The Quack Doctor

My Scottish grandma could be rather forthright at times and was wont to sum up the appearance of passers-by with the succinct phrase ‘She’s no stranger to a fish supper.’

Had grandma been around in the early 20^th century, however, perhaps she wouldn’t have had as much opportunity to make this pronouncement. Help was at hand for those who wanted to lose weight.

Source: The Theatre Magazine, January 1911

Jeanne Walter patented a rubber bandage in 1904. The following year she invented a two-piece rubber suit of undergarments designed to retain perspiration and heat for therapeutic purposes. By 1909 this had developed into a severe-looking full-body garment that was supposed to compress all your extra flesh down into a svelte figure – and, according to this drawing from the patent, make one arm shorter than the other.

Walter’s range grew to include specialised garments for different parts of the body – a brassiere to reduce large busts, leg wraps to create slender ankles and a beer-gut minimiser for men. Those with a double chin could try the Chin and Neck Reducer, to be worn for a few hours daily in the privacy of one’s own home. Pictured in the advert shown above, this also appears in the following image from 1915:

Walter’s 1909 patent presented the garments simply as foundation wear for holding in the flesh, but later advertising also capitalised on the sweatiness of the rubber and claimed that this would actively result in weight loss. One Canadian stockist used the slogan: Perspire and grow thin.

Taking rubber to your blubber was just one of many ways to try and lose weight in the early 20th century – pills, supplements and fat-reducing soaps were widely advertised as a quick and easy fix. But then, as now, there was no overnight solution.

A correspondent to the Washington Herald’s beauty column in 1910 received the following perennial weight loss advice from agony aunt Mrs Symes:

If you wish to reduce flesh, you should live on a diet and exercise.

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Source: The Belfast News-letter, Tues 3 June 1879

This ad is unusual in appealing not to the potential consumer but to her weedy, emasculated little husband. (Presumably he’s her husband, because he seems stuck with her.)

Most ads for Allan’s Anti-Fat, however, were aimed directly at people wishing to lose weight. (N.B. the spelling ‘Allen’s’ above is an error that crops up occasionally.) Where images were included, they showed women, as in the one below, but the product was very much aimed at corpulent men too.  Some adverts claimed it also cured dyspepsia, palpitations, rheumatism and gout, and prevented heart disease, apoplexy and paralysis.

The nostrum, costing 6s 6d per 6½ fl oz bottle, was a fluid extract of Fucus vesiculosis (bladder wrack), which had been the original source for the discovery of iodine back in 1811. It is therefore a forerunner of modern iodine-containing weight loss supplements, and while in appropriate quantities it might have assisted people with hypothyroidism, it wouldn’t have done much good to any random person taking it indiscriminately in order to shed a few pounds.

Another 1879 ad gives the following testimonial from Windsor physician Thomas Fairbank:

I gave some of this extract (Fucus Vesiculosus) to a very corpulent lady, who in three months lost three stones in weight without any change of diet. Since then I have frequently given it for reducing weight depending on the accumulation of adipose tissue, and have never found it fail. I may state that a patient who has been lately taking it as an anti-fat, and who always suffered very much from from rheumatic pains about the body, has been entirely free from such trouble while she has been taking the extract, a fact which she quite independently noted.

Fairbank was a genuine doctor and the Botanic Medicine Company certainly did not invent his testimonial, but in his original letter to the BMJ, he is clearly referring to Fucus vesiculosus in general, and had never prescribed Allan’s Anti-Fat. The case of the ‘very corpulent lady’ had occurred 15 years before. He also said how easy it was to make Fucus pills – a handy hint that the Anti-Fat proprietors understandably left out. Various opinions were printed in the BMJ over the next few months, with some correspondents, like Fairbank, broadly in favour of Fucus as a weight-loss aid.

Irish physician A T Carson, however, was not convinced:

Some who are paying expensively for the remedy may be surprised to hear that the Fucus Vesiculosus is here largely used as a food for pigs, and that it in no way interferes with their growth. It will require a number of well-reported cases to convince me that what fattens a pig will make a Christian lean. BMJ, 19 July 1879

William Murrell M.D. prescribed generic Fucus pills for a man. ‘C.G.’ who had enquired about the remedy, and asked him to keep a detailed diary of progress. The patient enthusiastically obeyed the instruction, leaving nothing to the imagination:

June 25th. Weight, 15 stone 6¼ lbs.; three pills; food and exercise as usual; had two motions.—June 26th. Weight, 15st. 6½ lbs.; three pills; four motions; urine very copious (not often, but when about it felt as if I was never going to leave off), smelling like some old horse, and very dark coloured.—June 27th. Weight, 15st. 6½ lbs.; three pills; five motions; much urine; appetite much increased; felt as if I had a tape-worm.

The next day he had ten motions, in case you really wanted to know. ‘C.G.’ briefly got down to 15st 5½ pounds, but only continued the treatment for 10 days. He concluded:

Towards the end, I fancied that I exhaled a kind of fusty odour from my whole body, but my feet and breath were stern facts. I have just weighed, and am 15st 7lb. If you think the liquid preparation will act I will try it, but the other seems (to use a vulgar expression) to be making me as rotten as a pear.

This, of course, has no specific reflection on Allan’s Anti-Fat – Murrell, C.G.’s doctor, had prescribed the pills himself and there is no way of knowing his formula. A subsequent correspondent, signing himself  ″A Very Broad Church Parson,” replied that Fucus had caused him to lose a stone in a month, without any unpleasant side effects.

Fucus was a component of many similar weight loss products in the later years of the 19th century. The media today likes to compare us 21st-century bloaters with our healthy pre-McDonalds, non-computer-game-playing forebears, but the market for these quick-fix remedies suggests that anxiety about weight is nothing new.

Diet products that promised you could eat what you like and not have to do any tedious exercise had a market in the early 20th century, even though today’s media would have us believe that everyone in the good old days was more robustly active than us morally decrepit modern lard-arses.

While many of today’s diet products require you to ingest something, this one was even more effortless – all you had to do was put some pleasant effervescing power in your bath, and in a few weeks you would be the svelte siren of your husband’s dreams.

At least, you would be if Epsom salts had any power to dissolve blubber. The product, a white powder, was analysed by the chemical laboratory of the American Medical Association and found to be Epsom salts, alum, citric acid, camphor and sodium bicarbonate. The Association’s article on the substance, published in the Annual Report for 1914, concluded ‘Like every other bath salt sold as a ‘cure’ for obesity, “Every Woman’s Flesh Reducer” is a fraud.’

……..Take Off That
…………..Weight of Fat

………..___________

EVERY WOMAN’S FLESH REDUCER.
…..Easy, Wonderful, External Method
………….for Men and Women.

…………...________________

Results or Money Back Guaranteed to
.Users of $2.00 Package, which Con-
..tains Three Times Amount in $1 Size.

Just dissolve Every  Woman’s  Flesh  Re-
ducer in your bath,  and  that’s  all!   Your
superfluous   fat   will  fade  away,  easily,
surely and without any bad  effects.  Day
by day your figure will become more and
more as it should be – graceful, trim and
beautiful.  No  need  to  starve   yourself,
dose with  harmful,  drastic  drugs  or  go
through   exhausting and  ridiculous  exer-
cises.
…Be Rid of Your Handicap. EVERY
…..WOMAN’S FLESH REDUCER
……………..is the Easy Way.
….Superfluous  fat  is  humiliating – is  dan-
gerous.
….Every   Woman’s   Flesh  Reducer  will
quickly  and  naturally  relieve  you  of   all
abnormal fat.  You can  keep  your  weight
just   where   you   want  it,   and  not  feel
weakened   or  exhausted.   Indeed,  you’ll
feel stronger and better in very way.
…You  can  not  be happy while you  carry
around   with   you   that   load  of  useless,
energy-using   fat.    Rid   yourself   of   the
burden.   Get  out  of  life  the  energy  you
are entitled to.
….Get  Every Woman’s Flesh Reducer  and
begin its  use  today.  At  drug  and  depart-
ment stores, $1 or $2, or sent on receipt of
price  by   The   Every   Woman  Company
(Not  Inc.)  30  South  Fifth   avenue,  Chi-
cago,  Ill.  For  sale  and  recommended  in
Indianapolis   by   Weber  Drug  Company,
both   stores:   Felger’s    Pharmacy,    both
stores, Henry J. Huder, both stores.

Source: The Indianapolis Star, 13 October 1913

This is an interesting advert because there is nothing blatant about it. It doesn’t appear to be selling anything and it’s difficult to see what Mr. F. Russell has to gain. To the average reader, this could simply be a kind-hearted gentleman so excited about having lost weight that he wants to share the secret with everyone.

So why did he go to the trouble and expense of placing advertisements in regional papers all over the UK and Ireland?

Image: Dr. E. Brown, the Largest Man in America by J. R. Dix. 19th century, date unknown. Courtesy of the US National Library of Medicine.

TO FAT PERSONS.—A Gentleman who can personally
vouch for the efficacy of a REMEDY (doctor’s prescrip-
tion) which will effectually and rapidly REDUCE CORPU-
LENCY in either sex without semi-starvation dietary, exer-
cise, &c., quite harmless, will send Recipe on receipt of
stamped address.—Mr. F. Russell, 15, Gower-street, Lon-
don, W.C.

Source: The Ipswich Journal, Saturday 16th February 1884

 In the 1890s, some of Mr Russell’s adverts took  on a more “advertorial” look, purporting to be news items about an effective cure for corpulency. This cure happened to be detailed in his book, Corpulency and the Cure. 256 pages, and an incredible bargain at 5d.

The pressure on women to be thin might often be condemned as a malaise of modern society, but here is an excerpt from one of Mr Russell’s advertisements of November 1894:

The “poetry in motion,” which is the acme of every woman’s desire, is incompatible with anything approaching obesity, yet how many pretty girls develop into stout and dowdy matrons. You fall in love with a sylph, and find yourself a happy possessor of a wife whose elephantine proportions are a burden to herself and those around her; for a young woman who has “fallen into flesh” loses her activity, her beauty, and, as a natural consequence, her smartness in dress. What is the remedy?

The remedy was a simple vegetable beverage taken at your meals – wholesome, tasteless, even palatable … What more can those who sigh for their ‘too, too solid flesh’ to melt desire?