#ventilatinghats — Public Fediverse posts

Flash practice

On Whit Monday 1839, the Perthshire Advertiser reported, a country lad visiting Glasgow fell into bad company. His new companion invited him into a suburban pub, and after drink had been taken, duped him into placing £3 in banknotes on the table. In the course of the ensuing banter, these were substituted for three “flash notes”: advertising bills made in the style of banknotes and easily mistaken for them through beery eyes.

The flash notes in question were more remarkable than the crime. They bore a version of the Glasgow coat of arms, with the motto “Honour & Honesty”, and they carried the promise that the euphoniously named “John Knox Stuart MD Surgeon”, of 39 Maxwell Street, professed to cure “sexual debility and all secondary symptoms of VENEREAL”. The self-proclaimed Dr Stuart was in turn more flash than his notes: a fascinating scoundrel operating in the credibility gap that had opened between a self-educated working class and traditional authorities during the cholera epidemics of the 1830s.

One of Stuart’s 1830s “flash notes”. [Wellcome Collection]

John Knox Stuart was born in East Kilbride around 1800. His background is obscure; his father may have been a “dealer” in unspecified goods, while a brother seems to have emigrated and died in New Orleans. It seems that in 1823-24 he briefly studied medicine at the University of Glasgow, and in 1827 — presumably after further training at another local medical school — he passed the examinations of the Faculty of Physicians and Surgeons and qualified as a Licentiate, an accredited surgeon. He would later claim to have earned a medical degree and would style himself “Dr Stuart”; there is no evidence that he was entitled to do so.

Stuart first set up as a surgeon in the port of Grangemouth, but found himself in competition with George Waddell, who also worked as a surveyor and could undercut his rival. Stuart wrote directly to the Prime Minister, the Duke of Wellington, demanding amends. Unsurprisingly this went nowhere, and Stuart was left to make his own way in the world.

One line of work was lecturing. Popular enthusiasm for self-improvement had spawned Mechanics’ Institutions in many industrial towns, with audiences hungry to learn about the rapid advance of science and technology, and often sceptical of established authority. Stuart lectured to the Institutions of Falkirk, Carron, Denny and Dunipace.

Another line of work, readily combined with the first, was quackery. In 1832, Stuart set up as a partner in the New Drug Company, with premises at 12 Crown Street in the Gorbals. This coincided with the arrival in Scotland of pandemic cholera, for which Stuart marketed (presumably ineffective) curative powders. He also plunged into radical political circles, where he found a supply of audiences to whom he could advertise his wares. By his own account, a committee of the “humane residents” of Beith were sufficiently impressed to vote him a medal of thanks in 1834 for the efficacy of his treatment; if such a medal ever existed it probably says more for his charisma than his medicine.

As a quack in radical circles, Stuart could count on the sponsorship of one of the local Radical periodicals, the Liberator, but came under fierce attack from its rival, Peter Mackenzie’s Reformers’ Gazette, which addressed him as “Quack Stewart”, challenged his qualifications, and enquired whether it was true that his medical training consisted of running a sweetie shop in Wilson Street. This criticism didn’t stop him from widening his range and offering specifics against sea-sickness, constipation, and gonorrhoea.

Stuart also broadened his educational activities, publishing weekly numbers of purportedly instructive material as The Chemical Experimentalist and later The Museum of Scientific Recreations. These were peculiar collections of scientific facts (presumably recycled from reference works), bulked out with housekeeping tips and occasionally stranger excursions. In issue 32 of the Chemical Experimentalist, Stuart set out a detailed plan for an “etherial tavern” in which customers could get high on nitrous oxide. He had even costed the scheme: a customer could have an “exhilarating breath” for 2d., an “extatic” breath for 3d., or a fully “seraphic” breath for 4d. Sadly it was never realised.

A gentleman getting pure seraphic. [The Chemical Experimenter]

Stuart also published an assortment of scholarly and semi-scholarly works, ranging from a poetic pamphlet on cholera to a translation (made a century earlier by someone else) of the Italian physiologist Sanctorius, and on again to “A historical, mythological, and descriptive catalogue of paintings”.

At the same time as this flurry of publication, Stuart was operating a private medical establishment at 39 Maxwell Street, in the shady urban quarter later flattened by St Enoch’s Station. Privacy was of the essence: as his flash notes indicated, Stuart specialised in venereal diseases, many of which must have been contracted in the brothels for which that quarter was notorious. He also circulated farthing-sized tokens, of which one side bore an image of a doctor comforting a presumably clap-ridden patient, while the other advertised either his “Panacea” or his obstetric skills. These tokens may even have circulated among the local currency, accepted unofficially in much the way that Stuart’s own skills were.

Details of two farthing tokens. [Pics: various online auction sites]

In parallel with this, Stuart was investing his money developing property in the expanding commuter town of Gourock. He appears to have had a house of his own at 10 Shore Street, and he’d built three tenements at Charles Place on Cardwell Bay. (It’s possible that one of those tenements survives on Cardwell Road.)

Charles Place (right of centre) on the OS 6-inch map surveyed in 1863. [National Library of Scotland] The current building at the east end of Charles Place, possibly the original. [Google Street View]

With the cholera of 1848-9, Stuart dug out and advertised his old powders and went back on the lecture circuit. He had early success attracting customers — if not keeping them alive — in Charleston, Paisley. Lecturing later in Greenock, he referred the audience to the Provost of Paisley to confirm the efficacy of his cures. When one of them took him at his word, the Provost supplied the damning statement that

I beg most distinctly to state that I never knew of a single cure effected by his medicines. He came to this town and harangued a large meeting of the working classes at a time when cholera was very severe in the suburb of Charleston. The people at that time had a strong prejudice against the ordinary medical men, and I believe he sold a considerable quantity of his medicines… I was told by a most respectable minister of the Gospel who resided in the district… that in one small street, where a good many cases occurred, and where they were wholly treated by Dr Stuart, that every case proved fatal.

It wasn’t long before Stuart had a new line of quasi-medical ingenuity. In July 1853 he received a patent for “improvements in hats and other coverings for the head”, and immediately began aggressively to advertise the “Prince Leopold” Patent Ventilating Hat. This miraculous headgear, according to the advertisements, solved the ventilation problems which caused apoplexy, palsy and paralysis; congestion, softening and ossification of the brain; whitening of the hair; rheumatism in the head; premature blindness and deafness. He even printed a testimonial to the effect that it could not only prevent but reverse baldness.

Assorted adverts for the “Prince Leopold” Patent Ventilating Hat and some of its relatives. [Various newspapers]

In June 1854 the “Prince Leopold” was joined by the “Sir Charles Napier Wide-Awake”. (It is unlikely that Sir Charles had endorsed this hat, since he had died the previous year.) By now, cholera had returned to the West of Scotland, and Stuart was again advertising his trusty powders. Neither hat nor powders were enough to save him on 19 August 1854 when he became ill en route from Glasgow to Gourock. After sitting for a few hours in the coffee-room at Greenock, he gave himself a dose of morphia and set out for his house on Shore Street where, in the small hours of the morning, he died of cholera.

Stuart’s death was not the end of the trouble he caused. He had married Margaret McLean, the daughter of a collier from Partick, and had two living daughters by her, but it seems that they had been separated for many years. (She may have moved to Liverpool, where both the daughters had married and where, in 1839, there was an auction of implausible Old Masters described as the property of John Knox Stuart.)

Margaret’s place had been filled by Catherine Reid, originally from Inverness, who from the mid-1830s was living with Stuart as his wife in all but law, and with the aid of her sister Elizabeth was bringing up an increasing list of splendily named and blatantly illegitimate offspring — Catherine Eugenia Stuart, Lorenzo Knox Stuart, James Kepler Stuart and Eugene Macintosh Stuart — as well as Ann Stuart, John’s daughter by his former servant Janet Adam.

About the most that can be said for John Knox Stuart is that he did his best to make provision for his irregular family, constructing an intricate will that left his property in trust for them, while providing enough for his wife to forestall her legal claims. He also left instructions that his children, male and female, were to be “thoroughly instructed in Mathematics Botany Chemistry Natural Philosophy Geology and Astronomy”, and provided with tickets to the Glasgow Botanic Gardens and to the Astronomical Observatory.

The will, unfortunately, was premised on the assumption that there would be enough money to go round. Margaret, perhaps surprisingly, declared herself satisfied with the provisions. Stuart’s creditors did not, and after four years of legal wrangling they forced his estate into sequestration. Matters were complicated because he had not granted his trustees the power to sell most of his assets — presumably feeling that this would make them more vulnerable to claims by the legitimate against the illegitimate offspring. By the time of the sequestration, all his trustees had refused to act, but it took a further legal case, finally decided by the Court of Session in 1863, to eventually establish that they had a right to resign.

It isn’t clear what became of Catherine Reid and her children during this period. There were certainly loose ends; as late as 1902 there were advertisements for her children to come forward, and matters seem to have been closed only in 1911.

John Knox Stuart, from The Museum of Scientific Recreations via Dow (1990)

John Knox Stuart was a scoundrel of his time. The themes of quackery and illegitimacy were current enough in the 1850s for the ever-trendy Anthony Trollope to work them into Dr Thorne. Nevertheless, he has a familiar quality. Turning a pandemic into a business opportunity; selling quack cures and garbled science to people mistrustful of the political and medical establishments; and carrying it all off through the unabashed blatancy of his methods… we have, perhaps, seen his like lately. And at the same time there are those flashes — his son’s name, those tickets to the Botanics and the Observatory — that suggest a faith in the very science he was misusing.

It’s possible that he may even have believed in himself.

Main sources

The only published account of Stuart’s life seems to be Derek A. Dow, “John Knox Stuart, Accoucher Extraordinaire”, Scottish Medical Journal 35:89-90 (1990); I’ve followed Dow where I couldn’t confirm details directly.

For Reid and Stuart’s ménage and its legal aftermath I’ve referred to the 1841 and 1851 census records, and Stuart’s will (all via National Records of Scotland).

Most of the other information, including advertisements, comes from contemporary newspaper reports. Details are available on request, and corrections are welcome, as ever.

#cholera #johnKnoxStuart #quackMedicine #venerealDisease #ventilatingHats