This is a post about the medical help, (or hindrance) available to your Marlow ancestor during a time of illness in Georgian and Victorian times. Many of those who we would call doctors, surgeons, pharmacists and midwives have or will feature in their own posts as individuals as will the Cottage Hospital. But this is an overview of how things worked in practice in Marlow specifically if you did not or could not consult a regular doctor.
Usually we think of the "doctors" of the time as being divided into physicians, who made the diagnosis, the lesser ranked surgeons who did operations, and below them the apothecaries making up and dispensing medicine, patent medicine sellers, quacks, and "wise women" and midwives. Things were not that simple though. Physicians were expensive, university trained and relatively scarce. I have found no medical practitioner in Marlow defining themselves as a physician during this period, but "Doctor of Physick" Stephen Chase was based in Little Marlow in the 1730's and 40's. There are however many surgeons - all male of course - and a good number of them also referred to themselves as apothecaries, so they were effectively acting as something approaching a GP eg George Rawden Robson.
The apothecaries were for many the first port of call in an illness. We tend to think of them as a kind of early chemist operating out of a shop and using herbal and sometimes dangerous ingredients. But many of our Marlow men were the ones called to make a home visit to the sick as one of the first ports of call. When reading narratives of deaths and illness, the pattern that emerges is something like this ..When someone first fell ill, the family would try and do what they could at home for them. They may make up a medicine from what they kept at home, use a patent medicine held on standby or go to a one of the druggists for a tried and trusted remedy. If this did not work, most called in the apothecary who would both diagnose the condition and prescribe a cure, hopefully. Only those who had more funds would routinely call in the surgeon-apothecary. For example, when 69 year old Hannah Croxon suffered severe burns in 1869, the person called in was "pharmaceutist" (as he then described himself) Tildesley mentioned above. Poor Hannah had tried to top up an oil lamp while it was already lit. The oil caught and the "flare" travelled up her arm and then set her dress aflame. Tildesley was the only person who attended Hannah before the unfortunate lady died of "nervous exhaustion" 2 days later. (There was more than one Hannah Croxon in Marlow at this time. Our victim here is the wife of bargeman William, not baker James.)
If there was an accident, a surgeon was the usual person called, and he sometimes performed an operation at the nearest convenient place, otherwise at his premises, usually his home. For example when surgeon Dr Henry French of West Street sells up in 1861, he is described as having a "neatly fitted up surgery and consulting room ..well supplied with water" which is to be sold with all the usual fixtures of surgery. Surgery is this sense is not just a doctors practice but an actual place to do operations. Later the Provident Nursing Association, and the Cottage Hospital would provide care - and an operating theatre in the case of the latter. Dr French was a former army and general surgeon and teacher of anatomy who later specialised in the treatment of eye conditions. He ran an eye clinic and "opthalmic dispensary" at West Street in the 1850's, on Mondays and Thursdays 10-12. Advice given to the poor for free. He was also a midwife. Male midwives or "accoucheurs" were the expensive option, the other prominent Marlow man to fill this role is John Tildesley in the later Victorian period. He was also a dentist.
The most famous apothecary associated with Marlow is James Chase who lived at Westhorpe House between 1684 and his death in 1721. James followed in his father's footsteps and acted as the apothecary to the Royal court. He served William III, Queen Anne and George I.
Most of the patent medicines sold by the likes of George Cannon and John Howe, were made to secret recipes we don't really know if they may have had any actual affect on the conditions they were supposed to cure. A tour of both their shops is available here, and here but one thing you will notice is they were both booksellers. These and stationers routinely sold patent medicines, made up in chemists elsewhere. They were respectable tradesmen and the treatments they sold may not actually have contained different ingredients to the cures prescribed by the doctors. The remedies might sound strange to us now, but they could only work with the medical knowledge of their time. The people who may unintentionally have sold useless or even dangerous treatments were different from "quacks" who knowingly sold what they knew to be ineffective or adulterated.
However a report from 1795 showed the danger that could come from untrained grocers in Marlow acting as druggists. John Mason Goode collected some examples, and published them on the request of The Committee of the General Pharmaseutic (qv) Association. He reported that some unnamed grocers and a druggist at Marlow had caused "lamentable and deleterious effects" by mistaking arsenic for cream of tartar. Tincture of opium was given instead of tincture of senna. As a result of these type of errors, a woman nearly died.
Marlow suffered a few medical scams from the above mentioned quacks. We may be suspicious of a few "medicine" sellers who tended to pop up at Marlow Fair offering brilliant solutions to every possible condition. It's interesting that even at the time these were called a con -not everyone was equally gullible but also not everyone was equally desperate for a cure affordable to them. A particularly unpleasant scam was ran in 1836. A man calling himself Dr Hamilton arrived in Marlow smartly dressed and accompanied by a respectable looking wife. He claimed to have come from an Edinburgh medical school (one of the most prestigious places to receive medical training) and he was in the neighbourhood to treat some important cases that demanded his particular attention and expertise. So he had made arrangements to spend a few months in Marlow and while here, he would generously find time to see the local sick. He distributed handbills in the streets stating that he would see the sick for free - they would just have to pay for the remedies prescribed, and supplied by Dr Hamilton himself. This naturally attracted the attention of those who would normally struggle to afford a doctors fees. He produced shining testimonials of how his miracle remedies had cured many a high class person. Queues formed and the doctor issued a lot of prescriptions. He asked for payment in advance for this, with the medicine due to be delivered to the patients later. But it never came. When the doctor had received enough money, he absconded without paying any bills and without curing anyone. For the poor who had pawned their possessions to pay for treatment or taken out a loan, it was a cruel trick. It emerged that Dr Hamilton and his distinctive yellow gig had also taken rooms in Reading, Windsor and Maidenhead and enacted the same scam there. He was believed to have come from Wales, and does not seem to have ever been caught. A description was circulated - he was apparently fond of plaid trousers.
It was not unusual for medical men to come to Marlow and see patients over a short period of time before moving on in their "tour". So Dr Hamilton popping up out of the blue was not a red flag in itself. For example Monsieur Mallan arrived from London in 1838 to cure Marlow's dental problems "for a limited time". The gentleman seems to make quite bold claims but he does not seem to have attracted any complaints. He aimed to restore decayed teeth using a mineral "succedalteum" which in a few seconds would harden into something resembling enamel and allay pain. He also used it to secure loose teeth, but if it was too late for that, he would provide replacement teeth either natural or artificial "fixed painlessly and without springs, clasps or wires."
Later in the period, the place to go for patent cures was more likely to be a chemist than a bookseller or grocer. In late Victorian and Edwardian times, Marlow was flooded with ads from our chemists for the brilliant preparations of their own devising they could offer. Increasingly they were for beauty products too. Special mention goes to chemist Walter Duplock who in 1906 managed to get a testimonial for the effectiveness of his exclusive Voxine throat drops from no less than Madame Melba, a regular Marlow visitor. She said they were pleasant to take and should be more widely known. He reproduced this hand written note in many an advert. Going back further, testimonials to the efficacy of various patent medicines were a feature in both local and national newspapers. I have often come across those alleged to have been written by Marlow residents. You might imagine these people didn't actually exist outside the imagination of the writer of the advert, but in fact they were usually the names of real traceable Marlow people at least. Whether the choice of words was their own or suggested by the seller is uncertain but set phrases do tend to get recycled. For example in 1725, Great Marlow resident, the barge-man William Pudsey had apparently contributed a testimonial to a pamphlet about the wonders of Dr Bateman's Pectoral Drops. William tells us he had long suffered a cold and rheumatism as well as a swollen jaw for which he could receive no "ease or rest". He had sought at great expense treatments from doctors and apothecaries to no avail. Then someone had told him that he should try the Bateman's Drops which were often advertised with testimonials in the Northampton Mercury. (It covered the Marlow area for news at this point.) He bought a bottle from Christopher Irwin who offered a number of patent medicines. And lo and behold William had a miraculous cure. To the surprise of all who knew him in his previous "deplorable condition", William "recovered my former health and strength in very short time."
We have gathered the names of many Marlow women who acted as midwives - many who saw into the world hundred of babies. Surgeons were usually only called in if difficulties arose. Unregistered midwife Sarah Ann Price had for example helped to deliver 900 youngsters in her estimation by 1903. More on her here
Other medical related posts:
Biography of hospital surgeon and doctor Dr John Dunbar Dickson here
Call the Apothecary here
Marlow Hero Nurse Cassidy here
Matron Mary Cole here
Benjamin Atkinson, surgeon here
Midwife Sarah Price here
The first Cottage Hospital and Provident Nursing Club here
More about the Cottage Hospital and the move to Glade Rd site here
SOURCES
"Apothecary" - Reasons why the apothecary may be suppos'd to understand the administration of medicines in the cure of disease. (Luke Stokoe 1704)
Corfe, George. The Apothecary Ancient and Modern (Stock, 1885)
Goode, John Mason, History of medicine in so far as it relates to the apothecary. 1795.
The Pharmaceutical Journal, December 1st 1877, Vol 8 (Pharmaceutical Society, 1878), digitised by Google.
Kelly's Directory Bucks 1883 (Kelly's Directories Ltd,1883)
Bucks Gazette, 20 August 1836, British Library Archive.
Reading Mercury 25 August 1838
Windsor and Eton Express March 15 1856.
Bucks Herald, 12 May 1861.
https://www.sheffield.ac.uk/nfca/projects/studentresearch/supernatural
Marlow Guide 1905.
A Treatise on the Virtues of Dr Bateman's Pectoral Drops (William Dicey, 1739) US National Library of Medicine collection, made available through the InternetArchive.
©Marlow Ancestors