During summer 2026, graduate student Katherine Horan, recipient of the 2025-2026 Irene B. Katele Research Travel Fund award, traveled to the United Kingdom to conduct research for her dissertation. Read on to learn about her journey.
What does a patent medicine that claimed to cure everything from scurvy to gout have to do with British colonial rule? I went to the United Kingdom to find out. In June, I completed my pre-dissertation research trip to London and Edinburgh with the goal of discovering the links between the family behind a patent medicine (or a “quack” medicine) and the British Empire. I visited several archives—from the British Library to the National Library of Scotland—and found everything from accusations of mutiny in the British Navy to 200-year-old wax seals still attached to their letters.
My trip to several archives in the United Kingdom helped answer essential questions about these patent medicine sellers. Francis Spilsbury was the seller of “Spilsbury’s Antiscorbutic Drops,” a cure-all medicine sold beginning in the 1780s up until the 1820s. The Drops were made of everything from mercury to Allspice and Guaiacum, and relied on advertisements that sometimes targeted sailors or British colonists abroad. Francis Spilsbury wrote often about his political opinions and his thoughts on the place of patent medicine sellers and “quacks” among the broader medical community. These pamphlets, written with his typical zeal, show his support for the British Empire and belief that patent medicine makers held an important position in the British Empire. Of Francis Spilsbury’s many children, two followed in his footsteps by training as surgeons and joining the British Navy and British Army. These two men—George Green Spilsbury and F. B. Spilsbury—legitimized imperial ambitions through their medicine and their medicine through their imperial ambitions.
At the British Library, I visited an archive of about 70 letters written by George Green Spilsbury during his time in India—an unprecedented amount of handwritten material from a family with few extant manuscripts. These letters cover George Green Spilsbury’s opinions on race, gender, the role of medicine in colonial India, and his thoughts on the patent medicine business. Of all of the material I saw, one recurring theme stuck out to me: each member of the Spilsburys continually attempted to rise up in the ranks of colonial governance, but failed time and time again. It turns out that the Spilsburys used pay from their work in the British colonies to fund the patent medicine (and not the other way around). The patent medicine, in turn, funded British colonial trade networks by relying on ingredients sourced from those networks.
This trip has allowed me to gain a better understanding of the role of patent medicine sellers in the broader medical economy, and the Spilsburys’ positionality in relation to the British Empire. George Green Spilsbury and F. B. Spilsbury both used their medical authority to justify their opinions on imperial expansion, but I still have much more to learn about this family. I plan to take everything I learned from this trip and apply it to my broader interests of the formation of medical legitimacy during this period.