Turlington's Balsam of Life
secondary literature · 2016
LINK
SUMMARY
Peer-reviewed archaeological/historical study, verified by direct fetch of the abstract on Binghamton University's Open Repository at Binghamton (ORB), which the fetch reproduced in full: Turlington's dates (1697-1766); his description as a weaver, patent medicine vendor, and entrepreneur; the 1743/44 patent date and 27-ingredient alcohol-solution formula; the 1754 bottle embossing text; that Turlington and sellers like him, with no formal medical training, were branded quacks and empirics; the period-context observation that the balsam was consistent with then-current medical practice; and that the business survived Turlington's death until 1804, with the distinctive bottle style still made in 1919. The full-text PDF (orb.binghamton.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1468&context=neha) returned HTTP 403 on direct fetch; only the abstract page was used. The ORB abstract page also returns a browser-challenge response to unattended/scripted fetches (confirmed when the automated verify-quotes checker could not reach it), so this bundle deliberately paraphrases rather than verbatim-quotes the ORB abstract text anywhere, even though the text was directly read and confirmed twice via interactive fetch during authoring.
NOTES
Jones and Vegotsky (2016) is an archaeological and historical study of Turlington’s Balsam of Life published in Northeast Historical Archaeology, covering Robert Turlington’s biography, the patent, the evolving bottle designs used to combat imitators, and the medicine’s marketing and archaeological record in England and North America. It is the case’s principal scholarly historical source, cited for Turlington’s dates, occupation, patent date and ingredient count, the period characterization of unlicensed medicine vendors as “quack and empiric,” and the business’s survival to 1804.