Brandreth's Pills

Yesterday (4th October) BBC Radio 4 aired Brandreth's Pills which told the story of Benjamin Brandreth, a pioneering patent remedy salesman of the nineteenth century.

Brandreth's Vegetable Pills earned their creator a fortune, and the programme investigated Brandreth's ground-breaking marketing techniques.

The programme also featured William Schupbach, Curator, Paintings, Prints and Drawings, Wellcome Library, discussing the testimonials included in Brandreth's publication The Doctrine of Purgation.

Brandreth's Pills will be available to listeners in the UK through the BBC iPlayer until Monday 11th October.

Quacks and Cures: new and improved!

Friday 4^th June sees the return of Wellcome Collection’s hugely popular Quacks and Cures all-building spectacular. The event aims to present a snapshot of some of the opinions and ideas threaded through three centuries of medical history.

Friday’s event will see a new line-up, including Hope Springs Eternal, a talk on medical spas and waters by Medical London’s Dr Richard Barnett, as well as the return of the advice panel spanning three centuries of practitioners, which will now be relocated to the more stately atmosphere of the Wellcome Library due to its popularity last year. We are very excited to be welcoming science writer and broadcaster Dr Simon Singh who will be speaking in the auditorium. The hugely popular leeches will be making a return visit too.

For those who missed the event, have a look at this short clip on our first event here on the Wellcome Collection site.

The event is free and there is no need to book.

The after-effects of Vril

Dr Lesley Hall of the Wellcome Library was one of the contributors to a recent BBC Radio 3 documentary discussing the curious afterlife of Edward Bulwer Lytton’s Vril.

"Matthew Sweet finds out about Vril, the infinitely powerful energy source of the species of superhumans which featured in Victorian author and politician Edward Bulwer Lytton’s pioneering science fiction novel 'The Coming Race'. Although it was completely fictional, many people were desperate to believe it really existed and had the power to transform their lives".

One of these people was a Harley Street doctor, Herbert Tibbits, who along with a handful of aristocrats, tried to promote the notion of electrical cures and the possibility of a "coming race" in a bizarre bazaar at the Royal Albert Hall.

Another believer was Arthur Lovell. In the documentary, Dr Hall describes his work The Breath of Life, which claimed to offer practical advice on how to breathe your way to a higher state of human evolution.

The Wellcome Library holds a copy of this book, and other works by both Tibbits and Lovell. The documentary is available here until 11 January 2009.