Joshua Ward
individual · London, England (previously an exile at St. Germain and Dunkirk, France, c. 1717-1733)
FINANCIAL CONFLICTS
Ward was the pill and drop's named author, promoter, and seller; the 1899 Dictionary of National Biography reports that his knowledge went no further than slight pharmacy knowledge, while the medicine's public authority rested on his own claims and courted celebrity patronage. The same account records that 'he amassed a good fortune' from its sale; no source discloses that any of it was shared with a testing body or regulator, though the chemist J. White compounded the medicine for Ward and so held working knowledge of the recipe before Ward's death. He also drew a direct royal subsidy: George II gave him rooms in the Whitehall almonry, from which he treated poor patients 'at his majesty's expense,' a state-funded distribution channel that widened his patient base and reputation while charging the crown rather than the patient. At his 1761 death he bequeathed his formulae to John Page, who published the receipts and arranged for the profits from their sale to be divided between two named charities (the Asylum for Support of Female Orphans and the Magdalen Hospital for Penitent Prostitutes) under the charge of the magistrate Sir John Fielding; this arrangement does not establish that Ward himself gave away his own profits during his lifetime, only that his heir redirected the posthumous revenue.
INTERVENTIONS PROMOTED
NOTABLE PATIENTS
EXTERNAL REFERENCES
NOTES
Joshua Ward (1685-1761) was an English promoter of a proprietary “pill and drop” that he claimed could cure any human ailment, sold first in France during a political exile and then, from 1734, in London. The 1899 Dictionary of National Biography account concludes that “beyond some slight knowledge of pharmacy, Ward was destitute of medical learning.” He nonetheless had a talent for courting the rich and the crown: he won the favor of George II by resetting the king’s dislocated thumb “with a violent wrench,” and secured the patronage of the Earl of Chesterfield, Lieutenant-General Churchill, and, near the end of his life, the novelist Henry Fielding. Contemporaneous critics (Daniel Turner in 1735, Joseph Clutton in 1736) publicly examined the medicine’s composition and effects during Ward’s own lifetime, and Parliament nonetheless exempted him by name from an apothecaries’ licensing bill in 1748. He died a wealthy man in 1761 and bequeathed his formulae to John Page, who published the receipts and arranged for the sale profits to go to charity.