Joshua Ward

This article deals with the quack and chemist, for the American politician see Joshua John Ward

Joshua Ward

Joshua Ward (* 1685 ; † November 21, 1761 in London ) was an English pharmacist (quack) and chemist.

Ward's family came from Wolverton Hall in Suffolk . Little is known about its early years. He later became notorious for selling pills that supposedly helped against any disease (but containing toxic heavy metals like antimony and arsenic). Ward stayed - possibly because he was involved in the Jacobite uprising of 1715 - with English Jacobite emigrants in St. Germain and in the English colony in Dunkirk and attracted attention in 1717 when he was expelled from the English Parliament for fraudulent elections. He sold his pills in France, but aroused the suspicion of the authorities and almost was imprisoned in the Bastille, but was saved from it by the intercession of an influential Englishman. (John Page, to whom he later bequeathed the secret of his pills in gratitude, which was published in 1763.) In 1733 he was pardoned by George II and returned to England, where he started a flourishing business with his pills. He enjoyed the favor of the king, for whom he twisted a thumb. He treated, among others, Henry Fielding and was sponsored by Chesterfield and Lieutenant-General Charles Churchill . He bought houses in London where he treated the poor and it was fashionable among society women to distribute his pills there. Despite attacks in the press and lawsuits revealing that he had received no medical or pharmaceutical training and that his pills had serious side effects (including death), he stayed in the public eye and in passing a Pharmacists Act of 1748, the provided for a qualification of pharmacists, an exception was made specifically for Ward. He was buried in Westminster Abbey .

He also sold other medicines, including Friar's Balsam (a mixture of tree resins in alcohol).

As a chemist, he is known for introducing the production of sulfuric acid by burning sulfur with saltpeter with the introduction of steam in England. The process originally came from Johann Rudolph Glauber . In 1749 he received a patent for it. He manufactured in secrecy in Twickenham and then in Richmond, the stench causing annoyance among local residents. Soon afterwards, John Roebuck invented the lead chamber process in 1746 , which replaced production in glass vessels.

literature

• Winfried R. Pötsch (lead), Annelore Fischer, Wolfgang Müller: Lexicon of important chemists , Harri Deutsch 1989, p. 445
• Edward Irving Carlyle, in Dictionary of National Biography , Online