Henry Fielding
- ward-pill-and-drop-1734-1761 patient
Henry Fielding, the novelist and a sitting Westminster magistrate, became Joshua Ward’s patient in February 1754 for the dropsy that would kill him eight months later in Lisbon. In his own Journal of a Voyage to Lisbon, published posthumously in 1755, Fielding wrote that Ward’s medicines “had seldom any perceptible operation” on him, and that Ward “declared it was as vain to attempt sweating me as a deal board.” He nonetheless credited Ward’s personal care as sincere and unpaid: “The powers of Mr. Ward’s remedies want indeed no unfair puffs of mine to give them credit,” Fielding wrote — while allowing that there might have been “something particular in my case capable of eluding” the cure Ward otherwise claimed to achieve routinely against dropsy. Fielding’s account is the case’s first-person patient record of the medicine’s marketed promise and its failure to work, from inside the same illness Ward claimed the medicine could cure.