Ward, Joshua (1684/5–1761), was a medical practitioner and inventor of medicines, both admired and vilified by his peers. He started his medical career working with his brother William as a drysalter in Thames Street, London, where he presumably gained some useful experience in the properties of drugs.
He fled to France in 1715, apparently due to his sympathy towards the Jacobite cause. However in the same year he was elected as MP for Marlborough, after one of two rival mayors got hold of the election writ and inserted Ward’s name. Ward was returned from France even though no one had voted for him but in May 1717 he was unseated on petition.
Ward remained in France for about sixteen years, spending time near Paris and among the English colony at Dunkirk. In 1725 he was co-defendant with his brother John in an action brought in England by the widow of John Sheffield, first duke of Buckingham and Normanby, over some alum works the duke had earlier leased to them. It emerged that John Ward had cheated the duke out of £70,000, only £10,000 being recovered, and he was convicted of fraud and forgery; being abroad, Joshua Ward escaped blame.
While in France, Ward invented the medicines known as Ward’s Pill and Ward’s Drop. The composition of these and other nostrums, such as sweating drops and paste for fistula, varied greatly over the years, but essentially the pills contained antimony and a vegetable substance—dragon’s blood—mixed with wine, whereas the drops comprised a fearsome brew of nitric acid, ammonium chloride, and mercury. Those taking such remedies, in an age when cupping and blistering were regular treatments, thought that the resulting heavy perspiration, vomiting, or purging had beneficial effects. After receiving a pardon from George II, Ward returned to England in 1734, settled in London, and overnight became the talk of the town.
Ward’s reputation was greatly enhanced by royal patronage. He spotted that the king’s painful thumb was not gouty but dislocated, and cured it with a violent wrench. For this he was rewarded with the use of an apartment in the almony office, Whitehall, and the privilege of driving through St James’s Park. Ward was also adept at puffing himself, asserting in press advertisements his ability to cure gout, rheumatism, scurvy, palsy, syphilis, scrofula, and cancer. He converted three houses near St James’s Park into a hospital for the poor, and set up a further treatment centre in Threadneedle Street, in the City of London. He subsidized these activities by charging the rich what they could afford.
He was widely accused of hiring ‘patients’ at half a crown a week and instructing them on how to simulate the symptoms of diseases; better-dressed impostors were said to arrive in their coaches and throng his consulting-rooms for 5s. a day. The large sums he contributed to charity—put at over £3000 a year—and the coins he regularly threw from his carriage only fanned hostility towards him. The Grub Street Journal, in articles from 1734 onwards, repeated verbatim in the Gentleman’s Magazine, at first reasonably attacked the public’s indiscriminate use of the medicines, but later castigated him openly as the friend of undertakers, coffin makers, and sextons by poisoning the sick. Ward responded by taking the journal to court on charges of libel—inadvisedly, as it turned out, as his scant medical knowledge was revealed and his case was thrown out, the defendants gleefully commemorating their victory in prose and doggerel.
Among men of letters, reactions to Ward and his activities were decidedly mixed. Henry Fielding commended his powers of curing the poor with no expectation of reward, in his Voyage to Lisbon (1755), and Horace Walpole approved of the way in which Ward relieved headaches with a dab of ointment on the forehead. Edward Gibbon as a sickly twelve-year-old was successfully treated by Ward during a life-threatening illness. On the other hand Alexander Pope satirized Ward as a despicable quack at least four times in his verses. In William Hogarth’s ‘The Company of Undertakers’, Ward is depicted with the surgeon and oculist John Taylor (1703–1772) and the notorious bone-setter Mrs Mapp as an impudent fraud.
In 1748, when the House of Commons debated a bill to control apothecaries and others who were dispensing adulterated drugs, Ward petitioned the house, alleging that over the past fifteen years he had had no fewer than 2000 patients under his care, 300 being soldiers; he was duly exempted in the bill, which was rejected in the House of Lords.
Ward’s notoriety for his pills and his treatment of the sick overshadowed his scientific experiments. He had two trained assistants, John White and F. J. D’Osterman, with whose help in 1736 he began to make sulphuric acid at Twickenham, in what were known as the ‘Great Vitriol Works’. Ward died at his home in Whitehall, London, on 21 December 1761, his fortune being estimated at £16,000, with £5000 earmarked in bequests, mainly to relatives.
Reference:
N. N to Hans Sloane, 1735-08-27, Sloane MS 4054, f. 95, British Library, London
T. A. B. Corley, ‘Ward, Joshua (1684/5–1761)’, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, Oxford University Press, 2004 [http://www.oxforddnb.com/view/article/28697, accessed 3 Sept 2017]
