Caroline Rance - The Quack Doctor: Historical Remedies for All Your Ills

The new tombstone at St Leonards, Shoreditch, excited interest and comment. Its epitaph, cheering to the whimsical and terrifying to those with a fear of premature burial, made a change from the usual departed this life: Dr John Gardner, His Last and Best Bedroom, 1807.

Should you have strolled past the churchyards boundary in 1807, you might wonder over the inscriptions meaning and pause to regret the passing of the eccentric worm-doctor, privately thanking the Lord that you retained possession of life and health.

Also retaining possession of life and health, however, was Dr John Gardner, who was heartily continuing to dispense remedies at his unusual museum. Only a decline in the number of customers convinced him of the inadvisability of erecting his gravestone before he was actually dead, and tradition has it that he had the stone edited to read His intended Last and Best Bedroom, which must have delighted the stone mason no end.

In 1807 Gardner was 55 years old and would enjoy three more decades before taking residence in his churchyard spot. Meanwhile, he could commute on his large roan horse between his country estate and his shops in Long Acre and Shoreditch, make donations to religious organisations, and live well on convincing people that their every symptom was the result of one thing worms .

Intestinal worms might have been more common in Gardners time than they are in the UK today, but that doesnt mean people were blas about them or welcomed them as pets. The They Were Used To It view of history might lump worms in with hunger, cold and infant mortality as something the poor saps of tolden days hardly noticed, but proprietary worm medicines were big business. People would do just about anything to get rid of real or suspected parasites.

Gardners advertisements were gleeful in their fascinatingly horrible and far-fetched account of the beasts his medicine had expelled from the human body. A broadside from around 1822 describes the creatures preserved in the doctors museum:

Worms, from 1 inch to 130 in length, some with 150 suckers; others in the form of caterpillars; another species like woodlice, 12 feet to each; a wolf of the stomach, expelled from a lady at Hoxton, who had nearly fallen victim to its ravages!!

One animal, with ears like a mouse, from a gentleman. Another with 4 horns, 6 legs, and 12 feet, which lived 9 days, from a child of 9 years; a Tape Worm, its edges like the teeth of a saw; a Stomach Worm by a ladys mouth, 7 inches long, in the act of emitting its young; male and female Teres, one emitting her young, were preying in the vitals of a gentleman five years, who could find no relief in Paris, nor Edinburgh!!!

A round Worm, 10 inches long, from the mouth of a child, aged 20 months, at the Palace; a Worm, resembling a small snake from the bowels of a man; 44 round Worms, 9 inches each, from a child; a narrow Tape Worm from a young womans mouth, 18 feet she also voided 40 feet downwards, had been afflicted 16 years.

An insect from a young womans stomach, of a caterpillar form: it lived 7 weeks in a bottle, and gnawed through two corks!!

Two hundred worms resembling wood-lice, expelled from Mr. A Hollywell Mount, which had tormented him for many months; a Bamboo Worm, with 4 horns and 12 legs, expelled from a man, whom it had nearly destroyed. Worms from the mouth, nose and ears of Mrs. T., and in the milk of the breast of Mrs. P., Bishopsgate Road.

All were bottled and displayed for the education and terror of the potential future patient. But these specimens were not all they appeared.

Gardners popularity attracted attention from the anti-quackery publications of the early nineteenth century, including The Medical Adviser, or, Guide to Health and Long Life , which printed a letter from An Enemy to ImpostureB, who claimed to know the truth about the doctors earlier life. Gardner had served in a West India regiment, during which time he became interested in medicine. Lack of supplies led him to be creative with whatever was available, and when he relieved a fellow soldiers rheumatism with a dose of gunpowder in gin, his medical reputation was secured. Considering the pill as a more dignified method than the bayonet, said another periodical, the London Medical and Surgical Spectator , he left off the one, and has continued his warfare on society, we are told very successfully, with the other.

After leaving the army, Gardner worked for a picture framer called Mr Floot, rising to the role of foreman and then partner before setting up in opposition. He also became a Methodist preacher, combining religion and medicine in a conspicuous way that his enemies saw as hypocritical.

Gardner initially sold pills against gout, while his wife Margaret was the proprietor of a nipple shield and ointment for lactating mothers. They also dabbled in electrical medicine, advertising The poor electrified gratis . It was the Worm Medicine, however, that would make their fortune, and around the turn of the nineteenth century its inventor adopted the title of Doctor, apropos of business success rather than qualification.

Morbidly fascinating advertisements like the above-quoted handbill served to attract people to Dr Gardners shops, but it was once they arrived that the full ghastliness of their condition became apparent. In the window, rows of bottles and jars lured the passer-by to gawp in revulsion. Within, enquirers already concerned enough about their health to have gone there in the first place would find themselves surrounded by an astonishing display of specimens. Suspended in preserving fluid were creatures of frightful aspect tapeworms as thick and black as eels, reptiles with clawed hands, snail-like monsters and collections of caterpillars.

The doctor himself was likely to be at prayers or in his laboratory (a closet with a sign saying Laboratory above the door), so a respectable-looking and plainly dressed woman perhaps Mrs Gardner or perhaps an employee welcomed the patient and listened to their symptoms. She would select an exhibit from the collection and allow the patient to become acquainted with the very beast that was nibbling away inside him. The cure would cost 30 s , but the specimens convinced enough people to do whatever it took to get their unwanted passenger out. And this is not surprising when you consider that, even if Gardners exhibits were not all they seemed, the truth was bad enough.

The Teres referred to in Gardners broadside is the roundworm species now known as Ascaris lumbricoides , a creature that still inhabits up to 10 per cent of the developing worlds population, and is responsible for 60,000 deaths mostly those of children per year. The ascarid, or large roundworm, grows to about a foot long and its life cycle involves a stint in your lungs before the larvae ascend the bronchial tracts into your throat, where you would normally swallow them without noticing. If you are particularly unlucky, however, you might cough or sneeze one out. Probably onto your pillow, so that you meet him in person in the morning. An internet image search for this parasite is not recommended, but the curious will find that it brings up plenty, i.e. whatever you had for dinner, followed by whatever you had for lunch and breakfast.

The Medical Adviser gave the remedys composition as saltpetre, sulphur and crude antimony, but also possible are the ingredients listed in the London Medical and Surgical Spectator and the Medical Observer mercury, jalap, gamboge and scammony, all common components of both proprietary worm medicines and orthodox prescriptions. These drastic purgatives could have spectacular effects upon the bowels, and the mercury content was dangerous, particularly where unevenly mixed medicines left high concentrations of the metal in one batch and not much in another.