Brodum's Restorative Nervous Cordial and Botanical Syrup

The doctor who had a shop at the Prince’s party

In 1802 a masquerade attended by the Prince of Wales and two of his brothers included, among the costumed amusements, a mock village shop labelled ‘Doctor Brodum’s shop’. That a quack’s storefront was famous enough to parody at a royal entertainment is the measure of the man. William Brodum (died 1824) was, in the patent-medicine historian Alan Mackintosh’s words, ‘the most notorious’ of the irregular medicine owners of late-Georgian England, ‘the owner of two medicines, a nervous cordial and a botanical syrup’ (Mackintosh 2017). He claimed to have trained as a military practitioner in continental Europe but was regarded as an irregular practitioner; ‘often itinerant, he bought an MD from Marischal College, Aberdeen for 13 guineas, and aggressively publicised both himself and his patent medicines.’ That bought degree licensed the title ‘Dr. Brodum’ that fronted his advertising and title pages. His Jewish parentage and an alleged foreign birth drew hostile comment: the 1805 attack ‘Of Quacks and Empiricism’ asserted he was born in Copenhagen, but a defence in the same journal called the claim ‘given on no authority’ and ‘utterly false’, so even his birthplace was contested in his lifetime, and his birth year is uncertain, an estimate of around 1750 resting on a later record of his age.

A secret formula, sold in every market town

Access was broad rather than scarce. The Nervous Cordial and Botanical Syrup were sold ‘By His Majesty’s Royal Letters Patent’ from Brodum’s premises at No. 9 Albion Street, Blackfriars, through named London houses, and through ‘all the Booksellers, Printers, Druggists, and Medicine Venders, in the principal Market Towns in the Three Kingdoms’ (Brodum broadside, [1801?]). The formula and Brodum name were proprietary: secret preparations whose composition was not disclosed, sold alongside A Guide to Old Age (advertised at 3s 6d, with the doctor’s portrait and a dedication to the King).

‘Vigour to the functions of life’

The advertised mechanism was unexaminable vitalist language about the nerves and the ‘animal spirits’. Brodum’s broadside describes nervous complaints as governed by the mind through the nerves, then asserts that the Nervous Cordial braces the system and gives it ‘vigour to the functions of life’. The medicine was a secret compound never subjected to any controlled test, so the claimed action on the constitution was asserted and never measured. The breadth of the surrounding indication list (delicate and relaxed constitutions, lowness of spirits, weakness of sight, loss of memory, impaired vigour, tabes dorsalis, nervous consumptions, the effects of intemperance) is itself the mark of an unfalsifiable cure-all rather than a defined remedy with a testable mechanism.

Five thousand a year from a bottle he owned

Brodum was the proprietor and the public face of the secret medicines whose efficacy he proclaimed, so his income depended directly on their sale. Mackintosh (2017) reports that he was ‘very successful, earning an estimated £5,000 a year from selling medicines’, and sold his book A Guide to Old Age as part of the same business. The conflict is the owner-vendor pattern stated on the documented facts and not overstated: his own advertisements list numerous London houses and provincial booksellers, printers, druggists, and medicine venders who sold the medicines, so the proceeds were shared. The documented conflict is his direct and substantial financial dependence on the secret medicines he owned and praised, dignified by a bought degree and an advertised royal patent, neither of which was evidence that the medicines worked.

No trial, but a verdict already in

There was no decisive trial, because the secret medicines were never put to a controlled test; the disconfirmation is the convergence of contemporary judgement and the historical verdict. Informed contemporaries classed Brodum among the empirics: John Corry’s Detector of Quackery, in the edition titled Quack Doctors Dissected (circa 1802), named him with Samuel Solomon and Elisha Perkins as ‘modern Empirics’. The medical press attacked his pretensions directly in the Medical and Physical Journal of 1805, which also records that Brodum brought a legal action against the publisher. Mackintosh (2017) records his name ‘repeatedly being used as an exemplar of quackery’. The royal letters patent he advertised was not evidence that the medicines worked. What the record shows is a charismatic irregular practitioner with a bought degree, selling secret proprietary nostrums on testimony and on an unfalsifiable cure-all promise, with no demonstrated power to restore a failing constitution or to preserve health ‘to extreme old age’ as his advertising claimed.