Royal Poxes and Potions: The Lives of Court Physicians, Surgeons and Apothecaries (review)

What possessed the editors at Sutton Publishing to put out this old-fashioned, insubstantial book? For what audience could they have intended a medical history that is neither scholarly enough for academics nor engagingly enough written for a lay readership? While the manuscripts of bona fide historians likely languish unread on editors' desks, how did this project, with its hackneyed, passive-voiced accounts of "elephant-man" Joseph Merrick's and Jack the Ripper's connections to the English court, get off the ground?

Raymond Lamont-Brown, a free-lance writer whose credits include Edward VII's Last Loves and Royal Murder Mysteries, tries to delve into serious medical history, mingling it with gossipy revelations about selected aulic physicians. Though more than half of the book is focused on the Victorian age to the present, the author incorporates material on royal medics of ancient Egypt and sixteenth-century Scotland in his rambling narrative. There is no context given for the lives presented. Lamont-Brown does not delineate the divisive squabbles characteristic of the medical world in early modern England, nor what bearing court doctors had on those theoretical and jurisdictional wars. Paracelsus is not mentioned, nor is Van Helmont, both of whose disciples in England challenged the traditional Galenic establishment and sent it reeling.

Even more egregious in a biography of key royal healers is the slighting of men like clinician Theodore Mayerne, and the complete omission of Whig propagandist James Welwood; the Chase family controlled the office of court apothecary for three generations, but they are missing from this chronicle. John Dee, who was never a formal appointee, gets more space than Thomas Vicary, who was. Lamont-Brown segues to sixteenth-century France for a short discussion of Ambrose (spelled Ambroise in the index) Paré before an awkward transition to the Tudors. He deals with scattered early English royal appointments in a sentence or two, and offers no accurate, comprehensive listing of medical officials from the inception of their positions; he does provide, however, detailed registers for nineteenth- and twentieth-century appointments.

With so many fine titles available for those interested in the transitional character of English medicine, and an avalanche of learned articles on the theories and therapies of royal physicians, no one should waste any time on this book. Lamont-Brown surely did not waste his time absorbing any new scholarship. Imagine a bibliography on anything in medical history without works by Roy Porter, Harold Cook, Andrew Wear, Allen Debus, or Charles Webster. Where is Vivian Nutton's indispensable Medicine at the Courts of Europe, 1500-1837? No specific journal articles are cited in the bibliography, and most mentioned in the endnotes are from the 1930s or earlier. Perhaps that is why the whole book seems so quaint; it is rooted in yesteryear. The citations are altogether bizarre: venerable primary sources, though never quite the right ones, sit alongside pedestrian secondary material.

Despite some chapters of startling brevity and an index acknowledged as abbreviated, the production values of the book are sound—although two presentation decisions troubled me. First, outlined boxes containing extraneous anecdotes and aphorisms invade the middle of chapters; they are distracting at best, and supply no tangible support for the text. Second, credits state that some of the illustrations come from the "author's collection"—but having just wrestled with institutional permission and payment myself for a picture that Lamont-Brown labels "The Doctor's Dispensary," I know for a fact that the uncropped original, a 1650 broadside sold by Nathaniel Brooke and inscribed "The Doctor's Dispensatory," is in the Douce Portfolio at the Bodleian Library, Oxford University. Another pruned illustration, an ink and wash portrait of Thomas Linacre, comes from the Cacherode Collection of...