Dover’s Powder.
Thomas Dover, to whom we owe “Dover’s Powder,” practised as a doctor in London in the first half of the eighteenth century. He was born and buried at Barton on the Heath in Warwickshire in 1660. How he got his medical training is not on record, but some time in his youth he lived in the house of Thomas Sydenham, the famous physician, from whom probably he acquired his independent ideas of medical treatment, and possibly the germ of his lack of reverence for the College of Physicians. While living with Sydenham he had small-pox, and forty or fifty years later he described how the doctor treated him. First he was bled to the extent of 22 oz.; then he took an emetic. He only took to his bed when he became blind with the disease. In his bedroom he had no fire, the windows were always kept open, and the bedclothes were only allowed up to his waist. This was in the middle of January. For medicine, Dover says, “he made me take twelve bottles of small beer acidulated with spirit of vitriol every twenty-four hours,” and he concludes, “I never lost my senses one moment.”
Having resisted both the disease and the treatment, Dover is first heard of in practice in Bristol in 1684. He plodded along there until 1708, when at the age of forty-eight he set out with a privateering party on a voyage round the world. The expedition consisted of two ships, the Duke and the Duchess. Captain Woodes-Rogers, who has left an account of the voyage, was in chief command, and Dover on the Duke was his lieutenant. He must have had previous experience of seafaring life or he would never have been entrusted with the command of a vessel.
The buccaneers were away from England three years, and when they returned they brought with them a Spanish frigate of twenty-one guns, and a quantity of loot. One event of their voyage proved to be of world-famous importance. On February 2, 1709, Dover, on the Duke, touched at the island of Juan Fernandez and took on board Alexander Selkirk who had lived alone on the island four years and four months, and whose story was to develop in the skilful hands of Defoe into that of the immortal Robinson Crusoe.
A few months after leaving Juan Fernandez the expedition arrived at Guayaquil in Peru. Having duly sacked the city and stored their plunder in the ships, the sailors slept in the churches, and Dover quaintly relates how annoyed they were by the smell of the Spanish corpses; for plague was raging in the place at the time, and the victims were buried just under the floors with only a plank or two over them. Two days later, at sea, the disease broke out among the crews. They had 180 cases all at the same time, and Dover had four surgeons with him. He ordered them to go round and start bleeding all the patients, and to stop the bleeding when the round had been completely made. About 100 oz. of blood, he says, was taken from each man. Then he gave them spirit of vitriol, and only seven or eight died.
The next we know of Dover is that from 1721 to 1728 he was in practice in Cecil Street, Strand; he returned to Gloucestershire for a few years, then came back to London and practised in Lombard Street, removing in 1736 to Arundel Street, Strand.
He is supposed to have died about 1742. It was in these latter years that he wrote his “Ancient Physician’s Legacy to his Country.” He describes himself on the title-page as Thomas Dover, M.B., and his book as “Being what he has collected in forty-nine years’ Practice, or an account of the several diseases incident to mankind, described in so plain a manner that any person may know the nature of his own disease. Together with the several remedies for each distemper faithfully set down.”
In this work Dover relates a number of wonderful cures he had effected, gives names and addresses of many of his patients, often adding grateful letters from them. He had but limited confidence in the “clan of prejudiced gentlemen,” as he calls the College of Physicians, and he complains vigorously of the extortions of the Apothecaries. Metallic quicksilver was his panacea, and he prescribed it so lavishly that he acquired the title of “the quicksilver doctor.” It forms balsam with the blood, he says. That is why it cures venereal diseases. Other doctors gave it, but in disguise, in the form of Ethiops Mineral generally; which was like using the sword in the scabbard.
His formula for “Diaphoretic Powder” is given in a chapter on gout. It was as follows:—
“Take opium 1 oz.; saltpetre and tartar vitriolated, each 4 oz.; liquorish 1 oz.; ipecacuanha, 1 oz. Put the saltpetre and tartar into a red-hot mortar, stirring till they have done flaming. Then powder them very fine. After that slice in your opium; grind these to a powder, and then mix the other powders with them. Dose, from 40 to 60 or 70 grains in a glass of white wine posset going to bed, covering up warm, and drinking a quart or three pints of the posset while sweating. In two or three hours at furthest the patient will be free from pain, and though before not able to put his foot to the ground, ’tis very much if he cannot walk next day. The remedy may be taken once a week or once a month.”
The dose appears to us in these degenerate days a large one, and Dover states that “some apothecaries have desired their patients to make their wills before they venture upon so large a dose.” But he declares he has given up to 100 grains, and the patient has appeared abroad the next day. The notion of danger, he adds, proceeds entirely from their ignorance, and from the want of knowing those ingredients that are mixed up with it, for they naturally weaken the power of the opium.
Dover’s powder first appeared in the London Pharmacopœia for 1788. Probably it was adopted after the quack Ward had made it famous as a “sweating powder.” Ward died in 1761 and the formulæ for his remedies were published soon after his death.