The Quack Doctor

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FATHER CHRISTMAS AND THE DOCTORS

Old Christmas comes but once a year,
Of that there is no question;
But when he comes we all feel queer,
Hurrah for indigestion!

Dyspepsia follows in his train,
The Stomach-ache attends him;
And every sort of inward pain
A gay enjoyment lends him.

As honest country-people say,
In all their sickly hobbles,
We’re “wrong inside”—alas, the day!
“We’ve got the colly-wobbles.”

Though we are poor, roast goose is rich;
So, gladly let us greet it:
Plum pudding is a dainty which
Upsets us; so we’ll eat it.

A Christian people prove they’re such
Not by their lives amended;
But just by eating twice as much
As Nature had intended.

Avaunt ye doctors, silly elves!
In vain your righteous passion,
We mean to over-eat ourselves
In good old English fashion.

Black draught and pills of awful blue,
By-and-bye from you we’ll borrow,
To-day we’ll be to Christmas true,
You’d better call tomorrow.

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Thank you for reading The Quack Doctor over the past year!

Image: Angier’s Emulsion advertisement, 1907, courtesy of Wellcome Images.
Poem: Judy, or the London Serio-Comic Journal, 23 December 1885

Whether they promised to cover a bald head with a mop of curls, to rejuvenate greying locks or to produce manly whiskers on the smoothest of chins, hair-related products appear in numerous Victorian and Edwardian adverts. There was a huge choice of potions, lotions, devices and even pills for bringing back a youthful barnet – here are just a few from the end of the 19th century and beginning of the 20th.

Madame Fox’s Life for the Hair. From The Graphic, 4 March 1882

Foso Hair and Scalp Remedy. From the New York Tribune, 7 January 1906

Wyeth’s Sage and Sulphur Hair Restorer. From the Palestine Herald, Texas, 19 January 1910

Wilson’s Whiskerine. From Jackson’s Oxford Journal, 12 December 1891

Esauline. From the Penny Illustrated Paper, 20 July 1895

Hygienic Vacuum Cap. From Popular Mechanics, December 1909. For more details on this and other vacuum caps, see this previous post: You Needn’t Be Bald.

I had this post all specially planned for 21 May 2011 and now you tell me today has nothing to do with ruptures? Honestly, I don’t know why I bother.

Well, I might as well post it anyway – I get the feeling not many Quack Doctor readers will be going to heaven any time soon, so you’ll need something to peruse as you while away the Tribulation.

From The Penny Illustrated Paper, 16 July 1904

When the W. S. Rice Rupture Cure arrived on the market in the late Victorian period, traditional rupture trusses had been around for centuries, and were constantly being re-invented in the hope of improving them. Many severe-looking designs – like the American one pictured below – jostled for supremacy, so to stand out from the crowd, new products had to offer something different.

Truss by Levi Westinghouse, St Louis, Missouri, 1877. I assume this is supposed to be a woman, otherwise that's a damningly small leaf.

The Rice Method offered to cure, rather than simply support, ruptures. And if you had a hernia, I would imagine absolutely anything that might get rid of it would have been worth a go. Although the Rice method included an ‘appliance’ for temporary use, the lasting cure would be performed by a liniment called Developing Lymphol. Twice a day the patient had to remove the appliance, sprinkle some Lymphol onto the rupture and rub it in thoroughly. This must have been pretty empowering for people otherwise faced with the grim prospect of indefinite truss-wearing.

The Lymphol comprised essential oils of origanum, spearmint and peppermint, with tincture of capsicum and red dye, all padded out by rectified spirit. Its accompanying appliance was described by the BMJ in 1908 as ‘an elastic band to go round the body, fitted with an adjustable pad and an understrap.’

Rice was London-based but advertised the product widely in the US, Canada, Australia and New Zealand. Representatives travelled around offering free trials where sufferers could have the method ‘demonstrated to you right on your own rupture.’

‘Are you tired of that binding, hampering, uncomfortable old truss?’ asked one of Rice’s 1920s advertisements before exhorting the reader to come along to a demo. ‘[The Rice Method] is modern, up-to-the-minute, abreast of the latest scientific developments. It is the one Rupture Method you are not asked to take on faith alone—’

San Jose News, 23 May 1928

If your Easter chicks aren’t looking too chirpy, why not perk them up with a dose of this 20th-century Kentucky remedy?

From The Champaign Democrat, 6 Sept 1912

As a 1911 advert put it:

Sick fowls don’t pay,
Droopy hens won’t lay

and the Poultry Cure was a bargain at only 50 cents for a quantity that could be diluted to 12 gallons. The product claimed to be effective against a variety of conditions, but prominent in the advertising is ‘the gapes’, a disease affecting both domestic poultry and wild birds. When suffering from the gapes, the victim holds its mouth open and gasps for air as if it has something stuck in its throat.

Regular readers of The Quack Doctor might not be surprised to learn that the ‘something’ is parasitic worms. Without going into too much detail, gapeworms are blood-red, lodge in the bird’s trachea, and appear to be Y-shaped because they exist in a permanent state of copulation. No wonder the chickens look surprised.

The Xenia Daily Gazette, OH, 1 June 1910

Testimonials for the Poultry Cure emphasised that it was the secret of success for experienced farmers – i.e. those who would not be fooled by any dubious flash-in-the-pan products. Mrs D A Brooks in 1908, for example, wrote:

I have been using your Bourbon Poultry Cure and I think it fine. If you induce our druggist here to keep it in stock I will recommend it. I am an old time chicken raiser and so many people come to me for pointers on poultry.

Whether the Poultry Cure was good or bad for neighbourly relationships is difficult to tell from Illinois farmer Ellora Sonnemaker’s testimonial:

I have eighty head of fine Bourbon Turkeys. My neighbours lost all of theirs. They all raise Bronze Turkeys and say that mine are better bred is all the difference. I feed Bourbon Poultry Cure twice a week and tell them if they will use it they will have as good luck with their turkeys as I have with mine.

Meanwhile, the product enabled Mrs Cox of Lawrenceberg, KY, to win first prize in the best gobbler at Kentucky State Fair.

The Bourbon Remedy Company also sold a medicine for hog cholera (swine fever) but if the pigs and chickens had swapped notes, they might have discovered that there was no difference between the mixtures. According to analyses made when the FDA seized a consignment in 1919, both solutions contained aloes, free sulphuric acid, sulphates of iron, copper and magnesium, colouring and flavouring. Neither would be effective against the wide range of diseases they were supposed to cure.

The Bourbon News, Paris KY 12 September 1913

In honour of the birth of The Quack Doctor’s new baby niece, who arrived early Saturday morning in the car park of Harlow Hospital, this post looks at a liniment that claimed to make labour a doddle.

The Daily Times, Portsmouth, Ohio 4 May 1899

Mother’s Friend was on sale in the US and Canada by the mid-1880s, though some adverts said it had been around for longer. During the last couple of decades of the 19^th century and into the 20^th, the advertising made some far-fetched claims.

The packaging stated that the liniment would ‘cause an unusually easy and quick delivery’ and that it would ‘alleviate in a most magical way the pains, horrors and risks of labor’. Used early in pregnancy, it would also cure morning sickness.

Some of the advertising went further and suggested that the use of Mother’s Friend would make the resulting baby clever and good-looking. In this 1901 ad, for example, an anonymous father sets up a potential fratricide situation by describing the youngest of his three children as the ‘healthiest, prettiest and finest-looking of them all’.

The Alamance Gleaner, 13 June 1901

The advert below  rings a few alarm bells by insisting that there is no opium, morphine or strychnine – but in fact this was true. Twice in 1909, consignments of Mother’s Friend were seized under the Food and Drugs Act (1906) and deemed misbranded because of the claims made. Analysis showed them to be a mixture of oil and soap (the type of oil is not specified in the misbranding reports but presumably it was a vegetable oil).

The Rock Hill Herald 19 April 1902

The Bradfield Regulator Company was allowed to continuing selling the product provided it did not make unrealistic claims, so from then on Mother’s Friend was marketed as a massage oil to help with dry skin and the aches and pains of pregnancy. Later, under ownership of the S.S.S. Company, it became a body lotion, firmly in the category of toiletries rather than medicines.

The Reading Eagle 11 March 1941

The bolder claims of the early advertising, however, were not without some merit – for pregnant women, accustomed to having to listen to everyone else’s birth horror stories, the positive outlook of Mother’s Friend must have been a welcome change.

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Source: Popular Mechanics December 1909

When a bald fellow had got fed up with rubbing lotions on his scalp or taking bullocks’ blood supplements, it was time to go for something more drastic – a vacuum cap.

An early form of this device was invented in New York in 1898 by Claude O. Rosell. The cap, which he dubbed the ‘Capillary Chalice’, took its inspiration from the ancient surgical practice of cupping. By using suction to draw blood into the scalp, the rubber device was intended to stimulate the circulation of blood and to loosen the scalp from the skull.

‘When the scalp has thus been loosened,’ read the patent, ‘it ceases to impede the normal circulation of the blood among the roots of the hair, and as a consequence there is a proliferation of cells and a new formation of blood vessels.’

It reminds me of one of those hopper popper toys from the 80s, and I imagine it coming unstuck and pinging off into the atmosphere, to the wearer’s disgruntlement. To prevent air getting in around the edges, the cap had to be coated with a suitable substance such as cold cream, petroleum jelly or beeswax, and Rosell also suggested that if desired, the patient could first apply diluted formaldehyde to the scalp as an antiseptic. The invention was versatile and could be used to provide a cupping action to other parts of the body – the biggest size available (6”) was also recommended as a breast enlarger.

A year later, another inventor, Frederick Watkins Evans, had improved upon the idea by incorporating a tube that the user could either connect up to a vacuum pump or simply put in his mouth and suck.

The inventions proliferated and within a few years had become solid bell-like structures with a rubber seal around the base.

In 1904, Napoleon W. Dible recognised that there was a problem with the devices then on the market – the patient’s whole head tended to get sucked up into the cap, uncomfortably stretching his neck. To alleviate this objectionable feature, Dible’s invention contained an internal support that pressed on the scalp, keeping the patient down. Dible’s cap had a greater volume inside than the earlier versions, and the tube shown on the left was to be attached to a pump.

As to their efficacy, it is interesting to note that these devices frequently cropped up for sale second-hand in the classified ads of early 20th-century US newspapers. Either they worked so wonderfully that their owners didn’t need them any more, or – perhaps more likely – they simply sucked.

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Unlike the La Vida Electric Vibrator, this one was hand-operated. Snyder explained its action in his patent application as follows:

In a general sense my present invention comprises a main staff and a vibrator-head, the latter mounted for movement longitudinally on the staff in such manner that said movement will give a series of shocks to the staff, which may be communicated to the body of a user.

The accompanying drawings suggest it was a bit like a woodpecker toy:

In 1904, a similar invention called the Marvel Vibrator went on the market. Even though it was advertised before Snyder’s patent was granted, he took the Marvel company to court in 1906 for infringement. In their defence, Marvel presented patents for mechanical toys, suggesting that the general idea had been around for ages, but the judge wasn’t buying it and granted Lambert Snyder an injunction.

Boston Daily Globe, 11 August 1904

Source: The Fort Wayne Journal-Gazette,17 April 1907

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Following on from the last post, we remain in early 20th-century America. But while Mayr’s Wonderful Stomach Remedy was fairly harmless (albeit rather revolting), this nostrum was notorious for the damage it caused in just 6 years of existence. Between 1906 and 1912, the Delta Chemical Company made more than half a million dollars by supplying morphine addicts with its own branded version of the narcotic.

The company was run by Dr Robert Prewitt and Ryland C. Bruce. Prewitt’s medical qualification was genuine, but he never had much success as a practising physician, trying his hand at surgical instrument selling in Little Rock, AR, until this venture went down the pan. He then became a travelling salesman for various chemical companies and ended up working at a St Louis sanatorium that ran a mail-order addiction cure business on the side.

Prewitt, in partnership with former insurance salesman Bruce, took over this business in 1906 and started to think big. They traded as the Delta Chemical Company and dubbed their product Morphina-Cura, an ‘infallible remedy’ for drug habits of all kinds.

The product name changed to Habitina in 1907, probably because titling something a ‘cure’ could lead to allegations of misbranding under the Pure Food and Drug Act. Addicts – then often referred to as habitués – were advised to ‘discontinue the use of all narcotic drugs and take sufficient HABITINA to support the system without any of the old drug.’ They should then gradually decrease the dose until they stopped taking it altogether.

This was in line with reputable medical practice, but for addicted patients with no supervision, life didn’t work out according to the instructions. Habitina contained 16 grains (approx 1g) of morphine sulphate and 8 grains of heroin per fl. oz. It was simply a more expensive way of continuing to take huge hits of narcotics – and of course the money went straight into Prewitt and Bruce’s pockets. The company hooked people in with free samples, and although they claimed to make patients answer a questionnaire, in reality they would send the freebies out to anyone who asked.

In 1912, Prewitt officially changed his name to Gregg because of his wife’s father’s will. Old man Gregg stipulated that his daughter must keep her maiden name or forfeit her inheritance of $50,000. Her first husband had gone along with it without changing his own name, but romantic Prewitt decided to be at one with his spouse, and the couple became Dr and Mrs Robert Prewitt Gregg.

Just a few months later, however, Prewitt’s fortunes changed. He and Ryland Bruce were arrested and charged with sending poison through the mail and with using the mail for a scheme to defraud. The trial revealed the devastating effect of Habitina on its victims, several of whom testified in court.

Some had experienced periods of insanity – Missouri mechanic Mr. H. I. C. lost everything and became a ‘maniac’ consuming a whole $2 bottle of Habitina every day. Mrs M. P. of Pennsylvania lost her reason and went blind as a result of taking the medicine, but hospital treatment eventually cured her addiction.

Perhaps the most tragic case is 26-year-old Mrs G. M. S., who spent more than $2,300 on Habitina over the course of 5 years, even going without shoes to be able to afford it. At the time of the trial she was still addicted.

Prewitt and Bruce were found guilty on both counts, fined $2000 each and sentenced to five years’ hard labour. It would be nice to end on that note, but the pair appealed. At the appeal court, Judge Munger dismissed the count of sending poison through the mail, as registered physicians were still permitted to do this, and sent the second count – the scheme to defraud – to a new trial.

At this point, I must own up to an epic fail, because I haven’t been able to find out anything about the second trial – if anyone can point me towards any sources, I’d be grateful. I imagine Prewitt and Bruce were acquitted because being unscrupulous doesn’t necessarily amount to a crime. They were careful to remain within the law as regards labelling their product, and made it very clear that Habitina contained morphine and that a cure would only result from a gradual reduction in dose.

They surely knew that they would make a fortune from addicts who would take it willy-nilly for years, but even with my lack of legal knowledge, I suspect this couldn’t technically be defined as a scheme to defraud. As you can see from the bottle label, they weren’t exactly misleading people about what was in it:

Source: Black & White, 19 March 1904

Chief among the ills to which flesh is heir in the springtime is the provoking habit of our ‘crowning glory’ to come off in handfuls, leaving us with the parlous prospect of a denuded poll.

So says a 1904 advertorial recommending Capsuloids as a hair restorer. I’m not sure to what extent people really moult in the springtime, but if did you found yourself shedding, Capsuloids were there to help.

The product started life as a general tonic. Launched in 1897 under the name ‘Dr Campbell’s Red Blood Forming Capsuloids,’ it had a wide remit:

…kill disease germs, cure chronic ailments and diseases, restore colour, health and strength, cure all irregularities, and generally build up the heart and nervous system.

Only after the turn of the 20th century did the company rebrand the product as a cure for baldness and grey hair.

Capsuloids were teardrop-shaped gelatine capsules containing a mixture of haemoglobin, olive oil, oleic acid, balsam of Peru and purified storax. The Capsuloids Company formulated the contents themselves then sent them to a manufacturing chemist, Duncan Flockhart & Co., who made the gelatine capsules and filled them with the mixture. This business relationship went through a rocky patch in 1912, when a batch of the capsules went mouldy and the Capsuloid Company tried to claim £8000 damages from the chemists. After a 19-day hearing, the courts ruled that Duncan Flockhart & Co were not at fault.

Unlike most hair restorers and dyes, Capsuloids were to be taken orally. Adverts used an illustration of a hair follicle (the one above is quite simple but there were much more detailed versions too) and pointed out that any preparations rubbed onto the scalp could not possibly reach that far into the skin. Instead, the remedy would work through the bloodstream, killing off germs surrounding the hair follicle and allowing it to get the nourishment it needed. Earlier advertising stated:

This natural iron has been extracted from the blood of carefully selected healthy bullocks, redissolved and enclosed in a gelatine covering.

Perhaps, however, this was distasteful to some, for later pamphlets emphasised that the capsules didn’t contain any actual blood or germs, just haemoglobin. In response to criticism made ‘through ignorance or self-interest’, the pamphlets also reassured women that Capsuloids would not give them facial hair:

It would require miraculous powers to make the small fine hairs on a lady’s face grow to a greater length or size than that intended by Nature. A miracle is an act which is directly contrary to Nature.

Capsuloids adverts usually incorporated a testimonial along with a picture of a satisfied customer. There are a few examples below but there were loads – a run of ads in one newspaper would use a different portrait every time. These were drawn from photographs – I’ve seen some of the originals and they are good likenesses.

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Imitators tried to promote similar products with less catchy names such as ‘Capsulated Haemoglobin Ovals for the Hair’ and ‘Soluble Capsules of Haemoglobin’ but the Capsuloid Company gave them short shrift:

BY TAKING CAPSULOIDS you will wear luxuriant, natural HAIR.
BY TAKING IMITATIONS you will wear A WIG.

For me, growing up in the 1980s, asthma was a convenient way of getting out of P.E. I can imagine, however, how disabling the condition must have been before modern drugs like salbutamol. Anything that claimed to relieve asthma would have been worth trying – but Dr Tucker’s remedy carried with it the danger of addiction.

Pall Mall Gazette, 10 March 1900

This advert for Tucker’s Asthma Specific is fairly unassuming compared with the big pictorial ads in fashion at the time, but it was well-positioned on the front page of London’s Pall Mall Gazette. The product originated in Mount Gilead, Ohio, where Dr Nathan Tucker started The Asthma Specific Company in 1889. (The title ‘Dr’ was genuine.)

Early 20th-century analyses had varying results, but most agreed that the Specific contained cocaine and atropine. While the company emphasised that the amount of cocaine in each inhalation was tiny, the Journal of the American Medical Association didn’t approve:

When one considers the prevalence of the cocain habit and demoralizing and brutalizing effect that this habit has on its victims, the viciousness of the indiscriminate sale of a preparation of this sort becomes evident.

They were particularly concerned about the method of taking the medicine – it was vaporised and inhaled into the nose:

It is only necessary to call attention to those cocain habitués, known as “coke-sniffers” to realise the enormous harm that can be done by the taking of cocain in this way.

An inhaler plus an initial supply of the liquid cost $12.50 in the US and 3 guineas in Britain and you can see Nathan Tucker demonstrating the inhaler below. The company operated by mail order – punters had to fill in a questionnaire and would receive a diagnosis and prescription by post. This was a marginally better bet for American patients than British ones – at least Nathan Tucker and his nephew William Briscoe Robinson were qualified doctors. In the UK, the business was run by Tucker’s brother, Augustus Quackenbush Tucker (no, seriously!) who had no medical qualifications and later claimed he didn’t even know what was in the medicine.

There were thousands of happy customers, but for some the outcome wasn’t much fun.

In 1908 the Specific was implicated in the death of a British patient – 36-year-old Margaret Weston from Slough. She had been using the inhaler for two years and the doctor who attended just before her death noted symptoms of cocaine poisoning. The American Medical Association, in Nostrums and Quackery, implied that the Specific killed her, but in their quack-busting enthusiasm, didn’t mention that the inquest found she had also had a cocaine injection for dental work. At about the same time, Augustus Tucker was fined £5 plus £5 5s costs for selling the preparation without marking it ‘Poison’, and for not including an address on the packaging.

Nathan Tucker retired in 1910 and William Robinson took over the business, but got into trouble five years later when a court ruled that under the Harrison Narcotic Act, it was illegal for the company to prescribe its product by mail. Robinson somehow managed to get round this and continued the mail-order system, with his son Dr Gerard Briscoe Robinson later joining him. Tucker’s Asthma Specific was around until 1959, when G B Robinson died in a plane crash and the company’s assets were sold off.