1. The sarcastic reference to the cure as ‘a virtue beyond all medicine’ is from the Hull Packet, 20 May 1828. The two main resources for digitised newspaper research are the British Library/Gale Cengage British Newspapers, 1600–1950 series, and the British Library/Brightsolid platform, The British Newspaper Archive.
2. See, for example, P. S. Brown, ‘The Providers of Medical Treatment in Mid-Nineteenth-Century Bristol’, Medical History, 1980, 24, 297–314; Hilary Marland, ‘The Medical Activities of Mid-Nineteenth-Century Chemists and Druggists, with Special Reference to Wakefield and Huddersfield’, Medical History, 1987, 31, 415–39; Owen Davies, A People Bewitched: Witchcraft and Magic in Nineteenth-Century Somerset (Bruton: Privately printed, 1999).
3. John Morley, An Essay on the Nature and Cure of Scrophulous Disorders, Vulgarly called the King's Evil (London: James Buckland, 1770), iii; Henry Season, Speculum Anni: Or, Season on the Seasons; An Almanack (London: T. Parker, 1762) n.p.
4. See Olivia Weisser, ‘Boils, Pushes and Wheals: Reading the Bumps on the Body in Early Modern England’, Social History of Medicine, 2009, 22, 321–39.
5. Courty M. A. , ‘On the Treatment, Without Excision, of Wens and of some other Cysts’, The Retrospect of Practical Medicine and Surgery, 1862, 44, 147–50.