Samuel Solomon (1745—1819): quack or entrepreneur?
Dr Samuel Solomon’s name is unlikely to have any particular significance for most people today. Even in Liverpool, where he gained fame and fortune, very few would be capable of identifying him.1 Some Liverpool Jews, having heard their parents or grandparents refer admiringly to ‘Dr Cowan’ or ‘Dr Lowenthal’, might imagine him to have been a devoted physician who treated the sick, perhaps without charge, in the early decades of the twentieth century. Yet Samuel Solomon was neither a general practi? tioner nor a communal worthy. He made his name over 200 years ago on the strength of patent medicines that he devised and marketed with brilliant advertising and vast commercial success.2
Although it is generally assumed that the facts regarding Solomon’s life and career are too well known to require further investigation, references to him in many books show gaps and inconsistencies even about when and where he was
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Gabriel A. Sivan
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Other articles within the volume
- Captain Simmon Latutin, GC — hero of Mogadishu
- Spain and the Jews in the Second World War
- Amendments to ‘England Expects…’
- Salo Baron, universal Jewish historian
- Josiah Wedgwood and Palestine
- Aaron Liebermann: the father of Jewish socialism
- “Samson” by Solomon J. Solomon: Victorian academy and Jewish identity
- Jewish settlement in Staffordshire: the early years, 1811—1901
- A Hebrew poem on the death of Nelson
- ‘The Lady of Longueville Clarke’: Maria Hart Myers (1794-1868) and her family
- Samuel Solomon (1745—1819): quack or entrepreneur?
- The radiocarbon dating of two London shofarot
- Early modern German states and the settlement of Jews: Brandenburg—Prussia and the Palatinate, sixteenth to nineteenth centuries
- A Domus Conversorum at Bristol?
- In memoriam: John Klier, 1944—2007
- Preface
