Unpublished Rhyme

The advertisements indicate that booksellers were the most common agents through whom pox doctors sold their products. Some practitioners sold their medicines exclusively through one agent, but often these distribution networks were quite elaborate. For example, Stephan Freeman sold his pox medicine with instructions at ten different London locations. In addition to these sites within the city he also advertised an impressive list of “Printers and Booksellers” in sixteen other British towns, and undisclosed agents in “Jamaica,” “Ireland and America.”95 Bookshops and other stores, then, became a sort of anonymous medical space for the London poxed. Sick men and women could enter the shop under the guise of browsing a merchant’s innocent wares and, largely out of the public eye, obtain medicine and information on how to administer it.96 When discussing why he preferred to sell his treatments at a bookseller’s rather than at an apothecary’s shop, one eighteenth-century practitioner claimed that a medical man like an apothecary might “know the Occasion” for the medicine, “and so be more inquisitive than the Patient be pleased with… .”97
Handbills also advertised that pox medicines were sold at coffee-houses and ale-houses.98 Attempts to secure privacy in these spaces bordered on covert. Consider the cloak-and-dagger exchange a doctor named Vanforce arranged. His handbill promised that he had “ordered it to be sold at these places hereunder mentioned, being Ale-houses, where you may go into a Box, call for a pint of Ale, and have it delivered by the Landlady, without the least Notice or Suspicion, sealed up with my Cypher and Directions. Price Two Shillings.”99