The Georgian medicine vendor as physician: William Brodum

Wellcome Library no. 20131i

A watercolour in the Wellcome Library (left) shows an interior with three figures.  In the centre a plump, self-satisfied looking man  looks down with approval at the work of the second figure, on the right, who is Death himself. Death is a tall and physically active skeleton wearing a tie-wig: he vigorously stirs a pestle in a mortar to grind up ingredients for medicines. Some pharmaceutical vessels are shown on the floor around them, and the shelves in the background are full of apothecary's glassware.  The third figure is a woman patient who sits in front of the fireplace on the left, gripped by illness.

The obvious interpretation is that the man is an apothecary (pharmacist), hence the glassware on the shelves of his house. Death is the apothecary's business partner, making up medicines with lethal side-effects: clearly the woman is going to die as a result of taking the harmful medicine. Right?

No, not exactly.  If the setting is an apothecary's shop, the sick woman wearing night-clothes would be sitting in front of the fire in the pharmacist's establishment, not in her own home. To explain that improbability, one would have to assume that she is meant to be a member of his household -- which would rather reduce the applicability of the joke and take the edge off the humour. As the watercolour is attributed to the ever-humorous Thomas Rowlandson (1756-1827), that would be a problem.

A possible clue to the subject came to light in January 2012 when Christie's in New York offered at auction another watercolour version of the same composition, inscribed in what looks like Rowlandson's hand "Dr Brodum and his assistant at work pro publico bono". [1] So who was Dr Brodum?

Wellcome Library no. 1397i

William Brodum (right) was one of several members of the Georgian medical fringe who were portrayed by caricaturists. Samuel Phillips Eady, also portrayed by Rowlandson and discussed in this blog-post, was another who could be so described. Unlike Eady, Brodum is dignified by an entry in the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (ODNB), where evidence is cited that he was a Danish Jew, born Issachar Cohen in Copenhagen around 1767. [2] He came to England around 1787 to work for another medicine vendor (Dr Bossy), using the name William Brodum. He obtained an Aberdeen M.D. degree in 1791, and from his house at 9 Albion Street, Blackfriars Road, London, launched his own career as a medicine vendor, specializing in two product lines: "Doctor Brodum's Botanical Syrup for the cure of scorbutic, leprous and scrofulous complaints" and "Doctor Brodum's Nervous Cordial for the cure of consumptive, nervous and debilitated constitutions, and people who have been in hot countries". His advertising for these products included a lot of code words that were euphemisms for syphilis (debility, leprosy, nervous weakness etc.), and the same insinuation was gracefully made in the title and body of a two-volume publication, Guide to old age, or, A cure for the indiscretions of youth (1795), dedicated to King George III, whose favour he received. A miniature portrait of him around this time was published in an engraving by Ezekiel Abraham Ezekiel (1757–1806), a member of the Jewish community in Exeter (above).

Brodum was therefore both a commercial medicine vendor and a doctor of medicine. Since the two professions were theoretically distinct and incompatible, problems could arise with the regulatory bodies, one of which was the Royal College of Physicians of London. In practice, this combination was not unusual at the time: Sir Hans Sloane, Dr Robert James, and Dr Richard Mead were among physicians associated with proprietary medicines (chocolate in Sloane's case), a fact which led one commentator to ask "Have not members of the College dined at Dr Brodum's table?". [3] In any case, Brodum was summoned before the College and told he could not accept consultation fees and should remove from his house the brass plate which described him as “Dr Brodum”. Brodum refused to accept this ruling, and the academic authorities in Aberdeen did not appreciate the College’s scorn for the value of their doctorate. Brodum continued to visit patients for an advertised cost of 5 guineas a week, while outpatients could visit him at his house every Monday, Tuesday or Wednesday. [4]

Whether by accident or design,the goings-on in Rowlandson's watercolour fit this situation perfectly. If the man is meant to be identified with Brodum -- he died in 1824 and Rowlandson in 1827 -- we need not ask whether it shows a medicine vendor or a physician. Brodum and Death together make up the medicines at Brodum's pharmaceutical laboratory in Southwark, while the patient in the background, huddled in front of her own fireplace, represents the use to which the medicine will be put in Brodum's medical practice.

[1] Christie's, Old Master and early British drawings and watercolors, New York, Rockefeller Plaza, 26 January 2012, lot 38

[2] Edgar Samuel, 'Brodum, William (fl. 1767–1824)', Oxford dictionary of national biography, Oxford University Press, 2004; online edn, Jan 2008. Brodum wrote that he was "born and bred" in the same country as the Queen, Charlotte of Mecklenburg-Strelitz, in north Germany (Guide to old age, or, A cure for the indiscretions of youth, 1795, vol. 1, fol. A2r)

[3] Roy Porter, Health for sale, Manchester 1989, p. 9

[4] William Brodum, Guide to old age, or, A cure for the indiscretions of youth, 1795, pp. 153-155

James Graham: Doctor of Love

On 26th November, author Lydia Syson will give a talk in the Wellcome Library on James Graham, the controversial eighteenth century healer, widely regarded as the world's first sex therapist and subject of Lydia's recent book, Doctor of Love: James Graham and his Celestial Bed (2008).

This is the latest in our strand of evening events, held in our Reading Room, which explore how authors have drawn on the resources of the Wellcome Library to inspire and inform their writing.

The talk is free and open to all, though places must be booked in advance. Booking opens at 2pm today, 29 October. More details can be found on the Wellcome Collection website.

Forthcoming events

News of a pair of forthcoming public events, which draw on the expertise and skills of two members of Wellcome Library staff.

On Thursday 24th September, Dr Lesley Hall, Senior Archivist, is speaking at ‘Sex: A Victorian Mystery’, a Wellcome Collection event to tie in with the Exquisite Bodies exhibition. The evening aims to bring together visual, historical and literary perspectives, in order to illuminate Victorian contradictions to sex and sexual health.

And on Thursday 22nd October, William Schupbach, Curator, Paintings, Prints and Drawings, will give a lecture entitled ‘Physicians and scholars: libraries and learning in 17th century medical portraits’, at an evening event at the Royal College of Physicians, 'Secrets of 17th Century Portraiture’.

Robert Whytt portrayed from the life

Robert Whytt. Oil painting by G.B. Bellucci, 1738.

Wellcome Library no. 665664i

Robert Whytt (1714-1766) was both a practising physician in Edinburgh and a professor at Edinburgh University. His extensive writings record his search for answers to questions that are still studied today: what distinguishes life from death, how people stay alive, why they fall ill, and what are the invisible processes involved. The seeming familiarity of some of his discoveries, such as the reflex action, led the neurosurgeon Sir Geoffrey Jefferson (1886–1961) to say that Whytt was "by common consent, the greatest of the early neurophysiologists". [1]

That verdict may today seem rather comical. Whytt lived in the 18th-century, and his ideas are not readily comprehensible today without some reference to his inherited vocabulary. [2] His thoughts about the nervous system came to the fore in a long-standing controversy with Albrecht von Haller over the faculty of sensation: Whytt's idea was that sensation, and indeed life itself, was due to the soul's distribution throughout the body, and its ability to take on different forms and functions in the different organs in which it lodged. Although Whytt has been called "the last of the animists" (French, p. 164), he is distinguished from the animists of the Stahl school, who thought that the soul must be a centralised controlling unit. Can Whytt really be said to have "discovered the reflex action", at least in a sense familiar today, if he saw the phenomenon he was describing as a function of invisible and sometimes non-material "animal fluids" channelling the functions of the Aristotelian soul around the various parts of the body?

As this example shows, despite his extensive writings Whytt is not an easy figure to get to grips with. Even the pronunciation of his name is unclear (it seems to be identical with "white"). There is an excellent monograph on him, written by the late Roger K. French, and published by the Wellcome Institute. However, reading that monograph, one understands why French's adviser, Professor Alistair Crombie, allotted this intractable subject to one of his most talented students (French later became a distinguished historian, particularly of mediaeval thought). It is characteristic of Whytt that he died of a mysterious complex of symptoms said to "correspond to no known disease" (French p. 13)

It is perhaps easier to approach Whytt through his historical context, as a luminary of the Edinburgh enlightenment and through his role in the Edinburgh medical world of his day. Fortunately he left an archive which passed through his descendants until part of it was acquired by the Wellcome Library in 1991. Drafts of his writings allow one to see his thought in action (click on the image on the left to read his manuscript).



Manuscript draft by Robert Whytt, 'The cure of (some of added) the most remarkable (symptoms of deleted) nervous, hypochondriac or hysteric (disorders deleted) symptoms'. Wellcome Library MS 6877/4

Missing from the archive available at that time was the portrait which Whytt commissioned from G.B. Bellucci in 1738 (reproduced above). The portrait remained with his descendants and has been inaccessible to the public for virtually its entire history. Fortunately it has now become possible for the Wellcome Library to acquire the portrait and reunite it with Whytt's papers. The portrait shows the young Whytt in the year in which he became a fellow of the Royal College of Physicians of Edinburgh, exuding the confidence that led him to lock horns with Haller.

The portrait is signed "Bellucci pinxit An.o 1738" (Bellucci painted it in the year 1738). Giovanni Battista Bellucci (1684–1760) was the son of the Venetian painter Antonio Bellucci (1654–1726), and came to England with his father in 1716. When Antonio returned to Venice in 1722, Giovanni Battista stayed behind and made his career as a portraitist in the British Isles, though today his paintings are hard to find. There is a portrait attributed to him in the Talbot Rice Gallery, University of Edinburgh, as is a painting of Diana in Northampton Museum, Northamptonshire, but the two main collections of his work, in Schloss Pirnitz (Brtnice, now in the Czech Republic) and in Tyninghame House (in East Lothian, Scotland) appear to have been dispersed. [3]

[1] Roger French, Robert Whytt, the soul and medicine, London: Wellcome Institute, 1969
[2] The context is richly described by G.S. Rousseau in Nervous acts: essays on literature, culture, and sensibility, Basingstoke 2004
[3] Zdenek Kazlepka, 'Se ancor del tutto fosse inesperto il mio talento del'arte liberale della dipintura ... Die Maler Giovanni Battista Bellucci und Antonio Lucino in der Korrespondenz mit Antonio Rambaldo, Graf Collalto e San Salvatore (1718-1722)', Römische Historische Mitteilungen, 2006, 48: 395–408

Layers of identity: Sir Charles Wyndham

Wyndham's Theatre in London's West End is hard to miss. Located in Charing Cross Road next to Leicester Square Underground station and adorned with crisp neo-baroque stone-carvings, it is surrounded in the early evenings by theatre-goers waiting for friends before entering the auditorium. It is named after the man who built it, Sir Charles Wyndham (1837-1919), actor and manager of the theatre. However, Wyndham was not his family name. Before he adopted it, he was Dr Charles Culverwell: his metamorphosis, from jobbing doctor to theatrical knight, is a good example of artfully manipulated identity.

Culverwell's father and uncle were both doctors of a sort. His father, Major Richard Culverwell -- as with the epidemiologist Major Greenwood, Major was his forename, not a military rank -- apparently had an M.D. degree, but instead of practising medicine, he ran a Turkish bath in the City, and together with his brother, Samuel Henry Culverwell, owned hotels in Arundel Street and Norfolk Street, both streets joining the Strand with the Thames. A third brother was Charles's doctor-uncle Robert James Culverwell MRCS (1802-1852), a fringe practitioner with a Giessen M.D. who also ran a bath-house in the City of London, and another one at 10 Argyll Place, off Oxford Street. The baths were advertised in his many popular pamphlets on bathing, indigestion, nervous diseases, "marriage", venereal disease, fresh air, health and longevity. He practised near the bottom of the medical hierarchy.

Charles Culverwell's education and early career followed those of his uncle so closely that people who had not met them must have assumed they were the same man: schooling in Germany, followed by medical education in Dublin, King's College London (near the family hotels), and an MD from Giessen, followed by medical practice in Great Marlborough Street, round the corner from his uncle's West End sauna. In 1860, eight years after his uncle's death, he published Health, happiness and longevity (price 1 shilling, so presumably a puffing pamphlet), and in 1863 advertised his practice in terms similar to his late uncle's:

Dr. Culverwell, M.R.C.S., L.M., L.S.A., 3, Great Marlborough Street, W., can be consulted upon all cases of nervous debility, involuntary blushing, palpitation, loss of memory, incapacity, spermatorrhoea, sterility, cauterisation and galvanism. Just published, 1s., by post 13 stamps: 18 sealed—" Marriage, its obligations, happiness and disappointments". Mann, Cornhill, or Author, as above.

Charles Culverwell was also involved in both amateur and professional theatre as an actor. In that field, he later claimed to have given his career a leg up by publishing lavish reviews of his own performances in the Theatrical journal. On a trip to America in 1862-1864 he tried both professions. As a surgeon he served for the Union army in the American Civil War, mostly in St Louis and New Orleans (with the aid of a testimonial from P.T. Barnum, whom he encountered by chance in a hotel lobby). As an actor he played with little success in performances in New York and Washington, where he appeared on stage in Hamlet with the later assassin John Wilkes Booth playing the title role.

However, after his return to England his career in the theatre advanced apace: in the words of the Oxford DNB ,

A slightly crooked mouth and heavy eyelids lent him a quizzical or mystified look that only enhanced his appeal. As his wavy hair turned from brown to silver his charisma increased. Seldom in fifty years on the stage did he fail to capture the men's admiration or the women's hearts. With the sole exception of Ellen Terry, no British player of his era surpassed his ability to sway the audience by the power of personal charm.

Gradually Dr Charles Culverwell, the agony uncle of Great Marlborough Street, faded from view: after 1882 he no longer submitted his name to the Medical Directory and in 1886 he changed his name formally from Charles Culverwell to to his stage name of Charles Wyndham. A warning to those who assume that disappearance of a name from the Medical Directory means that the person concerned had died -– though in a sense, Dr Culverwell had died. In 1890 when the Surgeon General's Office in Washington D.C. needed to get in touch with Dr Culverwell, the Post Office in London replied that there was no trace of him, though at the time he was starring at the Criterion Theatre, with his new name in lights above Piccadilly Circus. His only continuing connection with the medical world was a willingness to put on fund-raising performances for hospitals such as the Middlesex. Wyndham was knighted in 1902 and died in 1919.

The 1889 photograph of Wyndham by Barraud (above) thoroughly bears out the pen-picture in the Oxford DNB (click on the image to enlarge it). The portrait has recently been added to the Wellcome Library and joins other portraits of public performers such as acrobats, preachers, singers, quack-doctors and horse-tamers.

Wyndham was familiar with the illusory qualities of human identity. In one play that he produced, critics praised the convincing performance of an unknown actor, named as Mr Crabbe, playing the part of a French waiter. Enquiries revealed that the part was played not by an actor at all but by a real Frenchman employed as a waiter at one of Wyndham's father's hotels. How many layers of representation does that make?

Sources
John Malcolm Bulloch, 'Sir Charles Wyndham's family, the Culverwells', Notes and queries, 27 April 1935: 290-294
George Rowell, 'An acting assistant surgeon', Nineteenth century theatre research, 12 (1984): 25-38

Photograph of Sir Charles Wyndham: Wellcome Library no. 672836i.
Photograph of Wyndham's theatre by Vivido, 29 December 2008 some rights reserved