Call it escapist if you like but for my money reading online the daily drips from New Oxford Dictionary of National Biography is much more fun than reading the national press - which as often as not is headache inducing. Yesterday's offering was by T.A.B. Corley, on the subject of Robert James (1703-1776) physician and inventor of James's fever powder. I don't know if the powders dispelled headaches, but Corley's biography has a benign effect. James evidently had a flair for marketing and the powders did very well.

In February 1746 James appointed the publisher and bookseller John Newbery as sales agent for the powders. Newbery, also a wholesale and retail druggist, pushed the remedy enthusiastically, even working puffs for it into some of his books. In consequence the powders became all the rage among the well-to-do, who alone could afford 2s. 6d. for a pair of doses. They were taken not only against fevers-containing as they did phosphate of lime and oxide of antimony as sweating agents-but also as general pick-me-ups. A veritable pantheon of authors lauded them and their efficacy, Thomas Gray and William Cowper demurely, Horace Walpole ecstatically, and Richard Cumberland in many stanzas of inflated verse. At Eton College a widespread distribution of the powders sharply reduced the death-rate from fever there, but an attempt in 1759 by an over-zealous admiral on board HMS Monarque similarly to dose his exhausted ship's company back to health only led to plentiful burials at sea.

The concluding paragraph of the biography is also worthy of note, and should help dispel the idea that the 18th century is all about flowery toffs talking in epigrams and incapable of calling a spade a spade.

An impetuous and improvident man, James had attractive social gifts and was always happy to enliven a good dinner. In his working life he was a prolific and laborious author and a dabbler in chemical experiments. According to Dr Johnson, he never drew a sober breath during the final twenty years of his life; this scarcely impaired his medical practice as he was extremely adept at concealing his squiffiness. In his Birmingham days he had also been known as an assiduous womanizer, and he persisted in his lechery to an advanced age. When in his sixties he called with his latest doxy to take Dr Johnson for a ride, the latter angrily protested that at their time of life it was indecent to be driving about the streets with a whore. James replied, 'it is very indecent for both of us. But such is my infirmity, that if I go six weeks without a woman, my ballocks swell so that I cannot keep them in my breeches' (Ryskamp and Pottle, 113-14).