1855 British College of Health Arsenic Rare Quack Medicine Morison Advertisement

Description

1855 British College of Health Arsenic Rare Quack Medicine Morison Advertisement
Good condition, as pictured.
Original Advertisement\Manifesto from 1855.
8.25" x 5", Double Sided. Rare in Commerce.
This is an interesting original manifesto, issued as an advertisement in a periodical at the time (1855), protesting the bill put forward to regulate certain areas of "medicine" and specifically the medicinal sale of Arsenic.
The British College of Health:
It began in 1825 as a campaign conducted by James Morison to assert the importance of the blood; he believed that all diseases were caused by its impurity, and therefore urged the necessity of purging it with vegetables, with his own specially-developed Vegetable Pill (John Malcolm Bulloch, The Centenary of James Morison the “Hygeist”, 1925)
Originally, Morison gave away his Pill, but he found that no-one appreciated it when it was free, so instead he turned to selling it through specially appointed agents (John Malcolm Bulloch, The Centenary of James Morison the “Hygeist”, 1925)
Morison subsequently built the British College of Health to sell his products in partnership with Thomas Moat (Oxford Dictionary of National Biography)
Its grandiose name was described as “one of the cleverest things he ever did…by taking on a sort of corporate philanthropic existence he removed himself from the category of a mere commercial exploiter of a proprietary medicine” and created “a sort of University of Morisonism” (John Malcolm Bulloch, The Centenary of James Morison the “Hygeist”, 1925)
He also published a journal, the Hygeian Journal
In the early 1830s, his annual turnover in Britain was thought to be around £100,000 (Oxford Dictionary of National Biography)
He conducted a reciprocal campaign against orthodox doctors, led by Thomas Wakley of The Lancet, but after a series of deaths attributed to overdoses of his pills, Morison left England in 1834 for Paris; a decline in sales followed (Oxford Dictionary of National Biography)
One of the cases was Morison and others v. Harmer and another (The Times, 11 and 13 February 1837)
However, there was clearly a continuing market for the medicine; in 1837, Morison had to advertise that his Pill was sold only through his agents and had the red and white “Morison’s Universal Medicines” logo, as many imitations were then on the market, such as “Dr Morrisons Pills”, “The Hygeian Pills”, and “The Original Morison’s Pills, as compounded by the late Mr Moat” (The Times, 20 April 1838)
It was thriving again in the 1840s; in 1840–1849 it paid £115,000, meaning that it had sold 18,400,000 stamps or 828,000,000 pills, while another 1.5 million had been distributed to the poor (John Malcolm Bulloch, The Centenary of James Morison the “Hygeist”, 1925)
A book published by the College contained a collection of letters of recommendation from patients, dating from the early 1830s to 1869, and claiming his Pill as a cure for stomach complaints, cholera, liver complaints, general debility, jaundice, worms, gravel, limb pain after falls, and eye problems; they were even being used to treat snake bits and scorpion stings in Madras in 1866 (Guide to Health: Being a Collection of Cases of Cure Effected by Morison’s Pills (The Vegetable Universal Medicine) during the Last Forty Years, published by the College, undated)
Many patients were apparently continuing to take his Pill even when they had been cured, and some were giving them to the rest of the family as a preventative medicine with no side effects; others were taking or administering his Pill secretly because of their controversial reputation (Guide to Health: Being a Collection of Cases of Cure Effected by Morison’s Pills (The Vegetable Universal Medicine) during the Last Forty Years, published by the College, undated)
Advertisements for the product were printed in many languages including Chinese and Arabic, and the Pills reached many foreign countries; in Krakow, Poland, in 1844, one J. T. Fischer was arrested for taking the tablets, but proved he had been cured and was discharged by the court (Guide to Health: Being a Collection of Cases of Cure Effected by Morison’s Pills (The Vegetable Universal Medicine) during the Last Forty Years, published by the College, undated)
After Morison’s death in 1840, his son James Augustus Cotter Morison, journalist, historian, and Positivist, apparently did little to interfere with the running of the family firm (Oxford Dictionary of National Biography)
In 1843 Thomas Carlyle’s Past and Present (the book in which the term ‘the condition of England’ was coined) has a chapter called Morrison’s Pill, in which he says “Brothers, I am sorry I have got no Morrison’s Pill for curing the maladies of Society”
Another satirical reference came from Robert Wilkie’s one act farce Yalla Gaiters, or a Rare Discovery on the Banks of the Moy, published in 1840 and acted in 1846, which summed up the grandiose claims made for the Pill thus:
“In short, the blind may gain their sight, the dumb may find a tongue,
The lame may quickly run a race, the old again be young.
One dose will make you laugh or cry and every belly fills,
In fact if you would never die take Vegetable Pills”
(quoted in John Malcolm Bulloch, The Centenary of James Morison the “Hygeist”, 1925)
In 1856, Dickens referred satirically to “the august members of the Hygeian Council of the British College of Health” and “that great discovery, Morrison’s Pills"