Healers, healing, and the unofficial medical economy in England and Wales, 1834-1948

The project begins with the introduction of the New Poor Law in England and Wales in 1834, which helped consolidated official medical control over provision for the sick poor in an increasingly urban world, and it ends with the creation of a National Health Service in 1948, which was critiqued at the time, but which defines our everyday medical experiences today. Between these two landmarks in official healthcare there were numerous significant developments in the professionalisation of medicine: from the creation, for example, of a national register of qualified general practitioners in 1858 to the admittance of women to the full range of licensed professions beyond midwifery and nursing. But while considerable progress was made in terms of surgery, anaesthetics, antiseptics, and vaccines, until the development of antibiotics in the 1930s heralded a 'therapeutic revolution' the range of effective cures in orthodox medicine was limited - as was popular understanding of the causes of illness. There were also enduring regional differences in the ease of access for ordinary people to doctors and doctoring, and the emergent healthcare professions had ambivalent attitudes to the rise of medical institutions (hospitals, asylums, dispensaries) and the extending reach and power of the state. This study proposes to look beyond the standard histories of medicine in the period, therefore, and recognises that even with the impressive advances in healthcare today, some people still seek out alternative, unofficial therapies for healing.

We cannot fully understand the popular experience and economy of medicine unless we evaluate the totality of the unofficial medical marketplace, and such a task has yet to be undertaken in this country. By taking full advantage of the wealth of archival sources generated from the mid-nineteenth century onward - Poor Law records, local newspapers, medical journals, the censuses, sanitation board reports, folklore, and oral history recordings - the project will examine the thriving economy of unofficial healers in town and country, including herbalists, bone setters, abortionists, water casters, wen cutters, worm doctors, toad doctors, unofficial midwives, cunning-folk, charmers, faith healers, mesmerists and magnetisers, homeopaths, patent medicine vendors, and backstreet druggists. There was also a widespread resort to self-treatment using both commercial products and folk remedies that has not yet been considered in household economic terms. We should not dismiss such 'popular medicine' as the rump of outmoded medical ideas. Many people in the period saw them as contemporary and complementary to official healthcare, and, besides, this project is not concerned with testing the efficacy of unofficial therapeutics. Taking a patient and practitioner perspective, this project will provide, instead, a valuable historical benchmark for how unofficial medical markets develop, decline, and adapt in a changing world. It is a study of ongoing socio-economic medical plurality, and the reasons for it, rather than chronicling linear notions of scientific progress and the imposition of official structures of healthcare.