Hamilton helped Green to produce the medical compounds, collect the needed supplies and sell the cures for various illnesses ranging from cancer, leprosy, fistulas and scurvy.

At this time, quack itinerant doctors were sometimes well considered, and Dr Green even offered his services as poor relief to cure various illnesses and disorders, including fistula, being paid two guineas.

[3] Hamilton then worked independently as a quack doctor, travelling and selling medicine and medical advice in southwest England, dressed in "man's apparel": ruffles, breeches, and a periwig.

[3] Travelling meant that Hamilton could easily change location in case of suspicion, and the work provided a decent living.

[3] The couple travelled together for two months, before Mary Price decided she had been cheated upon into believing Hamilton was a man, and she reported her husband to the authorities in Glastonbury.

[8][9] According to the local newspaper report, "There was a great Debate for some Time in Court about the Nature of her Crime, and what to call it, but at last it was agreed that she should be charged with fraud.

However, the charges retained against people prosecuted for vagrancy were vague and diverse, they were seen as a way to maintain order by restricting mobility and consolidating gender and sexual norms that were not precisely named.

[10][11][3] In fact Hamilton was detained with men charged with crimes of bastardy or concerning settlement under the custody of William Hodges.

[13] The justices delivered their verdict that "The he or she prisoner at the bar is an uncommon, notorious cheat, and we, the Court, do sentence her, or him, whichever he or she may be, to be imprisoned six months, and during that time to be whipped in the towns of Taunton, Glastonbury, Wells, and Shepton Mallet ..."[4][3] The report in the Newgate Calendar concludes "And Mary, the monopoliser of her own sex, was imprisoned and whipped accordingly, in the severity of the winter of the year 1746.

"[4] According to Jen Manion, the court case is representative of the pressure exercised by community to trigger a legal response by the courts to punish sexual intimacy outside of marriage and to stabilize sexual differences in a context where there were no clear legal offences defined by existing laws for cases of female husbands.

[3] In addition to Hamilton's and Price's own depositions, there are several reports of the case in the local newspaper, the Bath Journal.

Another report says that at the trial the prosecuting attorney, Mr. Gold, had alleged in his opening statement that Hamilton had been married fourteen times.

A few months later the affair was picked up by the US press.The Boston Weekly Post published the story in February 1747 stating the court's difficulty in naming and defining the crime:[citation needed] Mary Hamilton was try'd for pretending herself a man, and marrying 14 wives, the last of which, Mary Price, deposed in court that she was married to the prisoner and bedded and lived as man and wife for a quarter of a year, during which time she thought the prisoner a man, owing to the prisoner's vile and deceitful practices.

[citation needed] In 1746, Fielding anonymously published[14] a sensational pamphlet, The Female Husband, that gives a different account of Hamilton's life.

She had been brought up in the strictest principles of virtue and religion, but was seduced into "vile amours" by her friend Anne Johnson, an enthusiastic Methodist, and "transactions not fit to be mention'd passed between them".

Fielding claims that "on the very evening she had suffered the first whipping, she offered the gaoler money, to procure her a young girl to satisfy her most monstrous and unnatural desires.

[19] In Fielding's version the reader can be confused by the use of gender: "She had not been long in this city, before she became acquainted with one Mary Price, a girl of about eighteen years of age, and of extraordinary beauty.

However, in the pamphlet published in the 19th century, the author makes a point of correcting this ambiguity, often adding italics to emphasize the pronoun choice.

[19] While in earlier text Fielding does play with the idea that women might find Hamilton attractive because of her femininity, whenever her 'sex' is discovered in his pamphlet, the relationship abruptly ends and unlike the 19th century author, Fielding more subtly exploits the possibilities of suggestion, and manages at the same time to maintain a tone of moral reprimand.

[19] It has been argued that Fielding merged the conventions of the criminal biographies that were so popular in his time, with those of the comic marriage plot (a staple of drama that was slowly gaining ground in fiction as well).

[5] Fielding's version of the story was adapted into a BBC Radio 4 play of the same name, starring comedian Sandi Toksvig.

[22] The 1813 publication by Henry Fielding[18] was the subject of an appraisal in a 2010 episode of PBS' Antiques Roadshow entitled "Naughty or Nice."