Until well into the twentieth century the provision of health care and medicines was very much a hit and miss affair. The National Insurance Act 1911 provided health insurance for industrial workers and for those covered it removed the stigma of ‘going on the parish’ a system of institutionalised begging under the auspices of the Poor Law. However the Act only applied to 70% of the workforce and it did not cover their families and dependants; that situation did not change until the introduction of the National Health Service in 1948.

It is easy to forget that many of the things we take for granted today did not exist a hundred years ago. Although the beneficial use of insulin was discovered in 1922 it was not in widespread use until after the Second World War and the same is true for penicillin. Surprisingly the control of medicines for human use was not formerly regulated until the Medicines Act of 1968 following the Thalidomide scandal.

Against this background it should not be surprising that older newspapers and magazines are full ‘patent’ medicines many if not most of which were of dubious efficacy and in some cases the remedy was worse than the disease!