The Quack Doctor

Why would you visit The Quack Doctor to read about the famous Beecham’s Pills, when five seconds of Googling will give you more information than you could possibly read in a lifetime?

Well, obviously you wouldn’t, so that’s why I’ve never blogged about them. I just wanted to do a quick post, however, to show this advertisement from 1909, which is a fine example of a witty response to criticism, and far better PR than threatening to sue anyone who’s a bit of a meany.

 The Penny Illustrated Paper 11 December 1909

On 2 January 1909, the British Medical Journal published an analysis of Beecham’s Pills as part of its exposé of proprietary remedies. The verdict wasn’t that harsh compared with the damning reports on other medicines, but it revealed that the pills comprised just aloes (an ingredient of most bog-standard laxatives), ginger and soap. The formula had not been top secret before this, but when the Journal’s reports were published as Secret Remedies: What they Cost and What They Contain (1909), it was brought to wider public attention.

This advert forms part of Beecham’s public response, taking ownership of the term ‘secret remedy’ and presenting it as something honourable; a shared secret between the company and the loyal customers who knew best about their own health. The last paragraph of the following advertisement also appeals to people’s trust in their own judgement, and engenders suspicion of the critics’ motives.

It is perfectly reliable although it is “a Secret Remedy,” it has been tried by the Public for upwards of sixty years, and in spite of all opposition, and in the face of calumny prompted by jealousy caused by success, the voice of the people is practically unanimous in favour of Beecham’s Pills.

Lloyd’s Weekly Newspaper, 12 December 1909

Beecham’s Pills were pitched as a ‘Remedy for the People’, not for the establishment. Whatever some high-falutin BMA analyst might say, the advertising cleverly flattered potential punters that they – who knew what it was like to be ill – were the real experts.

P.S. I’m on Google+ now – feel free to add me.

This advertisement for Eno’s Fruit Salt appeared in the special Royal Wedding Edition of the Penny Illustrated Paper on 8 July 1893. The edition commemorated the nuptials of Prince George, Duke of York and Princess May of Teck – the future King George V and Queen Mary. Click the image to enlarge.

From the Morning Post 18 August 1803

It must be at least a couple of months since we last heard from our old friend Ascaris lumbricoides, so it’s time he made another appearance on The Quack Doctor together with a few of his helminthic chums.

I’m putting together a talk about the career of John Gardner, a former soldier and picture-framer who became a medicine vendor and Methodist preacher in the 1780s. Gardner’s best-known nostrum was a vermifuge, relieving his patients of some spectacular parasites that he collected and preserved in his museums at Long-Acre and Shoreditch.

Last week I went to the Wellcome Library to have a look at a broadside (c. 1822) advertising Gardner’s collections, and its cheerfully disgusting exuberance was a joy to read. These specimens had the job of persuading new patients that their symptoms resulted from something equally revolting, and judging by the advertising, this would have worked a treat.

My useless attempt at taking a sneaky picture when no one was looking. The line under the address says 'Dr. G. aged 70 and without enemies - God has done much for him.'

Early 19th-century anti-quackery publications portrayed Gardner as a hypocrite whose conspicuously pious attitude was just a front for charlatanry. The specimens, they claimed, had not passed through any human sphincters but were made by Gardner himself out of everyday substances. His tapeworms were chicken guts and his roundworms vermicelli, while ordinary insects and lizards played the part of the other strange beasts.

Gardner’s shop displayed the sign ‘The Universal Remedy Under God,’ but a critic in the 1820s accused him of holding ‘a poisonous nostrum in one hand, and the Holy Bible in the other,’ and his Methodism perhaps provided him with a get-out clause for patients who weren’t cured. A correspondent to the Medical Adviser in March 1824 described a butcher going to complain that the worm remedy had made him worse. It transpired that the butcher worked on Sundays and didn’t go to church, so Gardner allegedly told him:

God help you, it is an affliction of the Lord for your wickedness. I can do nothing for you, it would be impious to attempt relieving you; good day, I am sorry for you, young man.

(The butcher replied ‘So am I: good day, doctor.’)

John Gardner at the age of 74.

There is another side to Gardner’s religion, however – he was the founder of the Stranger’s Friend Society for the relief of the poor in 1785. By his own account in The Grain of Mustard Seed (1829), he got the idea while visiting a destitute fistula patient in a garret. Gardner began to put by a penny a week to help those less fortunate, and encouraged his neighbours to do the same. The society grew, inspiring similar organisations across the country.

Back to the worms, however. The following is a small selection of the exhibits detailed in Gardner’s broadside. A. lumbricoides is here referred to as Teres – Gardner tended to use the term ‘ascarids’ for threadworms instead.

Worms, from 1 inch to 130 in length, some with 150 suckers; others in the form of caterpillars; another species like woodlice, 12 feet to each; a wolf of the stomach, expelled from a lady at Hoxton, who had nearly fallen victim to its ravages!!

One animal, with ears like a mouse, from a gentleman. Another with 4 horns, 6 legs, and 12 feet, which lived 9 days, from a child of 9 years; a Tape Worm, its edges like the teeth of a saw; a Stomach Worm by a lady’s mouth, 7 inches long, in the act of emitting its young; male and female Teres, one emitting her young, were preying in the vitals of a gentleman five years, who could find no relief in Paris, nor Edinburgh!!!

A round Worm, 10 inches long, from the mouth of a child, aged 20 months, at the Palace; a Worm, resembling a small snake from the bowels of a man; 44 round Worms, 9 inches each, from a child; a narrow Tape Worm from a young woman’s mouth, 18 feet—she also voided 40 feet downwards, had been afflicted 16 years.

An insect from a young woman’s stomach, of a caterpillar form: it lived 7 weeks in a bottle, and gnawed through two corks!!

Two hundred worms resembling wood-lice, expelled from Mr. A— Hollywell Mount, which had tormented him for many months; a Bamboo Worm, with 4 horns and 12 legs, expelled from a man, whom it had nearly destroyed. Worms from the mouth, nose and ears of Mrs. T.——, and in the milk of the breast of Mrs. P.——, Bishopsgate Road.

From The Graphic, 10 Nov 1888

Sometimes, patent remedies killed people. The Live-Long Candy did manage to get mentioned at an inquest, and there’d be a particular irony in a product of this name carrying someone off – but I reckon it’s innocent.

Eight months before this ad appeared, 16-year-old Belinda Balls, housemaid to Mrs Waspe at Gusford Hall in Suffolk, was suffering abdominal pain. This was nothing new for her, but as she hadn’t been in her job very long, she tried not to make a fuss. On Saturday 24 March 1888, however, she was in such agony that she had to ask her fellow servants for help.

The cook, Jane Mallett, gave her a cup of ginger and Belinda struggled on with her work. By ten o’ clock that evening she was in serious trouble. Her mistress gave her some hot water, which made her vomit, and she went on to have a bad night, cared for by Mrs Mallett in their shared room.

On Sunday, Belinda took some ‘family pills’ (laxatives) to no avail, and had to stay in bed all day. That night, Jane Mallett sat up with her until she fell asleep, then helped her when she fell out of bed at four o’ clock in the morning.

When the cook next awakened at dawn, she was shocked to find her young companion dead.

Mr G H Hetherington, surgeon to the East Suffolk hospital, examined the body and found it to be ‘that of a woman well developed.’ Other than this observation, he could pass no comment until he had done a post mortem examination, when he discovered severe ulceration of the stomach. In his opinion, the cause of death was peritonitis. Mr Hetherington felt that Belinda’s habit of taking Live-Long Candy after meals had exacerbated her disease. Such quack remedies, he said, tended to alleviate the pain, but would cause constipation and ultimately be harmful. The implication was that the Live-Long Candy contained opium – but no analysis was carried out.

The Candy’s proprietor, J C Shenstone, at once wrote to the Essex Standard to set the record straight. The recipe had been around for 50 years, he said, since his predecessor Thomas Smith brought it to public attention and gained the endorsement of the Duke of Wellington. You might expect a dodgy practitioner to leap to an immediate and hysterical defence of his practices. Shenstone, however, defied any accusations of quackery by being completely reasonable and failing to threaten to sue anyone.

Shenstone was a dispensing chemist with premises on Colchester High Street. In around 1834, the shop had been established by Thomas Smith, who began selling the Live-Long or Digestive Candy a few years later. Certainly by 1844 he was doing a brisk trade in the stuff, and at around the same time employed an apprentice, James B. B. Shenstone, (a descendant of the 18th-century poet William Shenstone) who travelled all the way from Bath to take on the role. After his apprenticeship, Shenstone started his own business at Wells in Norfolk, but later returned to Colchester as junior partner to Smith. Thomas Smith died in 1864 and the business, including the Live-Long Candy recipe, went into the Shenstone family.

Henry Beasley, in The druggist’s general receipt book, gives the recipe as follows:

Powdered rhubarb, 60 grs.
Heavy magnesia 1oz.
Bicarbonate of soda 1dr.
Finely powdered ginger 20 grs.
Cinnamon powder 15 grs.
Powdered white sugar 2oz.
Mucilage of tragacanth q. s.
Beat together, and divide into parallelograms of 20grs. each,

The younger Shenstone’s letter was no-nonsense but polite. He offered a £200 reward to anyone who could prove that the product contained opiates or any other ingredient likely to cause constipation. He stated that he was ‘quite prepared to satisfy Dr. (sic) Hetherington privately as to the nature of all the ingredients used in the preparation,’ and included a note from the physician and surgeon of Essex and Colchester Hospital saying they had used the candy and found it beneficial. This could all have been done in an arsey passive-aggressive way, but in my opinion the tone of the letter is assertive but calm; an understandable response to someone who had made unfounded assumptions about the nature of the remedy.

Just a few months later, Mr Hetherington had more pressing matters to think about when his vehicle was overturned by a runaway horse – but perhaps that’s another story.

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Thank you to everyone who has voted for The Quack Doctor as Best Literary Medical Weblog in the Medgadget Awards! If you haven’t voted yet and would like to, polls are open until 12 midnight (EST) on Sunday 13 Feb. For once in my life I would like not to be the wheezy unpopular kid trailing at the back, so if you can sling a vote my way I’d be very happy!

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Surgeon P Power's handwriting. Image via www.canada.com

Regular readers of The Quack Doctor might remember that back at the end of September last year, I blogged about a news story surrounding the National Archives’ Surgeons at Sea project. The Archives’ press release focused on a 12-year-old Irish girl, Ellen McCarthy, who apparently had the misfortune to vomit up a whopping 87-inch parasitic worm while voyaging to Quebec in 1825.

Except that, in my opinion, she didn’t. To me, it looked as though the ship’s surgeon, Mr P Power, had scribbled his notes so hastily that he made a rather workaday 8½-inch ascarid look like a monster. (Though frankly, chundering up an 8½-inch ascarid would be quite sufficient to fuel a lifetime of nightmares in anyone’s book.)

Over Christmas and New Year, I spoke to a Canadian journalist, Randy Boswell, who had also looked at the digitised records and concluded that the worm was indeed a measly 8½-incher. He contacted the National Archives, who responded politely and promptly, alluding to the possibility that their experts had misinterpreted the records. Randy ran a story across his group of newspapers, complete with quotations from your very own Quack Doctor, and here it is:

Monster parasitic worm may have been only a fraction of the size

Surgeons at Sea is a brilliant project and I own up to being a total killjoy over this one small aspect of it. I love a good story as much as the next person, and I’m glad that this worm captured enough journalists’ imaginations to give Surgeons at Sea so much publicity.

That it turned out to be only 8½ inches might be disappointing, but c’est la vie.

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Source: The Liverpool Mercury, 30 December 1851

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Phlegm is generally white, greyish, or of a yellow colour, with streaks of black; its consistency varies from the limpidity of water to the thickness of jelly.

This vivid description is from Parisian chemist Paul Gage’s Treatise on the Effect and Disorders produced by Phlegm in the Human Frame – the pamphlet referred to in the advert above. The 16-page essay is elegantly written and, rather than trumpeting the medicine’s properties in the exaggerated fashion typical of quacks, Gage uses more sophisticated tactics to persuade the reader of its efficacy.

Phlegm, Gage believed, was implicated in virtually all diseases – the sheer amount of the stuff was evidence for this. He estimated that if all the phlegm in the human body were collected together, the quantity would ‘surpass the weight of all other evacuations.’ Medical men might argue over this, but they were too inclined to follow fashions in diagnosis and put their own opinions above the welfare of their patients. Gage uses the common quack ploy of discrediting the medical profession, politely accusing them of disagreeing amongst themselves, observing only what they wished to observe and ignoring ancient systems of medicine.

At the time of the Treatise’s publication in English (1851), disorders of the blood were the ‘in thing’ and according to Gage, doctors did not look much beyond blood-letting as a treatment. Drawing of bad blood, however, was useless as it would simply be replaced by more bad blood if the cause – that is, the phlegm – were not removed.

‘For heaven’s sake,’ appealed Gage, ‘overcome the principle before attempting to overcome the symptom.’

At the other end of the spectrum was the ‘enlightened medical man who has at heart the love of his suffering fellow creatures’ – i.e. Monsieur Gage himself. He pre-empts criticism by pointing out the medical establishment’s tendency to write off any new method as quackery in order to protect their own interests.

It was easy to tell if you were suffering from phlegm: the ‘abundant expectoration of clear and slimy mucus’ was a bit of a giveaway. Other symptoms, however, included dry skin, belching, pale lips, hoarseness and poor digestion. Women and children were the greatest sufferers but phlegm affected everybody – particularly those of weak constitution, sorrowful and melancholy temperament and a sedentary lifestyle.

The Antiphlegmatic Elixir was a laxative, which seems odd for a condition now associated with the respiratory tract, but to Gage phlegm was just as much of a problem in the digestive system. In children, for example, it could generate and nourish intestinal worms. When treated with the Elixir (in conjunction with a decoction of male fern – a standard vermifuge!), the creatures would come out surrounded by masses of the stuff.

As well as worms and the more likely coughs, colds and asthma, the Elixir would cure apoplexy, scrofula, gout, dropsy, palpitations, skin conditions and ‘diseases of women.’

The Treatise contains a list of successful cases, but in a departure from the common quack practice of printing testimonials in the patients’ own words, Gage sets his out in the third person, like the case histories in reputable medical books.

One featured patient was a 28-year-old lady with five children, who had numerous crevices in her right breast and a white swelling on her right elbow. Until the age of 25 she had thrown up large quantities of viscous matter every morning, and when her mother mentioned this to the attending physician, he prescribed the Antiphlegmatic Elixir. After five months the lady was cured.

By writing of a reputable doctor prescribing the Elixir, and giving a lengthy recovery period rather than a miraculous instant cure, Gage subtly dissociated himself from quackery and presented his ideas as equal in status with (but more enlightened than) medical orthodoxy. He appealed to the educated reader with a sense of responsibility for their own health, and in doing so trousered a similarly upmarket 4s. 6d. per bottle.

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The dearth of posts on The Quack Doctor over the last couple of weeks is owing to the fact that I was away in Israel and the occupied Palestinian territory – not on holiday exactly, as I got paid to go and write about it, but nevertheless much more fun than staying at home! For anyone interested, there are some pics here.

While I’m trying to catch up with everything, this brief post is a departure from the usual advertising-related stuff. Today the Guardian and various other newspapers reported on the National Archives’ wonderful Surgeons at Sea project, which has catalogued the records of Royal Navy surgeons and assistant surgeons during the period 1783 to 1880. Selected records have been digitised and are available for download – big files but well worth looking at.

The papers have understandably picked up on a weird and icky story – that of 12-year-old Ellen McCarthy from Cork, who while travelling to Quebec on the ship Elizabeth apparently vomited up a worm 87 inches long. Surgeon P Power, who recorded the case in 1825, displays better penmanship than many of his medical and surgical brethren before and since, but he was scribbling quickly in note form and perhaps the movement of the ship didn’t help either – with the result that I think the case has been misinterpreted.

I’m going to be a killjoy, but I believe the original document says the worm was 8½ inches long, not 87. Disappointing, but there you go. I’ve compared other examples of Mr Power writing ‘½’ and ’7′ and I’m afraid this instance looks very much closer to the ‘½’. (If I’m wrong, fair enough, but I’m pretty sure.) Several days later, Ellen McCarthy expelled two more worms – one 13½ inches long, the other 7. These must have been Ascaris lumbricoides and it is reasonable to suppose that the first one was too.

As for the treatment, described in the Guardian as oil of ‘terebouth’ – well, Power’s handwriting once again leaves a little to be desired but it’s clear he has put ‘terebinth.’

So that’s me being a bit grumpy in my post-holiday er… I mean post-business-trip slump. I’m not usually one to advocate spoiling a good story, but for me the original source wins. And it’s a good reminder that if you want your own words of wisdom to survive the interpretations of posterity, make sure you write neatly!

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To view the original document, go to http://www.nationalarchives.gov.uk/surgeonsatsea/ and download ADM 101/76/9. (28mb)

Thank you to regular reader Michael Power (no relation to P) for pointing me in the direction of this story.

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From the Pittsburgh Dispatch, 2 Jan 1890

Alexander Wilford Hall wasn’t trying to flog a potion or contraption. His secret to health and longevity was something that people could do for themselves, for their whole lives, at very low cost. That is, if they really had the stomach for it.

On sending in a stamp, the enquirer would receive information about a booklet detailing the mysterious method. At a steep $4, this publication must really be something special, and according to a laudatory biography of Hall in Jay Henry Mowbray’s 1898 book Representative Men of New York, it sold 500,000 copies in the US, England and Australia. Purchasers were asked to agree to a ‘Pledge of Honor’ (or Honour, depending which country you were in) not to divulge the secret to anyone but their own family, although doctors were allowed to recommend it to patients.

The pamphlet reveals that the secret was a process that has enjoyed a resurgence in more recent times:

Disease depends upon the absorption of poisonous materials from the colon and rectum. Wash this out thoroughly with hot water once or twice a day and disease is robbed of its power, death of its terror and the doctor of his occupation. Use a large quantity of water, one or two gallons; retain it for as long as possible and that which is not absorbed can finally be expelled, taking with it accumulations which have a tendency to create diseases.

A sceptical correspondent to The Medical World, Dr Massie, colourfully paraphrased this as ‘Use lots of water (a gallon or two), retain it as long as possible, and then “Let her go, Gallagher!”’

Dr Massie also said:

I don’t know anything about Hall’s right to use the prefix ‘Dr.’, but suspect it is merely a trap to get some unwary M.D. to send for the June number of his alleged scientific journal, and be by it further deceived to send $4.00 for his alleged “Hygienic Method”

Massie needn’t have feared, however – Hall had a PhD from Lebanon Valley College, PA, and was Doctor of Laws from the University of Florida – therefore doubly entitled to be called ‘Doctor’. If people thought this meant he had a medical qualification, well, so be it!

After an inauspicious start as a mule-driver on the Erie Canal towpath, Hall worked hard to gain an education and became a writer and editor, producing his own journal, the Microcosm, and several works of philosophy. It was in the Microcosm that he announced the discovery of ‘this treatment for the cure of almost every known form of disease,’ and invited people to send $4 for the pamphlet. Although the secrecy and high cost aroused the suspicions of doctors like Massie, other physicians approved. Dr J H Etheridge of Chicago, for example, reported in rather graphic detail in the Medical Standard on his success with the treatment. In the case of one patient who had been a ‘poor breakfaster’ for years, ‘the discharges from her bowels were simply enormous’.

Etheridge might not have seen the Hygienic Treatment as quackery, but there was a danger of the method being promoted by amateur enthusiasts.

In 1889, 20-year-old George Harger, a student at the Rome Free Academy in New York, bought Hall’s pamphlet and was convinced it held the key to health. Whenever any of his fellow students were ill, he advised them to give up on conventional medicine and try the hygienic cure. His persistence, added to the fact that he was a staunch prohibitionist, didn’t do a lot for this young chap’s popularity. When he persuaded a seriously ill 16-year-old boy to adopt the hygienic treatment, enough was enough. The insufferable but unfortunate Harger was set upon by a mob of 15 other students and any remaining contents of his colon were promptly kicked out of him.

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TAPE WORM

Removed ALIVE IN TWO HOURS with HEAD or no charge. (No Fee in Advance.) No fasting. Have cured over 2,000 people of Tape worms with this harmless infallible specific, 50 per cent of which were doctoring for various other diseases, thereby eking out a miserable existence as thousands are doing. (Also cured two persons of LIZARDS.) Send stamp for circular.
Dr J. G. SHIPLEY
Montezuma, Iowa, Tape Worm Specialist of over twenty years’ experience.

Source: The Burlington Hawkeye, Iowa, 9 July 1895

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Tapeworm specialists advertised widely in late 19th-century American newspapers— Wait, what?… LIZARDS?

I wondered if ‘lizards’ was a colloquial term for some variety of parasite, but it seems Dr Shipley wasn’t the only one claiming to remove actual lizards from people’s innards. In 1900, Dr H D Rucker advertised that his medicine, ‘Korak Wonder’, had caused one Mrs E. J. Welker to expel a lizard ‘well formed and having four legs and feet.’

Tapeworm specialists had a variety of techniques and potions, but Charles Oleson, M.D, in Secret Nostrums and Systems of Medicine, describes a common method used by irregular practitioners. Oleson, though cataloguing the formulae of dodgy remedies, was not afraid to stand up for those he believed would work. This was one of which he heartily approved.

The patient must fast for a day, taking only a saline cathartic to empty the bowels. The next morning, he or she would take a teaspoon of the essential oil of male fern (whose Latin name, Dryopteris filix-mas, is one of the few things I remember from A-level biology) in a cup of warm milk. Milk was supposed to be ‘an article of food in which the tape-worm greatly delights.’

After this, the patient had to lie down for a few hours, keeping a slice of lemon handy in case of nausea, and then take a dose of castor oil, turpentine and croton oil – the latter being toxic and a rather drastic purgative. The spectacular effects of this mixture can be imagined. If you put a piece of mosquito netting over your chamber pot, ‘the worm itself can be easily retained for further examination,’ or for keeping as a pet or whatever.

Some tapeworm specialists did medicine shows in the street, and for this they needed to impress the punters by displaying preserved worms of enormous length. The Decatur Review (Illinois) in 1903 printed an anecdote about a worm doctor called Joe Bowen, who had given up a successful career as an auctioneer in order to go into the lucrative worm business. When he started out he did not have any specimens to display, and as the newspaper said:

If these tapeworm specialists haven’t something to show and scare the people, there is no use for them to set up.

Mr Bowen found an inventive solution:

He borrowed a crimping machine then he went to the slaughterhouse and gathered a lot of entrails. In a few hours after that, Joe had the finest exhibit of tapeworms that ever went on the street.

The exhibit did the trick and Bowen earned a fortune.

Less successful in the fight against tapeworms was an invention from earlier in the 19^th century — Alpheus Myers’ Tapeworm Trap.

This small metal capsule, about ¾ of an inch long and half an inch in diameter, was patented in 1854. It had a hole in one end and, inside, a sprung trap. The patient had to insert some bait – when making fun of the invention, newspaper reporters suggested cheese, but in fact the patent says any nutritious substance will do. The brave sufferer, having fasted for a couple of days to get the worm hungry, had to swallow the trap, keeping a string dangling out between their teeth. The peckish parasite was supposed to lunge for the bait and get its head stuck, after which all you had to do was pull the whole length of worm out through your mouth. It was important that the trap wasn’t too vicious:

… care should be taken that spring g, is only strong enough to hold the worm, and not strong enough to cause his head to be cut off.

The invention was about as effective and popular as you might expect – i.e. not very. Whether it would also work on lizards, I don’t know.

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Source: The Mills County Tribune, Iowa, 12 March 1914

Some secret remedies remain secret for centuries. Not Mayr’s Wonderful Stomach Remedy. Within about a year of it becoming famous, a Chicago newspaper was describing its promoter as a ‘comical quack’ and ‘one of the most entertaining medical fakers in Chicago.’

The Stomach Remedy was inspired by the methods of the itinerant con-artists who worked the small towns of the US in the late 1800s. In the early 20^th century, similar products began appearing in the advertising columns, and druggist George H Mayr was quick to get in on the act. Described by the A.M.A. as ‘the fake gallstone trick,’ his method provided patients with immediate, visible results so convincing that the testimonials flooded in.

Mayr was evangelical about his medicine’s properties:

I have watched sick people for years and have reached out my hand to thousands in the great depth of the Valley of Despair and brought them into the light of life and happiness. I want you, and each one suffering, to know the full joys of living with every part of your system in beautiful accord and absolute perfect harmony.

His remedy comprised a bottle of medicine and two sachets of powders. The patient had to take the first powder at about 3pm, then the whole contents of the bottle before bed, then the second powder in the morning. All going to plan, there should be spectacular results:

When the bowels operate, use a vessel and note the poisonous secretions removed by this remedy, in some cases dark green or yellow lumps varying in size from a fine bead to an olive – in severe cases even larger. In other cases quantities of thick tenacious slime or mucous.

Mayr claimed that it was an old French remedy, used for generations to ‘relieve all stomach ailments and keep the bowels free from foul, poisonous matter.’ France, he said, was ‘the nation without stomach troubles.’

Whatever the state of our Gallic friends’ alimentary canals, Mayr’s medicine bottle contained nothing more interesting than olive oil. The powders were flavoured with licorice but other than that, analyses varied. One said they were mainly Rochelle salt (potassium sodium tartrate) while another suggested that one sachet contained Epsom salts (magnesium sulphate) and the second a sodium phosphate.

Either way, the patient would expel greenish waxy globules that looked a bit like stones. The A.M.A.’s report concluded that these were a mixture of fatty acids and soap caused by the alkaline intestinal fluids operating on the oil.  Anyone taking the remedy and cheerfully rummaging through their subsequent excretions would get the same result, regardless of whether or not they had anything wrong with them.

Stones expelled by a patient using Mayr's Remedy. Pictured in Nostrums and Quackery, A.M.A, 1921

Mayr’s dodginess extended to his advertising methods too. In 1918, the New York Tribune revealed that he sent round a list of instructions to editors, giving them advertising copy like this…

………… SOLDIER UNDER FIRE
“We have had several brushes with the enemy since reaching the trenches here, which I am sure I would not have reached had it not been for Mayr’s Wonderful Stomach Remedy. It has entirely cured me of indigestion and awful gas in my stomach. Army food now digests as good as mother’s used to.”

The newspaper was supposed to fill in the blank in the headline with the name of its own town, to present the imaginary soldier as a local lad. The Tribune was quick to take the moral high ground against the papers that accepted this form of advertising, saying rather self-righteously:

But the publisher who cooperates with the quack by deliberately printing what he knows to be a lie is guilty of unspeakable treachery to those who believe what they read in his paper.

Mayr wasn’t the only one to use this advertising ploy, and not the only one promoting the oils-and-salts method. A hundred years later, a similar process called the liver cleanse or liver flush is still going strong. The difference is that now we have the internet, where people can (and do) post pictures of their poo to show off the wonderful things therein. A link to such biological delights is not necessary on a history site, but you’re big enough and ugly enough to do a bit of Googling if you desperately want to know.

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