘Do you know what I am now? I’m almost respectable!’

He died of heart disease in January 1987. Friends organised what amounted to a state funeral; an opera singer sang
A Scottish Soldier
. His close friend Evan Whitton called him ‘the most extraordinary man I ever met’. In the eulogy, it was said:

Generally speaking, the free interchange of ideas, the publication of new discoveries, the ready application of medical knowledge in sophisticated surroundings, and a commitment to aid the patient by sharing expertise, is the way in which modern medical practitioners go about their business.

Although you may occasionally feel that medical personnel are not always so virtuous, and can sometimes even be grasping, it is salutary to remember that in the past ethical standards have often been considerably lower. In fact, today’s most rapacious practitioner has much to learn from some of his or her predecessors. So let us go back a couple of hundred years to look at some real phonies.

A charlatan is one who pretends to skills he or she does not possess, and the term is usually applied to the vendors of quack remedies who cover their ignorance in a spate of hifalutin and meaningless words. These people played on the gullibility and touching faith of the population, and for them 18th-century Europe was their high noon. Their advertising used jargon, classical or oriental names, intimation of royal patronage, claims of infallibility and ‘secret formulations’. To compound the hard sell, there were usually unsubtle hints about the worthlessness of the opposition who, as one contemporary writer had it, commonly used his skill ‘to influence the minds of the vulgar, or help especially those lately sporting in the garden of Venus and now tasting the bitter grapes’.

A good pictorial representation of such a person can be seen in William Hogarth’s crowded drawing ‘Southwark Fair’. He stands there, in laced hat and embroidered waistcoat, expanding on his cryptic skill. A written description comes from Samuel Curwen, who in 1781 travelled through London’s Moorfields district (now the site of one of the most famous eye hospitals in the world) and came across such a character. He described the scene:

A stage doctor on an elevated scaffold covered with a ragged blanket discoursing to the more dirty-faced ragged mob; demonstrating to their satisfaction no doubt, the superior excellence of his nostrums to those of the dispensary, and the more safe and secure state of patients under his management than hospitals and common receptacles of sick and wounded poor.

So the characteristics which seemed to set the quack apart from the journeyman apothecary of that era were secrecy, advertising, including dubious testimonials, the popular image of a care-lined pedagogue in declamatory pose gazing meaningfully at a retort of urine, and, above all, the skilful use of crowd psychology.

The purveyors of these impenetrable skills ranged from the simple market-day pedlar with his handbills and treatments for ruptures, VD and the like, to such as Dr Clark, ‘sworn physician and oculist’, as he wrote, ‘to Charles II, James II and Queen Anne’. He advertised in top magazines offering his secret of ‘the lamp of light’, promising success where others had failed through the use of his infallible cure for the King’s Evil (tuberculosis), cancers, and the stone (in the bladder) without recourse to cutting. No disease too trivial, no duke too poxy.

A less up-market practitioner was a Dr Cerf, ‘lately arrived from France’ who claimed to be:

Well known for curing all kinds of disorders, both internal and external; likewise the SECRET DISEASE … Trusses to be disposed of for all kinds of ruptures. Any person that cannot attend personally, by sending their morning urine, may be faithfully informed of their complaint, and receive such medicines as are proper for their disorder, on the most reasonable terms … [There is] A back door with latch, by which persons may let themselves into the surgery. The doctor may be spoken with in all languages.

He sounds quite talented.

Dr Benjamin Thornbill of ‘the orthodox city of Wells’ (and few more orthodox than Wells, that’s for sure) cured the lame, blind, deaf, and diseased, with dismissive ease. No possible pathological condition was regarded to be beyond his expertise.

Lengthy lists of treatable syndromes probably came about as a result of the welshing nature of the quacks’ trade, in that they lacked those personal ties of reputation which the proper practitioner enjoyed within a neighbourhood. Mind you, proper practitioners were not above a bit of advertising to help retain an irresolute clientele. Besides stability, the local practitioners had two advantages over the itinerant quack: access to hospitals and the treatment of the poor and indigent for free.

The fly-by-night needed to concentrate on cures which were quick, could be confirmed at once by sight and background conversation, and conditions which did not recur before he or she had passed on to new pastures. The bizarre constituents of the nostrums added to their mystical quality, in itself part of the therapy. For instance, a concoction of snails mashed with bay leaves and mallows was advanced as a cure for the ague (malaria, then endemic in England) and a mixture of woodlice ground up with sugar and nutmeg was recommended for cancer. The juice of wild cucumber aided dropsy, and dung tea, stewed owls and crushed worms were given for a variety of complaints.

A Joanna Stevens was so jealous of her secret ‘universal cure’ it took an Act of Parliament and £5,000 from the Treasury to winkle it out of her. It turned out to be a mishmash of powdered snails, Alicante and other soap, calcined eggshells, wild-carrot seeds and honey.

Among other cures were Dr Belloste’s pills for rheumatism advertised at a guinea a box and Parke’s pills for the stone at 2
s
6
d
a pill. Such a price would guarantee success: having been foolish enough to pay that, you would hardly admit to the cure’s failure. Also sold, with equally spurious reputations, were Velno’s vegetable syrup for venereal disease, Daffy’s Elixir, Godfrey’s Cordial, Scott’s pills and Indian root.

Godfrey’s Cordial was given to quieten fractious children, and very popular at London’s Foundling Hospital. The snag was it contained laudanum (an opiate) and spirits, and its use resulted in numerous fatalities; a classic case of the treatment being infinitely worse than the complaint.

A favourite remedy of the time, and one which the writer Horace Walpole said would be the one thing he would rescue if his house was burning down, was Dr James’s Antimonial Fever Powders. These were a combination of antimony oxide and phosphate of lead, a ferocious combination with a distinctly lethal potential. Nonetheless, the actor David Garrick gave a glowing testimonial recounting how the powders had cured his mother of severe hip pain.

This Dr Robert James was a qualified physician and had been at school with Samuel Johnson in Lichfield (Garrick’s home town, too). He took to the bottle later in life, and it was said that he had been drunk every day for 20 years. He was damned by Johnson as a rascal after his improbable explanation for taking a whore about with him in his coach. James’s reason for such a coach companion was that ‘he always took a swelling in his stones’ if he abstained too long from sexual intercourse.

Despite his dubious lifestyle, he wrote a three-volume medical dictionary and was the inventor of perhaps the most popular patent medicine of his era. His pills were among many others which were used futilely to treat the mentally troubled George III.

Few were better at marketing themselves than another top-drawer charlatan, Chevalier Taylor. He claimed to be the ‘sole master of nostrums and specifics in Nature, and the only oculist for the teeth in the universe’. You can bet he was. Doubtless he only dealt with the eyeteeth his clients would have given for a cure. As a result of his unabashed advertising, Taylor became one of the most widely known men in 18th-century England, even though Dr Samuel Johnson said of him, ‘He is the most ignorant man I have ever met’—no doubt to be noticed at all by the old curmudgeon was a kind of reward in itself and grist to the publicity mill. Despite Johnson’s riposte, or maybe because of it, he was appointed oculist to George II, George Friederic Handel and the eminent historian Edward Gibbon. Chevalier Taylor had his comeuppance in the end, for he himself became blind—but not before he had published a three-volume autobiography.

A contemporary of Chevalier was Joshua Ward, popularly known as Spot Ward on account of a birthmark on his face. He had started life as a footman, but obviously had his eye on higher things. Such was his influence in the court of George II that he was accorded official thanks by the House of Commons for his attention on the king, and granted the singular honour of being allowed to drive his carriage through St James’s Park.

His famous Antimony Pill pepped up the likes of King George, Lord Chesterfield and Alexander Pope. Chesterfield was high on the social register, so that when he wrote Ward a fulsome testimonial, the quack was assured of a continuing and respected place in society. Mind you, the fact that Chesterfield was a vegetarian may have modified the action of the quite dangerous contents of the pill. Ward’s Antimony Pills were in the same chancy category as Bateman’s Pectoral Drops and Hill’s Medicine for Mad-Dog’s Bites—truly ‘kill or cure’ medicines.

One of the more interesting of these fashionable oddballs was Mrs Mapp, or Crazy Sal as she was known to her admiring and considerable clientele. She held court both at Epsom, outside the city of London, and in the Grecian Coffee House in Devereux Court, just off the Strand and a favourite resort of Oliver Goldsmith. She was a bonesetter, as had been her father before her, and enjoyed in her time such a towering reputation that the town of Epsom actually paid her a hundred guineas a year to live there in order to attract people of quality to the borough. She was there in the 1730s, before the advent of what was to become the town’s even bigger attraction, the Derby. This was first run in 1780.

She ran foul of the medical establishment, especially Percival Pott, of Pott’s fracture fame and eminent surgeon at St Bartholomew’s Hospital, no less. He was stung to write of her:

… the lowest labourer and the most exalted not only did not hesitate to believe implicitly the most extravagant assertions of an ignorant, illiberal, female savage, but even solicited her company, or at least seemed to enjoy her society.

It sounds as though he was feeling the competition.

Sal, cross-eyed and waving what looks like a humerus bone, together with Taylor and Ward, birthmark and all, can be seen making up the ghoulish back row in Hogarth’s cartoon ‘The Honourable Company of Undertakers’. In fairness, it should be pointed out that the majority of figures portrayed in the drawing, though pillars of the contemporary medical establishment, are made to look no less loathsome by the artist.

Perhaps the most remarkable practitioner of this tumultuous era, certainly the most celebrated, was a man who ran a glittering establishment in London. He didn’t have to trail round the royal court or country fairs soliciting custom—clients came to him, and gladly. His name was James Graham.

In 1780 Graham established the so-called Temple of Love in fashionable Pall Mall. He allowed his fertile imagination to run riot in decorating this up-market bordello, a place which was allegedly dedicated to breathing life into the flagging libidos of aristocrats and the well-heeled, so that, he claimed, ‘sexual intercourse became an urgent need rather than a passing fancy’. Or, to quote his handbill, which he had distributed by servants in splendid livery and gold laced cocked hats, those visiting his establishment would ‘find the whole art of enjoying health and vigour of body and mind’.

Inside the Temple of Love, the customer found a conceit of ceiling mirrors, glass dragons breathing bogus fire, and suggestive drawings depicting the sexual athleticism to which his clientele aspired. To heighten the drama, scattered in the foyer as practical proof of the place’s therapeutic worth, were discarded crutches, ear trumpets, eye glasses and wheelchairs. A popular feature of the establishment was the obvious presence of gossamer-clad nymphettes among the potted palms. Included among these lovelies is said to have been Emma Lyon, the future Lady Hamilton, posing as a Goddess of Health.

But its main claim to fame was the huge ‘Celestial Bed’, where was guaranteed a rip-roaring night of lusty satisfaction to the impotent and certain pregnancy to the infertile. Indeed, ‘perfect’ children were promised ‘as even the barren must conceive when so powerfully agitated in the delights of love’.