Tax and Quacks: The Policy of the Eighteenth Century Medicine Stamp Duty
secondary literature · 2013
LINK
SUMMARY
Academic legal-history book chapter, verified by direct fetch of the NCBI Bookshelf hosted text, which reproduced verbatim: 'It was in this context of a thriving trade that Lord John Cavendish introduced the medicine stamp duty in 1783 with the intention of taxing quack medicines for the first time'; the fetched text also establishes that the 1783 Act was a financial failure and was replaced by a second Medicine Stamp Act in 1785, and that it is this 1785 Act's schedule of 'over eighty named preparations, including famous ones such as Bateman's Drops, Daffy's Elixir and Turlington's Balsam'; and the general characterization that such remedies 'were unproven, sometimes useless, frequently dangerous, and they were consumed in prodigious quantities.' Full citation confirmed on the fetched page header.
NOTES
Chantal Stebbings’s 2013 legal-history chapter on the English Medicine Stamp Duty, covering both the failed 1783 Act and the 1785 Act that replaced it, published in an edited academic volume on the history of tax law and hosted on the NCBI Bookshelf. Cited in this case because it names “Turlington’s Balsam” specifically among over eighty proprietary preparations the 1785 Act’s stamp-duty schedule taxed, and because it supplies the chapter’s general scholarly characterization of that class of remedies as “unproven, sometimes useless, frequently dangerous.”