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Books > Health, Home & Family > Mind, body & spirit > Astrology > General
Ebenezer Sibly was a quack doctor, plagiarist, and masonic
ritualist in late eighteenth-century London; his brother Manoah was
a respectable accountant and a pastor who ministered to his
congregation without pay for fifty years. The inventor of Dr.
Sibly's Reanimating Solar Tincture, which claimed to restore the
newly dead to life, Ebenezer himself died before he turned fifty
and stayed that way despite being surrounded by bottles of the
stuff. Asked to execute his will, which urged the continued
manufacture of Solar Tincture, and left legacies for multiple and
concurrent wives as well as an illegitimate son whose name the
deceased could not recall, Manoah found his brother's record of
financial and moral indiscretions so upsetting that he immediately
resigned his executorship. Ebenezer's death brought a premature
conclusion to a colorfully chaotic life, lived on the fringes of
various interwoven esoteric subcultures. Drawing on such sources as
ratebooks and pollbooks, personal letters and published sermons,
burial registers and horoscopes, Susan Mitchell Sommers has woven
together an engaging microhistory that offers useful revisions to
scholarly accounts of Ebenezer and Manoah, while placing the entire
Sibly family firmly in the esoteric byways of the eighteenth and
early nineteenth centuries. The Siblys of London provides
fascinating insight into the lives of a family who lived just
outside our usual historical range of vision.
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