American imprints seeking to promote the English patent medicines were certainly rare. The most significant example may be found in the Library of the New York Academy of Medicine.[47] In 1731 James Wallace, a New York merchant, became American agent for the sale of Dr. Bateman's Pectoral Drops. To help him with his new venture, Wallace took a copy of the London promotional pamphlet to a New York printer to be reproduced. The printer was John Peter Zenger, not yet an editor and three years away from the events which were to link his name inextricably with the concept of the freedom of the press. This 1731 pamphlet may well have been the earliest work on any medical theme to be printed in New York.[48] [47] _A short treatise of the virtues of Dr. Bateman's Pectoral Drops_ (see footnote 6). [48] Gertrude L. Annan, "Printing and medicine," _Bulletin of the Medical Library Association_, March 1940, vol. 28, p. 155. Now and then a physician might frown on his fellows for reading such literature and prescribing such remedies, but he was in a minority. Colonial doctors, by and large, had no qualms about employing the packaged medicines. It was a doctor who first advertised Anderson's Pills and Bateman's Drops in Williamsburg;[49] it was another, migrating from England to the Virginia frontier, who founded a town and dosed those who came to dwell therein with Bateman's Drops, Turlington's Balsam, and other patent medicines.[50] [49] Wyndham B. Blanton, _Medicine in Virginia in the eighteenth century_, Richmond, Virginia, 1931, pp. 33-34. [50] Maurice Bear Gordon, _Aesculapius comes to the colonies_, Ventnor, New Jersey, 1949, p. 39. Complex Formulas and Distinctive Packages