Quackery and commerce in seventeenth-century London: the proprietary medicine business of Anthony Daffy.

Anthony Daffy's Elixir Account Book offers a unique insight into the medical economy of the later seventeenth century. It records sales beyond London in the 1670s and 1680s of Daffy's "Elixir Salutis", or simply Daffy's Elixir as it was better known, a medicine that continued to be manufactured and widely used into the twentieth century in England, America and various European countries.' Daffy's Elixir was one of the most famous, as well as one of the most long-lasting, of proprietary medicines, that amorphous group of remedies distinguished from the rest of the pharmacopoeia by the secrecy with which their producers shrouded their ingredients. Secret remedies had long been a part of medicine in Europe, and had circulated internationally since the sixteenth century at least.2 However, in England the variety and scale of production of proprietary medicines seems to have dramatically expanded in the later seventeenth century, although this is largely inferred from the survival of advertisements and pamphlets. The increasing prominence of proprietary medicines was one of the most distinctive, controversial and striking developments in medicine of the period. They are well known to historians from the mass of colourful, argumentative and immodest pamphlets and advertisements that their producers issued-and from the extensive condemnations that they later attracted from orthodox medical practitioners, particularly in the nineteenth century when the Lancet launched all out war on quack medicines. Much less is known of the economics of the trade than of the advertising strategies, rhetoric and the ethics of proprietary medicine producers, which have inevitably attracted much comment.3 For the later period we have some sense of the massive scale of the proprietary medicine industry from tax records. However, we have previously had nothing