Mighty Healer

Verity Holloway

"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-made men in England. Promising to save respectable Victorian invalids 'FROM THE POINT OF DEATH' (his capitals), the self-proclaimed 'Professor' Holloway used his millions to build the enormous Gothic Holloway College and Holloway Sanatorium for the insane. But Thomas was a man of contradictions. To his contemporaries, he was simultaneously 'the greatest benefactor to ever live' and no better than a...