ABSTRACT

This chapter utilizes sources from two regional contexts – Lancashire and Northamptonshire – with regional examples to explore the medical and drug strategies of the middling and the poor. Eighteenth-century Lancashire had an early dependence upon rural industry, and by the later eighteenth century was home to a thriving cotton trade and a growing urban population. The St Clare story demonstrates keenly how complex access to medicines must have been for the middling sort in the eighteenth century outside the metropolis, county towns and medical hot spots like Spa towns. It has been argued that for both the poor and middling sorts, there was a vibrant and robust sub-regional drugs trade, and one that probably became more robust and more vibrant over time. Several types of 'supplier' underpinned the trade, many of them with overlapping ambits, including apothecaries, doctors, quacks, middling and aristocratic families and institutions.