Conference Agenda

This proposed panel addresses the role of popular music as, and in the promotion of medicine in Britain and America, from ca. 1650-1900. Two throughlines between all three papers are the use of music in the regulation of health per se and the ways by which music--whether explicitly advertising quacks medicines or not--can help construct a cultural reality of health and illness that draws together wide-ranging notions such as spiritualty, morality, gender, class, and leisure.

Prefabricated, proprietary medicines were sold in England for the first time in the seventeenth century. Competing with ad hoc remedies hand-prepared by apothecaries and savvy lay practitioners, including family members and neighbours, drug sellers made particular claims—many outlandish and hyperbolic—about their medicines’ efficacy, symptom-targeting, and virtues (Suhr 2022). Around the same time, England’s print marketplace saw a flourishing of music anthologies borrowing language of the drug trade, proffering songs as substitutes for untrustworthy doctors (for example, An Antidote Against Melancholy, 1661; Pills to Purge Melancholy 1699–1721). These, too, used persuasive rhetoric to convince readers that their contents would provide “the surest physic for the spleen [melancholy]” in place of the “sure and infallible Cure” pedaled by “ignorant Quacks” (The Merry Musician, 1716). Patrick Wallis argues that a distinction ought to be drawn between those cures that were “hoaxes on the ignorant” and those held real value within the medical system within which they operated (2019).

Music was widely believed to have restorative properties (Gouk 1999, Austern 2020), but did early modern readers actually buy into medicinal claims about music in printed song collections? If so, how were such songs used in cases of melancholy and other afflictions? While such questions resist answers, we gain insight through the songs collected in a non-commercial genre of the period: handwritten medical recipe books. For although proprietary medicines gained popularity throughout the late seventeenth century, home remedies persisted as trusted alternatives to commercially traded drugs. My research has shown that music participated in regimens of home healthcare alongside other handcrafted remedies. As such, this paper compares medicinal claims about music in printed song collections with the musical repertoires in manuscript recipe books, finding that while music publishers attempted to transform the practice of home song collecting into a commercial enterprise through secular ballad sales, repertoires of home medicinal music predominantly comprised psalms, hymns, and instrumental music. Ultimately, I argue that print and manuscript sources should be read together in order to understand the spectrum of ways that music fitted into routines of healthcare in early modern England.

In 1887, the Beecham’s Pills company, an English quack medicine firm founded in 1848 by the grandfather of conductor Sir Thomas Beecham, began to publish notated sheet music to advertise their medicines. Originally distributed like free handbills by participating chemists, this music for voice and piano—folk and music-hall songs, dances and piano character pieces, oratorio selections, and even newly commissioned songs that advertised Beecham’s products—would contain a print ad on the back for the company's pills. Very soon, Beecham’s began to offer this music in volumes, sold at a low price by booksellers and by post, and available in various types of bindings, thereby investing some permanence to what had been ephemeral and turning the music into a nominal commodity in its own right. In total, twenty volumes collecting 600 pieces—with revised editions and reissues—were produced between 1887 and 1902.

This paper investigates firstly how this music functioned as advertising: what was the overlapping target market in terms of class and gender for the music and the pills, and what values did the musical commodity impart to the pharmaceutical one, and vice versa? Secondly, this paper presents a case study to show how specific pieces of music published by Beecham's interacted with the firm's other advertising material to form multi-medial “campaigns.” One such campaign, drawing on the symbol of the seaside (a place of both sedate therapy and exuberant pleasure), positions Beecham's pills as a counterbalance to overindulgence and an aid to leisure. This investigation reveals the multiple and intertwining ways by which “health” was constructed, packaged, and sold—with music at its center—during a particularly experimental and little-regulated period in English pharmaceutical advertising.

In the first half of the 19^th century in the US, medicine was not a well-regarded profession. Men who practiced the trade often had limited expertise, and in many places, trained physicians were simply not available. Therefore, the ailing populace often turned to self-help pharmaceuticals (Conrad and Leiter 2008). Before the Pure Food and Drug Act was passed in 1906, drug manufacturing was a largely unregulated process, and as such, medicine companies sold tonics, elixirs, and tinctures to unsuspecting customers with the most outlandish claims regularly touted in medicine shows or printed in newspapers.

One popular patent-medicine manufactured by the Chattanooga Medicine Company, Wine of Cardui, was an elixir purportedly capable of curing female “maladies” such as dizziness, nervousness, melancholy, cramps, hot flashes, prolapsed uterus, sterility, and even sagging breasts. To reach the target demographics, the company produced utilitarian advertising ephemera, such as almanacs, calendars, and cookbooks—a solid advertising strategy, as the consumer would likely hold on to them for at least a year, and with each viewing be reminded of the medicine’s unparalleled healing power. To achieve a similar end, the company also produced songbooks, which, in addition to music, included print advertisements and testimonials from satisfied customers.

This paper analyzes the contents of the Cardui songbooks and considers how song genres, lyrics, and the connotations of women’s domestic culture align with the advertising strategy cultivated in the songbooks’ non-music pages, which reify modesty, virtue, and domesticity and elevate women’s roles as natural healers. Connections between musical accomplishment and moral uplift were well established at this time, therefore interspersing the sounds and semiotics of gentility with descriptions of messy female bodies afforded an air of respectability and legitimacy to drug use at a time when the professionalization of medicine moved healthcare out of the domestic sphere (Campbell 2003).