Ward, Joshua
NAME:
Ward, Joshua
ACHIEVEMENTS:
Introduced new chemical process for manufacturing sulfuric acid
NICKNAME/ALIAS:
None
DATE AND PLACE OF BIRTH:
1685, England
DATE AND PLACE OF DEATH AND AGE AT DEATH:
21 November 1761, London, England. Aged 76
DISCIPLINE:
Quack doctor
FIELD:
Medicine
LANGUAGE:
English
PARENTS:
Father: ???Name
Mother: ???Name
SIBLINGS:
1 brother: William
2 sisters: Margaret, Ann
SPOUSE:
None
CHILDREN:
None
EDUCATION:
Not known
MAJOR WORK:
None
LIFE AND TIMES:
Ward went into partnership with his brother as a dry-salter in London before being elected Member of Parliament for Marlborough, Wiltshire in 1716. He was removed from the MP’s register the following year on a technicality and moved to France.
He settled in Dunkirk among the English colony there and made a living by selling a quack remedy he invented which allegedly cured every illness. Ward’s remedy could be taken in the form of either a drop or a pill. In an age when many remedies involved a long process of preparation, baking or boiling ingredients such as vipers and toads, Ward’s instant remedy was a great success.
In 1733 Ward returned to London and began advertising his remedy. He appears to have concentrated his efforts on the upper classes and early on made an impression when he cured a young girl of what would now be diagnosed as hysterical paralysis.
There was no such diagnosis then, and Ward’s cure, which was widely reported, was regarded as almost miraculous. The kill-or-cure nature of his remedy was soon exposed, as lurid reports appeared in the press about the deaths of patients taking his medicine. One doctor demonstrated that the active ingredient in both the pill and the drop was antimony, a substance which gives rise to violent reactions, and has no curative powers.
Nontheless, Ward was building up a following, and was praised by the novelist <a fan was> Fielding* for his kindness and care, even though Fielding admitted that Ward had not been able to cure him. The turning point came when the king presented his dislocated thumb to Ward’s scrutiny and Ward cured it instantly with a violent twist. The king was so grateful that he gave Ward rooms at Whitehall and provided him with a carriage and a pair of horses which he was allowed to drive through St James’s Park.
Ward then became rich, with at least four houses in London and a large staff. He turned his houses in ‘hospitals’ for the poor, whom he treated in spite of his lack of medical training. Society women visited the ‘hospitals’ to dispense Ward’s remedy to the poor.
His popularity with the king ensured that the College of Physicians could not touch him, and in 1748 he was exempted from the Apothecaries Act which prohibited unlicensed people from making medicines. He updated his pills by producing three different versions: in blue, red and purple. Three of them contained antimony and the other two arsenic. His eyewash was particularly damaging.
Ward also experimented on a larger scale, attempting to manufacture both porcelain and saltpeter. He was the first person to introduce into England the preparation of sulfuric acid by heating sulfur with saltpeter, which brought down the cost of the acid to a twentieth.
In 1736 Ward began manufacturing sulfuric acid in conditions of great secrecy at Twickenham and Richmond, on the river Thames. He was the first in England to take the manufacture of sulfuric acid, a vital substance to industry, from the laboratory stage to the factory stage.
The process was further advanced in 1746 when <work related to> Roebuck* used lead chambers for making sulfuric acid and so instituted its manufacture on an industrial scale. The discovery of the preparation of artificial soda by <work related to> Leblanc* later in the century boosted demand for sulfuric acid and Ward made a great deal of money.
ASSESSMENT: Ward was a quack with a great personality, who introduced an improved method of making sulfuric acid to English manufacturing.
EXTRA CONNECTIONS: None
ONELINER: Joshua Ward, 18th-century sulfuric acid maker
BIBLIOGRAPHY:
Jameson, Eric, The Natural History of Quackery, Michael Joseph, London, 1961
Smith, J.T., Nollekens and His Times, London, 1949