ABSTRACT

This article revisits the nineteenth-century debate about medical quackery in Britain, to examine its implications for the history of modern advertising. It makes two related claims. First, the prevalent view of advertising as a field prone to exaggeration, often taken as obvious, has a legal history. The circumstances of the quackery debate led to a legal elaboration and formalization of views of advertising as an epistemologically doubtful but not illegal field. Second, advertising’s status as exaggeration was part of a legally supported cultural division of labour – or legal boundary work, which carved differentiated roles for science and the market in modern Britain whereby science was increasingly defined by restraint, and the market by its lack. The analysis examines the implications, while also offering new insights on the role of law in the history of quackery, and examining untapped sources, particularly a set of libel cases that developed a legal definition of quackery.

摘要

本文回顾了 19 世纪英国关于医学骗术的争论，以检验其对现代广告史的影响。它提出了两个相关的主张。首先，普遍认为广告是一个容易夸大其词的领域，通常被认为是显而易见的，具有法律历史。骗术辩论的情况导致了将广告作为认识论上可疑但并非非法领域的观点的法律阐述和形式化。其次，广告夸大其词是法律支持的文化分工或法律边界工作的一部分，它为现代英国的科学和市场划分了不同的角色，科学越来越受到约束，而市场则越来越缺乏约束。分析检查了影响，