Brodum's Nervous Cordial restores weakly and debilitated constitutions, bracing the system and giving it 'vigour to the functions of life', and relieves nervous disorders, lowness of spirits, loss of memory, impaired vigour, and nervous consumptions.
Brodum’s broadside markets the Nervous Cordial for “delicate, weakly, and relaxed constitutions, lowness of spirits, hypochondriac, horrors, tremblings, weakness of sight, loss of memory, impaired vigour, tabes dorsalis, nervous consumptions, and disorders arising from a course of intemperance”, and asserts that it braces the system and gives it “vigour to the functions of life”. The claim is mechanism-only and refuted. No controlled evidence supported it; the medicine was a secret proprietary preparation whose composition this bundle does not assert, sold on a structure of testimonial letters and an unbounded list of conditions, which is the signature of an unfalsifiable cure-all rather than a tested remedy. Brodum was classed among the empirics by contemporaries (Corry) and recorded by Mackintosh (2017) as the most notorious of the irregular medicine owners, his name “repeatedly being used as an exemplar of quackery”. The restoration-of-vigour promise is the dietetic-vitalist longevity claim in its premium-nostrum form: the renewal of a failing constitution sold as the route to a sounder and longer life.
Appears in
Sources
- By His Majesty's Royal Letters Patent. Dr. Brodum's Nervous Cordial, and Botanical Syrup — By His Majesty's Royal Letters Patent. Dr. Brodum's nervous cordial, and botanical syrup. [London]: [Walker], [1801?]. Wellcome Collection (catalogue work hcza4zdf; digitized copy IIIF presentation b30354596). Public Domain Mark. Digitized full text also at Internet Archive item b30354596.
- The Patent Medicines Industry in late Georgian England: A Respectable Alternative to both Regular Medicine and Irregular Practice — Mackintosh, Alan. 'The Patent Medicines Industry in late Georgian England: A Respectable Alternative to both Regular Medicine and Irregular Practice.' Social History of Medicine, vol. 30, no. 1 (2017), pp. 22-47. DOI 10.1093/shm/hkw054. ISSN 0951-631X. Open-access accepted version, White Rose Research Online eprint 98462.
- Quack Doctors Dissected; or, a New ... Edition of Corry's Detector of Quackery — Corry, John. Quack Doctors Dissected; or, a New, Cheap, and Improved Edition of Corry's Detector of Quackery: Containing Several Curious Anecdotes of Solomon, Brodum, Perkins, and Other Modern Empirics; with Strictures on Book-makers, & Puffing Publishers. London: sold by Champante and Whitrow [and others], circa 1802. Held by the Wellcome Collection (Wellcome Library) and digitized through the Medical Heritage Library; Internet Archive item b30369496 (https://archive.org/details/b30369496); public-domain copy on Wikimedia Commons. Public domain.