ABSTRACT
In the late Georgian period, any half-candid historian must surely admit to confusion and even to an attraction to the ‘conventional view’, in that the phenomenon of ‘regularity’ is simply more impressive than a still mysterious quack world. Compared to the display of power managed by the surgeons of the Bristol Infirmary in the years 1750–1800, the history of Chevalier Taylor is an aside. Any population-based view of medical remedies must, after all, presuppose such a habit along with a public able to purchase patent medicines through known local vendors and through newspaper advertisement. In late-eighteenth-century Bristol patent medicines, if newspaper advertisements are anything to go by, were widely available. Victorian professional regulation in medicine needed to contradict the colourful laissez-faire world of the eighteenth-century market economy with its often strange alliances between patient and practitioner.
