A study in eighteenth-century advertising methods: the anodyne necklace

A study in eighteenth-century advertising methods: the anodyne necklace, (0-7734-9177-5). Widely dubbed the "golden age of quackery", the eighteenth century was also the era when newspapers and the periodical press first boomed and the arts of publicity became big business. The connexions between these phenomena have long been recognized-as early as 1934 Fielding H. Garrison published his pioneering 'Medicine in The Tatler, Spectator and Guardian' in the Bulletin of the History of Medicine (ii: 477-503); but only with Francis Doherty's remarkable volume has the promotion of nostrums been examined with the depth it deserves. Doherty has followed a very specific line of research. He has chosen to investigate and document with great meticulousness the hundreds of newspaper and journal insertions and all the handbills and other ephemera promoting the anodyne necklace, for a period covering more or less the whole of the eighteenth century. Long manufactured and marketed by the Chamberlen family-for generations encamped in the disputed territory between medical fringe and medical orthodoxy-the amulet was a teething aid for infants, sales of which were evidently boosted by the prevailing belief that teething troubles precipitated the convulsions and fits that destroyed so many babies. Harking back to the celebrated Sir Kenelm Digby, the anodyne necklace's publicity material explicitly drew upon theories of sympathetic magic and action at a distance-thereby in some measure substantiating the view espoused by many historians that the official and popular magic of the early modern era was given a new lease of life by commerical hype. The advertising copy examined by Doherty frequently touted lengthy pamphlets sold, or given away, with the necklace-reading matter purveying weird and wonderful information ('The travels of a shilling', 'A dissertation upon noses', 'A new way of breeding canary birds')-which surely indicates very advanced notions of sales psychology and sophisticated techniques for highlighting products and creating brand loyalties through indirect associations. In conjunction with the necklace, a range of other proprietary medical products was marketed, including sundry VD cures, gout remedies and general restoratives, bitters, Cephalick tobacco, purging sugar plums, and so forth. Despite the dearth of manuscript business records or biographical records, Doherty is able to demonstrate how the Chamberlen firm was constantly assailed by competitors and counterfeiters. Highstreet wars flared in the metropolis as to who was the true proprietor of the authentic necklace, and eventually, through a struggle that remains somewhat obscure, a successful adversary-Basil Burchell-was able to …