The Mighty Healer: Thomas Holloway's Victorian Patent Medicine Empire

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-m...