Henry Fogg (1707-1750) and his patients: the practice of an eighteenth-century Staffordshire apothecary.

The early eighteenth century in England, before the first published Medical Register of 1779, is for historians a great mystery in many crucial aspects of medical practice. Who practised where is fairly difficult to discover, while a man's patients, fees, possessions, books and equipment are even further hidden after over two centuries. What a physician, surgeon or apothecary was worth at death, however, can be elicited from probate inventories, and these have long been a recognized, if under-exploited, source for medical history. Interesting though probate inventories can be, there was no standard format in compiling them and the untrained appraisers (valuers), often the deceased's neighbours, decided what to list, at what values and how detailed the inventory should be. Thus, while one will include the minutiae of daily life, another will tantalisingly note only "implements of household stuff' or "tools in the shop". Technical archival problems conspire further against the medical historian, for probate inventories, as church documents, are normally found today in diocesan record offices, not always coincident with county record repositories. Inventories are not only extremely numerous, but further frustrate the researcher by being stored chronologically, year by year, generally annotated with the deceased's name but hardly ever with an occupation or place. Thus, retrieving practitioners' inventories is far more complicated than might appear. However, in 1991 a new Leverhulme research project was begun to examine the probate inventories in the Lichfield Diocesan Record Office for the period 1600-1858. The project has started by indexing the records of the Consistory Court, between 40-60,000 documents, to locate inventories deposited in cases of disputed probate. Over 500 such inventories have been traced in the periods 1739-99 and 1820-39, and it is proposed to continue the survey until probate jurisdiction ceased in 1858. This large ancient diocese covered parts of both Derbyshire and Shropshire, as well as north Warwickshire and the whole county of Staffordshire. The research has brought to light the inventory of Henry Fogg,' an apothecary who practised at Leek, in north Staffordshire, until the middle years of the eighteenth century. As a county, Staffordshire lacks many vital eighteenth-century medical history sources found in