McALISTER’S
ALL-HEALING OINTMENT
OR WORLDS SALVE
Has been an old family nurse for the past twenty years, and known all around the world as the most soothing and healing ointment in existence.
McALISTER’S ALL-HEALING OINTMENT
Never Fails to Cure.
Salt Rheum, Scrofula, Ulcers, Small Pox, Sore Nipples, Mercurial Sores, Erysipelas, Carbuncles, Corns, Bunions, and all Rheumatic Pains, &c. &c. Heals permanently Old Sores and Fresh Wounds. For Frosted Limbs, Burns, or Scalds. It has no equal in the World. Give it a trial.
Price 25 cents. Sold by all Druggists.

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Source: Bangor Daily Whig and Courier (Maine) 6 March 1867

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The aura surrounding the figure in this ad is not just for decoration. It represents insensible perspiration (sweat that evaporates before it can build up as moisture on the skin.) James McAlister believed insensible perspiration arose from the blood and drew off all impurities therein. Illness suppressed it, and life could not be sustained without it. ‘Stop up those pores,’ he said, ‘and DEATH knocks at your door.’

The All-Healing Ointment, or World’s Salve, would promote perspiration and restore health – but that wasn’t all. As well as the list of conditions in the ad, it would cure consumption, cancer, worms, influenza, hernias and dog bites. It was an antidote to poison, would correct a tan or freckles and was even a hair restorer. Using a topical application made sense, McAlister argued, because throughout the Bible, medicine took the form of ointments and oils rather than being taken internally.

Here’s a male version of the image from the nostrum’s early days (1845):

The figure above is in rude health, with his insensible perspiration flowing freely around him – he is far more fortunate than the gentleman featured in an 1847 broadside. According to the text, the man had come to McAlister’s shop in South Street, New York City, in despair.

Few men ever presented an appearance as appalling as his. His whole body from head to foot was covered with enormous

Tumors, Swellings and Ulcerous Sores,

from whence issued streams of purulent matter, making the entire surface

ONE MASS OF PUTREFACTION.

It seemed that nothing to be found had power to reach his case,

SO TERRIBLE! SO AWFUL! WERE THESE PUTRID SORES

He came into the store, and presented himself as one of the most pitiable objects, one of the most forlorn in expression of countenance of any man, I think, I had ever seen. The first words he uttered I shall never forget, coming as they did from the depths of the poor fellows heart,
“Oh! that I was dead!”

The melodrama continues, with the customer stripping off to reveal the extent of the putrefaction and detailing the failure of various sarsaparilla syrups, mercury and other medicines to help him. McAlister tells him the All-Healing Salve will save him; at this,

His whole frame shook like a leaf—his eyes shot forth unwonted fire, and every feature of his countenance was lit up with an unearthly expression.—Hope! Yes, Immortal hope, the last friend that forsakes us, dawned upon his soul, and he caught at the facts presented to him with the desperation of a drowning man.

After eight weeks’ use of the ointment, the man returns to the shop, smooth-skinned and exhibiting the greatest signs of health and happiness.

In April 1856 McAlister entered into an agreement with wholesale druggists Barnes & Park to supply them exclusively with the salve. Five years later, however, Barnes & Park realised that McAlister had been selling large quantities of the ointment to rival druggists, including A. D. Sands, (who also promoted sarsaparilla products like those that failed to cure our scrofulous friend above.) Barnes & Park sought an injunction restraining McAlister from selling the ointment to anyone else, but details of the case show that it wasn’t a clear-cut instance of an unscrupulous quack breaking his contract.

Barnes & Park had agreed to promote the salve but had not really bothered, and sales had diminished. In 1858 the company became sole agents for Redding & Co’s Russian Salve, which was effectively a rival to the All-Healing Ointment. If he had kept to the agreement, McAlister could have seen his product sink without trace. Justice Bonney, who oversaw the hearing, decided that both sides were as bad as each other, and dismissed the case with costs.

McAlister kept the ingredients a secret, but sometimes referred to the salve as ‘Vegetable’ (as in the print above), and claimed it ‘contains no Mercury’. I don’t know whether or not he was telling the truth, but I do know that in the language of 19th-century nostrum-vendors, these were common indicators that mercury was indeed present.

For part 1 about Swaim’s Panacea, click here.

Woodcut commissioned by Swaim, showing Hercules battling the Hydra.

Within a few years of establishing his products, William Swaim was enjoying the benefits of endorsements from some of Philadelphia’s most eminent physicians, including Nathaniel Chapman, William Gibson, William Pott Dewees, Thomas Parke and James Mease – and he didn’t even have to make them up.

For the past ten years or so, sarsaparilla had been attracting renewed medical attention in the US as a blood purifier, so it was probably with this in mind that the doctors were well-disposed towards Swaim’s medicine. Swaim combined the sarsaparilla syrup with oil of wintergreen, giving it a pleasant taste that made it a hit with patients too. Gibson’s endorsement gives a further clue to its popularity:

I have always found it extremely efficacious, especially in secondary syphilis and mercurial disease. I have no hesitation in pronouncing it a medicine of inestimable value.

The symptoms of secondary syphilis, of course, disappear of their own accord before the disease goes into a latent phase – no wonder the Panacea and so many other treatments of the time claimed success.

In 1827 the New York Medical Society appointed a Committee on Quack Remedies, and the Philadelphia Medical Society soon did likewise. While the New York Committee acknowledged the possible benefits of the Panacea and other sarsaparilla-based syrups, the Philadelphia one was tougher, gathering numerous cases of people who had taken the medicine. The outcomes of these cases varied from no effect at all, to ‘a most violent and alarming bowel complaint’, to death. Analysis showed that the remedy contained corrosive sublimate (mercuric chloride).

Later, the New York Committee released its own analysis, done at the time of the investigation but not published, which showed that they too knew all along that it was mercury - so there, Philadelphia. A new analysis in 1831 also showed the presence of arsenic, but the ingredients varied from batch to batch and it was the luck of the draw whether you got the poisons.

By this time the doctors’ enthusiasm had waned. Chapman wrote:

Nathaniel Chapman, pictured 1846

Early in the history of that article, I was induced to employ it, as well from professional as common report in favour of its efficacy, and was well pleased at the result in several cases. But! more extensive experience with it soon convinced me that I had overrated its value, and for a long period I have entirely ceased to prescribe it.

Gibson admitted that: In several cases that came under my notice, ptyalism has followed the use of it. (Excessive salivation, a symptom of mercury poisoning.) Their testimonials, however, were now out of their control and there was nothing they could do to stop Swaim continuing to use their names.

In 1836, long after the US physicians had backtracked on their endorsement of the nostrum, British journal The Medical-Chirurgical Review condemned them in true Tunbridge Wells style:

We were utterly astonished to find an impudent PANACEA bolstered up with the names and certificates of some of the first authorities, in the medical profession, of the United States!…

We are mortified and grieved, beyond measure, to find professional propriety (to give it no other name) at so low an ebb among our brethren in America! This admonition from Europe will surely rouse the faculty of the United States to some sense of the duty they owe to their brethren throughout the world.

The early success of Swaim’s Panacea inspired imitators to cash in with their own versions, and they were completely blatant about it. ‘Swayne’s Panacea’ hoped to dupe punters who weren’t paying attention, and ‘Shinn’s Panacea’ was sold with the statement: The subscriber having discovered the composition of Swaim’s celebrated Panacea, has now a supply on hand for sale.

One of the heavyweight rivals was Parker’s Renovating Vegetable Panacea, the ads of which contained fighting talk:

In justice to myself, I have been induced to reply to a false and unjustifiable attack made upon me and others by Swaim, the vender of a certain Panacea in this city.

I have been acquainted with the ORIGINAL RECIPE FROM WHICH SWAIM MANUFACTURES HIS MEDICINE FOR UPWARD OF TEN YEARS. IT WAS OBTAINED FROM MY FATHER-IN-LAW, WHO NOW RESIDES IN THE STATE OF NEW YORK, WHO HAS USED IT FOR THIRTY YEARS , AND PERFORMED INNUMERABLE EXTRAORDINARY CURES WITH IT.

Parker used his own version of the Hydra image, which, in a nice dig at Swaim’s battling Hercules, shows the mythical beast already defeated:

Swaim’s reply tried to turn the copy-cat ads to his advantage:

This medicine had been used for seven years before an attempt was made to imitate it; but the great demand for it, and its wonderful success, have induced a great number of persons to imitate it in various ways—upwards of fifty different mixtures have been got up in imitation of it, which is a convincing proof of it being a medicine of great value.

Although the initial fame of the medicine declined, it continued to be made throughout the 19th and early 20th centuries, latterly with a different formula involving  alcohol and a huge amount of sugar.

1894 ad from the Galveston Daily News

SWAIM’S PANACEA.—This Medicine has acquired a very
extensive and established celebrity in Europe and America,
and its virtues are known and acknowledged by many of the most
respectable physicians of both countries. As an alterative, and
in various diseases, particularly in cases of inveterate corruption
of the blood descending to the second generation, it stands unri-
valled. Its safety and innocence have been fully tested, so that
it may be administered to the most tender and helpless infant.
No one, however, is advised to take it without being first con-
vinced of its efficacy and of the rectitude of the proprietor’s in-
tention. He has been induced to establish agencies in England
in consequence of the repeated and large orders for the Medicine
from various parts of the kingdom. He respectfully informs the
public that they can be supplied wholesale by EVANS, SON, and
CO., 85, Lord-street, Liverpool; EVANS and LESCHER, 4 Cripple-
gate-buildings, London; and retail by most of the respectable
Druggists in England, Ireland, and Scotland.

Source: The Liverpool Mercury, Friday 7 August 1847

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If you’re Welsh, don’t be annoyed at being left out; count yourself lucky.

Although I’ve chosen a British ad here, the medicine’s home was Philadelphia, where William Swaim settled after a career as a bookbinder in New York. A probably apocryphal tale has him finding the panacea recipe scribbled on a blank leaf of a book he was binding; another story, related in James Harvey Young’s The Toadstool Millionaires, has Swaim finding out the ingredients from a reputable physician called Dr Quackinboss. Although this sounds made up, the name (but with the spelling Quackenboss), genuinely did belong to a New York doctor in the 1820s. (And for purposes of mild amusement, here is a modern example.)

Swaim’s advertising materials included booklets endorsing his nostrum, and the following unpleasant picture appeared in these and occasionally in his ads. You might recognise it if you saw the colour version recently displayed on the Ephemera Assemblyman blog. In this one, the bottle of Panacea is more prominent, and the facial expression more grotesque, but the depiction of the legs is thankfully less gruesome for the lack of colour.

Notice that the caption says ‘The representation and her actual appearance after having been Cured by the use of Swaims Panacea.’ I think they must mean ‘The representation of…’ but anyway, AFTER is the interesting word here. This image was supposed to encourage people to buy the medicine. Just think! Take this stuff and you too could spend the rest of your life hiding in a darkened room, tragically plastering your face with yet more mercurial preparations while the looking glass mocks you with the ghostly memory of the carefree beauty you were long, long ago.

The logic behind the use of this picture is difficult to grasp – any further theories welcome in the comments, but it could be:

1. In that state, Miss Linton should actually be dead, so the very fact that she’s sitting in a chair grinning is a testament to the miraculous power of the Panacea.

2. The horror of the image would exert a strange fascination on punters and compel them to read the promotional book. This is what happened to ‘Morleigh,’ the British writer of Life in the West, (1843):

‘…fronting the title page, we have a full-length portrait of a lady, or skeleton in a ball dress, grinning horribly. If this lady is cured, thought I, it would be very advisable for her to stay at home. Faugh! the very portrait has made me ill. I threw the book aside with scorn, little thinking that in a few days hence, when the book had mysteriously disappeared, I should earnestly seek a copy, and devour the contents with as much gusto as a starving sailor would munch an old shoe.’

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To be continued…

In the next post – what was actually in Swaim’s Panacea, the proprietor’s on-off relationship with the medical profession, and how the Panacea’s success spawned blatant imitations.

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Picture courtesy of the US National Library of Medicine

Source: The Penny Illustrated Paper and Illustrated Times, Sat 26 January 1895. To view this rather fine-looking gentleman in full technicolour glory, click this ad from the National Archives.

Allcock’s Plasters had their origins in an invention patented in the US in 1845 by Horace Day and William Shecut. (Day was a wealthy manufacturer of rubber goods but in 1846 was sued by one Mr Goodyear for an infringement of a patent and lost $500,000.) The porous plaster patent described the ingredients and method thus:

We first cut five pounds of India-rubber into fine shreds and boil it an hour in common soft water to soften it. We then drain off the water and put the rubber into a tin or copper vessel which will hold at least sixty gallons, and pour into it a sufficient quantity of spirits of turpentine to cover the gum completely, adding from time to time more spirits of turpentine as the gum soaks it up. This process may be hastened by placing the vessel over a water-bath. When the rubber is sufficiently dissolved to admit of its being pressed through a fine wire seive [sic] is may be set aside for use. We next simmer four ounces of Capsicum annuum or cayenne pepper in a quart of spirits of turpentine about one hour and strain it with a portion of this tincture. We grind a pound of litharge on a slab or in a paint mill, mix it with the remainder of the tincture of cayenne, and add to it six ounces of balsam of Peru. Then we melt a pound of pine-gum and add spirits of turpentine until it is thin enough to strain when nearly cool, and, lastly, mix the whole of the preceding preparations together until the mixture is of uniform color, without specks or lumps. It is then ready for spreading on any suitable material. Cotton cambric or muslin will answer the purpose very well.

Holes were punched in the product – the colour image in the National Archives link gives some idea of what it looked like. Thomas Allcock, a British-born druggist living in New York,  appears to have acquired the rights almost immediately, and a few years later the company went into association with Benjamin Brandreth (great-great-grandfather of Gyles), whose Brandreth’s Pills were already famous.

The plasters were not only supposed to to help lumbago – other adverts suggested using them for such varied disorders as quinsy (you had to put a strip of plaster under your chin, stretching from ear to ear), diabetes, St Vitus’s Dance, epilepsy, dyspepsia, diarrhoea, coughs and colds, asthma, pleurisy, whooping cough, consumption, ruptures, sciatica, paralysis, rheumatism, tic douloureux and kidney problems.

The ads boasted that it only took 2 seconds to apply the plaster. Getting it off, however, was another matter. Dick’s Encyclopaedia noted in 1872 that:

These plasters adhere very firmly, frequently requiring the application of heat (by means of a hot towel or warm flat-iron), for their removal.

One 1876 ad advised customers to ‘Beware of piratical imitations.’ Presumably these were called Arrrrlcock’s.

Famous for its trademark showing someone walloping the living crap out of a reanimated skeleton (if skeletons can be said to possess any living crap), Radam’s Microbe Killer was a fraud.

Its inventor, William Radam, published a book, Microbes and the Microbe Killer (189o) describing at great length his quest for a cure for his own rheumatism, which he believed to have been caused by microbes. A florist and nurseryman, Radam associated the killing of microbes in the human body with the killing of pests on plants. He sought to find a harmless antiseptic gas that would cleanse the human body just as fumigation destroyed the bugs in his greenhouses.

In the book, Radam is unspecific about the methods that led to his claimed success, saying vaguely “A little more improving, and I had the antiseptic that proved to be an antiseptic, without having experimented upon my body.” (p49, revised edition 1895) Analyses, however, showed that the remedy was more than 99% water, with traces of sulphuric acid, sulphurous acid and ash (Journal of the A.M.A., 1910)

For more in-depth information about Radam, his remedy, and the opposition he encountered, there are interesting articles at The North Texas Skeptic and Quackwatch.

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Wm RADAM’S MICROBE KILLER

Nearly   all   well-read   people   are  familiar
with   the   scientific   investigations  of  Profs
Koch and Pasteur,  respectively  of  Germany
and   France,   as   well  as  a  number  of  other
scientists of almost equal renown, whose ex-
periments have proven conclusively that all
diseases are causes by microbes in the blood.
They are called microbes, because they are a
living   matter,   and  only  discovered  by  the
aid   of    powerful   microscopes.       But  until
William Radam discovered his Microbe Killer
Medicine    there   was   absolutely   nothing
known in the annals of  Medicine  that  would
destroy these Microbes or Germs of Diseases
existing   in   the   blood.   The  Microbe  Killer
does Kill the  Microbes  in  the  blood  without
fail, as the thousands of testimonials we have
in our possession demonstrate.
Microbes   being   the  cause  of  all  diseases,
Microbe  Killer will therefore cure  them.
WE EXCEPT NO DISEASES WHATEVER.
Ladies and  gentlemen  desiring  light  upon
the Microbe Theory, as well as upon any dis-
ease they may be afflicted with, are cordially
invited to call and get pamphlets for full  par-
ticulars. We will  forfeit  $1000  if  any  single
one  of   our  testimonials  can  be  proven  as
not genuine.
RADAM’S MICROBE KILLER CO.
For  sale  by  E.C.   FLEMING,  Druggist,  No.
South Detroit Street

Source: The Daily Gazette, Xenia, Ohio, 16 November 1889