I’ve been reading Daniel Mason’s The Piano Tuner as my evening reading – a change from outback noir crime novels – when I came across Steven’s Consumption cure.

Even though I’ve finished with Dows’ Pharmacy for the moment, I’ve acquired an interest in nineteenth century medicine along the way, something that dovetails into my interest in Victorian murders and the way that newspapers sensationalised the most graphic of them in order to sell papers.

So when I came across Steven’s Consumption cure I had to do some background reading about it. And it’s a curious tale.

Tuberculosis, or consumption was the scourge of the nineteenth century.

My grandfather’s first wife, Catherine Gracie, died of it, his mother died of it, and if you plough through the death certificates quite a few other family members died of it – and these were relatively middle class people who lived in relatively nice airy apartments, and living in Dundee had access to the Tay estuary and cleaner air despite the undoubted urban pollution from smoke and industry.

The urban poor, crammed in overcrowded tenements would have had it much, much worse than the middle classes.

Until the advent of antibiotics there was no real cure for tuberculosis. Most people died unpleasantly. If you could afford it, being able to live in the countryside and breathing clean air might let you live a little longer, but really, unless you were one of the roughly twenty percent of cases who recovered spontaneously, a diagnosis meant death sooner or later.

And of course, the figure of twenty percent is based on the middle and upper classes who could afford doctors and treatment. The poor simply suffered and died, and perhaps relied on patent medicines for some relief.

Most patent medicines didn’t do much – a pain killer like laudanum, some herbs to help clear the the chest and let you sleep, and that was about it. Some made outrageous claims as to their effectiveness, and of course there were always those that claimed to be derived from exotic cures from the mystic East.

Perhaps my favourite example of the latter was Bile Beans, claimed to be made from secret herbs used by Australian Aborigines, but in fact made principally from cascara and rhubarb in a factory in Leeds.

The situation regarding patent medicines was so bad that in the early twentieth century the British Medical Association analysed many patent medicines and published the results, invariably showing that they were cheaply made from standard ingredients. They also published an estimated cost of the ingredients showing that many were wildly overpriced for what they contained.

Instinctively, I would have put Steven’s Consumption cure among the quack medicines, selling hope when in reality there was none, but when I began to read about it in detail, I became less sure.

Colonel Stevens, and he liked to be called Colonel, claimed that as junior officer in South Africa he became ill with tuberculosis, and in desperation he went to see an indigenous healer who supplied him with a preparation made of a native pelargonium or geranium.

Given that at the time Europeans in South Africa probably didn’t know much about the therapeutic value of the native flora, it’s entirely possible that the plant used in the cure may have had some bactericidal properties. Or it could simply be that Colonel Stevens was one of the lucky twenty percent that went into remission.

In time Colonel Stevens returned to England and began to market his cure.

The BMA, who clearly to a man thought Stevens was a charlatan, analysed his patent medicine and claimed that his preparation contained Krameria, which is still used in herbal medicine today, but not Pelargonium as Stevens claimed.

However, this didn’t stop Stevens, who clearly believed in his medicine’s efficacy, from continuing to publicise his cure, so eventually the BMA took him to court, intending to prove he was just another charlatan exploiting poor and desperate people.

Stevens lost the court case. He appealed, and lost that case too. He was refused further leave to appeal, and you might think that would be that, but no, Stevens continued to prosper, serving in the Royal Flying Corps during the first world war, and to market his cure.

And this is where it gets interesting. After the first world war, a doctor in Switzerland started using the ‘English Cure’, ie Steven’s consumption cure, in treating his patients.

As a doctor practising in Geneva he was outside the control of the British Medical Association and free to prescribe what he liked, and he obviously thought that this preparation did some good. In fact, he made the interesting anecdotal observation that during the second world war, when supplies of Steven’s Consumption cure became unobtainable, some of his patients who had been in remission suddenly developed the full and fatal form of the disease.

With the arrival of streptomycin after the war, this all became moot, as tuberculosis ceased to be the scourge it once was.

Stevens clearly believed in his cure. He may have been deluded, but I think he was honest in his delusion. He may have profited from it, but I think he was sincere.

And, given the Swiss doctor’s observation, it may have been that it did some good.

The doctor in Switzerland strangely didn’t see it as cure but thought it might stimulate the immune system to better fight the disease.

No one today is interested in investigating Steven’s cure, but given the rise of drug resistant tuberculosis, perhaps it might be worthy of further investigation.

Strangely, you can still buy herbal preparations containing Steven’s pelargonium for chest and bronchial complaints from pharmacies in Germany …