products dominated the international market until well into the nineteenth
century. Many of the suppliers of these medicines were known as quacks,
usually described as someone who pretends to have qualifications that they
do not possess, and often called medical charlatans. In the late eighteenth
century a couple of Jewish quack doctors in Britain tested the boundaries
of orthodox medicine by providing both patent medicine and obtaining
genuine medical qualifications.^74
They were aware that a university degree could enhance the value of
their practice and used the lax regulations of Marischal College at Aberdeen
University to obtain medical degrees in absentia, with affidavits provided by
bona fidemedical practitioners, as at this time only the Scottish universities
were open to Jews. The University was alarmed at the award of their
medical qualifications to medical charlatans, but in an era where there was
difficulty in drawing a clear line between the dispensing practice of a prop-
erly qualified practitioner and the sales practices of unregistered medicine
traders there was little that they could do.
William Brodum, known also as the Empiric Brodum, had a stall at
Covent Garden selling his Botanic Syrup. Brodum had courted official noto-
riety, and considerable financial success, with his book A Guide to Old Age:
A Cure for the Indiscretions of Youth. His rival, Samuel Solomon, was born
in Cork in 1745, the younger son of the minister to the Jewish community
there. Solomon had also made a fortune from sales of his Guide to Health
and his patent medicine Cordial Balm of Gilead. The Cordial Balm cost the
enormous sum for the period of 33/– (£1.65) and was essentially a mixture
of brandy and a concoction of various herbs, and was claimed to cure
virtually every disease but was especially valuable for sexual disorders.
Solomon’s financial success was recognised in Liverpool where a number of
streets were named after him and his medication.
The boundaries were to be tested further by the practices of the Jewish
Levenston family who were active in Glasgow, but also other British centres,
during much of the nineteenth century.75–77Michael Jacob Levenston and his
sons were already involved in medical herbalism by the 1840s. Claiming to
be medical qualified they were forced to drop pretensions to medical degrees
once the General Medical Council began licensing procedures in 1859. They
had an extensive pharmacopoeia of British and American remedies of the
type that were much in demand at the time. While Michael and his sons
continued to trade in herbal medicine, one son, Samuel, entered Glasgow
University obtaining the MD degree in 1859, though he had previously
practised as a medical botanist claiming a non-existent medical qualifica-
tion. Though medically qualified Samuel was struck off the Medical
Register in 1877 by the General Medical Council regulations for advertising
and selling patent medicines and, despite appealing in 1881, he was never
reinstated.
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