Old English Patent Medicines in America

Long before America had its own pharmaceutical industry, colonial consumers turned to England for miracle cures. This fascinating cultural history traces the transatlantic journey of nostrums like Bateman's Pectoral Drops, Godfrey's Cordial, and Turlington's Balsam of Life, remedies that arrived in the American Colonies with extravagant promises and mysterious ingredients. James Harvey Young, a pioneer in the history of American medicine, excavates the advertisements, pamphlets, and court records that reveal how these products colonized American medicine cabinets and pocketbooks. The book is less about pharmacology than about the desperate psychology of illness in an era before licensed physicians and effective treatments, when hope was manufactured in London and shipped across the ocean. Young shows how these English patent medicines helped create an American consumer culture shaped by credulity, entrepreneurial cunning, and the universal human hunger for health. A revelation for anyone interested in the deep roots of American advertising, medical skepticism, or the Republic of Sickness that preceded modern medicine.