Overview

Verity Holloway's nineteenth-century cousin Thomas Holloway's patent medicine empire was so ubiquitous, Charles Dickens commented that if you'd murdered someone with the name Holloway, you'd think their spirit had come back to torment you. Advertising as far away as the pyramids in Giza, it was said Holloway's Ointment could cure lesions on a wooden leg. Bottling leftover cooking grease in the kitchen of his parents' Cornish pub, Thomas's dubious cure-alls made him one of the richest self-made men in England. Promising to save respectable Victorian invalids 'FROM THE POINT OF DEATH' (his capitals), the self-proclaimed 'Professor' Holloway used his millions to build the enormous Gothic Holloway College and Holloway Sanatorium for the insane. But Thomas was a man of contradictions. To his contemporaries, he was simultaneously 'the greatest benefactor to ever live' and no better than a general who led millions to their deaths. Aware of the uselessness of his own products, he believed the placebo effect was well worth the subterfuge and never ridiculed his customers. A ruthless businessman, he was deeply in love with his wife and cared for the education of young women. 'The Mighty Healer' charts Thomas's rise and the realization of his worst fear - that rival company Beechams would one day take him over - plus the very Victorian squabbling over his fortune by his respectable and not-so-respectable relations. It draws on primary and secondary sources to ground Thomas's life in the social issues of the day, including women's education, Victorian mental healthcare, contemporary accounts of debtors' gaols, and of course the patent medicine trade of the mid-Victorian period; the people who took the medicine, and those who fiercely opposed it.

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9781473855670

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Verity Holloway was born in Gibraltar in 1986 to a naval family and spent much of her early life following her warrant officer father around the world. Her speculative fiction and poetry is inspired by all things medical, religious and historical. By the age of seventeen, she was already being recognised as a gifted poet. She published her first chapbook, Contradictions, in 2012, and more recently her sonnet Kelmscott was included in a Pre-Raphaelite Society poetry anthology. Verity regularly blogs about history on her website verityholloway.com.

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