Quack Doctors Dissected; or, a New ... Edition of Corry's Detector of Quackery
period print · 1802
LINK
SUMMARY
Contemporary anti-quackery tract by the writer John Corry (active circa 1770s-1820s), used as the disconfirmation-stage artifact for the case. A vision inspection of the downloaded title page confirmed the printed title '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', followed by Latin and English epigraphs (Seneca, Boileau, Shakespeare) and the London imprint ('sold by Champante and Whitrow, Jewry-street, Aldgate ... and all other booksellers'). The page names Solomon alongside William Brodum (a rival proprietor of a 'Nervous Cordial') and Elisha Perkins (the metallic-tractor patentee already in this archive), placing all three in the contemporary catalogue of fashionable empirics. The holding institution is the Wellcome Collection (Wellcome Library), whose copy was digitized through the Medical Heritage Library and is held at Internet Archive as item b30369496; the public-domain copy used here is on Wikimedia Commons (license 'pd'). The author field reads 'Corry, John, approximately 1770-'. The edition is undated on the title page; the framing year 1802 reflects the circulation of Corry's Detector of Quackery in the early 1800s. Source for the artifact-role media entity corry-quack-doctors-dissected-titlepage; corroborates the case's disconfirmation that Solomon was treated as a quack by informed contemporaries.
NOTES
John Corry’s Quack Doctors Dissected (an edition of his Detector of Quackery) is used as the artifact of contemporary disconfirmation. Its title page names Solomon together with Brodum and Perkins as “modern Empirics” and promises “Strictures on Book-makers, & Puffing Publishers”, which situates Solomon’s advertising machine within the early-nineteenth-century critique of fashionable quackery. The scan is public domain on Wikimedia Commons (Internet Archive b30369496). The edition is undated; the year is framed to circa 1802, the period of the Detector’s circulation. It is cited as evidence that informed contemporaries classed Solomon as a quack, not as a technical analysis of the balm.