METHUSELAH ARCHIVE INTERVENTIONS / ST JOHN LONG'S CORROSIVE LINIMENT AND INHALATION

St John Long's Corrosive Liniment and Inhalation

regimen · 1827–1834
category:regimen
delivery:Daily topical friction with a secret liniment, rubbed onto the chest or back for five to ten days until it raised a running sore, paired in some patients with a secret inhaled vapour; administered in person at Long's Harley Street consulting rooms in London for a fee.
price tier:top_only
era:1827–1834
current status:historical
regulatory:unregulated
SHORT PITCH (AS SOLD)
A secret corrosive liniment that Long claimed could tell 'sound' from 'unsound' tissue, raising a large discharging sore over the chest or back to let consumption, rheumatism, and other internal disease 'escape' the body, together with a separate secret inhaled preparation for the same complaints.
THE ACTUAL EVIDENCE
No formula was ever published and no controlled trial, case series, or outcome comparison was conducted. At the inquest and trial following Catherine Cashin's death in 1830, the liquid used on her was shown to be highly corrosive: it produced a large, severely inflamed, infected wound rather than any diagnostic or curative discharge, and the attending surgeon Benjamin Brodie testified that he could not see how producing such a wound could have any effect in curing or preventing consumption. Contemporary medical opinion, reflected in *The Medico-chirurgical Review*'s 1829 and 1830 notices of Long's practice, criticized the method directly in his own lifetime rather than only in later historical retrospectives. Long's method was used again, weeks later, on Mrs Colin Campbell Lloyd, who died; a coroner's jury found manslaughter against Long, citing gross ignorance, though he was acquitted at the subsequent Old Bailey trial. Long published his own claims and testimonials in two pamphlets he wrote in his own defence (Discoveries in the Science and Art of Healing, 1830, published by Burgess & Hill; A Critical Exposure of the Ignorance and Mal-practice of Certain Medical Practitioners, 1831) but never submitted the liniment's composition or any outcome data for independent scrutiny; no modern source records any therapeutic benefit for tuberculosis or rheumatism from either preparation.
PRACTITIONERS
CASES
CLAIMS
SOURCES
  1. Long, John St. John (Dictionary of National Biography, 1885-1900, Vol. 34) (1893)
  2. John St John Long: quackery and manslaughter (2014)
  3. St. John Long and His Disciples (1830)
  4. Pulmonary Consumption—Quackeries of St. John Long (1829)
  5. John St. John Long (English Wikipedia) (2026)
NOTES

St John Long’s corrosive liniment and inhalation (London, 1827-1834) were secret preparations marketed as a single “entirely original method” for treating consumption, rheumatism, and other internal disease by external application. Long’s theory, as later medical-historical accounts summarize it, held that the liniment could tell sound tissue from unsound: rubbed daily onto the skin over a diseased organ for five to ten days, it would raise a large running sore, and the emerging discharge was presented as the disease itself leaving the body; rubbed onto healthy skin, it supposedly did nothing. No such selective action exists in any modern or contemporary pharmacology, and no formula, trial, or outcome series was ever published. The wound the liniment produced was, in fact, an ordinary chemical burn: at the 1830 inquest and Old Bailey trial following Catherine Cashin’s death, the applied liquid was shown to be highly corrosive, and the wound it produced became severely inflamed and infected, causing her death within days. Per Wikipedia’s biography, Long’s practice used two secret formulas throughout, one inhaled and the other rubbed on the skin; which formula was used in any given patient’s case is not always specified in the sources reviewed for this bundle. Long’s method was used again, weeks later, on Mrs Colin Campbell Lloyd, who died; a coroner’s jury found manslaughter against Long, citing gross ignorance, though he was acquitted at the subsequent Old Bailey trial. The intervention was sold through Long’s own Harley Street practice; a contemporary notice titled “St. John Long and His Disciples” indicates other practitioners imitated aspects of his method by 1830, but no formula, independent case series, or comparison trial was ever published by Long or any imitator. It was never approved, licensed, or regulated in any modern sense. When Long died in 1834 he left the undisclosed formula to his brother William rather than to medicine.