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.

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

Advertisement from The Pomeroy Herald, Iowa, 27 January 1910

Centuries after the figure of the ‘pisse-prophet’ had descended into the realms of quackery and ridicule, a modern kind of urine analyst popped up in Grand Rapids, Michigan.

In the early 20^th century, scientific urine tests were part of mainstream medical practice, so there was not necessarily anything dodgy about the activities of Antonius W. Van Bysterveld. As it turned out, however, he was every bit as dubious as Dr Cameron of a hundred years before.

There are several red flags in Van Bysterveld’s advertising. The 1910 ad above makes the arcane suggestion that his skills work even when the patient ‘tells nothing’. Other ads described his method as ‘a careful and secret process handed down generation after generation and most carefully guarded by the old families of Europe.’ There is some indication in the advertising that the analysis involved dripping chemicals into the urine sample, but beyond that it is kept under wraps. After diagnosis, the doctor would prescribe his own medicines at a cost of $1.25 a week.

Writers from the American Medical Association, in Nostrums and Quackery (1911) rather uncharitably passed comment on Van Bysterveld’s appearance:

Mr. Van B seems, from his picture, to be a man of mediocre intelligence who runs to naturally curled hair and an artificially curled mustache.

Van Bysterveld can’t have been the only fellow ever to have curled his ‘tache for a publicity pic, and however mediocre he might have appeared, he deserves some admiration for the sheer number of scrapes from which he managed to extricate himself.

In February 1903 he was prosecuted and fined for practising medicine without a licence, but went straight back into business with a dodgy but fully qualified medic, G. R. Adkins, who was permitted by law to write prescriptions. Within two months, Dr Adkins was arrested too, for writing a death certificate without ever having seen the deceased. Van Bysterveld bounced back and started seeing patients again, brazenly advertising himself as ‘The Wonder Doctor’ – though, if challenged, he would say that he was a chemist and did not claim to have medical qualifications. In March 1904, however, he discovered that quackery can be as dangerous for the quack as for the patient.

Fifteen-year-old Katie Bass had been consulting him for epilepsy for 3 months, when she alleged that he mistreated her. Although a report in the Chicago Tribune is coy about the details, a letter to Van Bysterveld from her furious father implies that it was a sexual assault:

You have laid the whole being of that pure, good girl, with all its enjoying capacities and angelic virtues, in ruin. You have converted all her life’s joys into sorrow; dressed all nature in mourning; hung her very sun and moon in gloom, and made her say with poor Charlotte Temple, and all others betrayed:

“Thou glorious orb, supremely bright,
Just rising from the sea
To clear all nature with thy light,
What are thy beams to me?”

I am only waiting for next Tuesday to meet you face to face.

John Bass applied for a warrant for Van Bysterveld’s arrest, but the judge refused to issue it unless Katie made a complaint in person. Katie, however, was too ill to go to the court, so Mr Bass took the matter into his own hands. He grabbed his revolver and set off in search of the doctor.

‘I am sorry I did not kill him,’ Bass later announced to the judge. ‘He laughed in my face when I upbraided him, told me she was crazy, and that no judge would believe the word of a lunatic. Then I shot him.’

Van Bysterveld sustained a gunshot wound to his leg but quickly recovered and does not appear to have been found guilty of the alleged assault, for he was soon back advertising his services. In 1906 he was again charged with practising medicine illegally, when a young woman died shortly after having taken medicine prescribed by him. And once again this had little effect on his business. He was still going strong in 1911 when the A.M.A. decided to test him out.

They made a mixture of water, ammonia, pepsin and anilin dye, and got three volunteers to send samples off to Van Bysterveld. Three different diagnoses came back, all consisting of a paragraph of vague analysis that could apply to anyone:

1. Careful examination of the urine shows there is too much acid in the blood, which will cause a rheumatic condition, the back is weak, and you will have a tired nervous feeling most of the time.

2. Careful examination of the urine shows the circulation of the blood to be very poor, the liver is not working properly, which will cause gas in the stomach and bowels and will effect (sic) the heart, you have caught a little cold which has settled in the back and stomach and you will have a nervous feeling.

3. Careful examination of the urine shows you are losing too much albumin in the urine, which will cause the back and kidneys to be weak, and there is a catarrhal condition of the stomach and bowels, and you will have a tired nervous feeling most of the time.

In an even more blatant test, the A.M.A sent in samples consisting of 95% water and 5% sugar. They got back two diagnoses using a mix of statements from the previous ones, and no mention at all of the dangerous glucose levels.

The A.M.A. unreservedly condemned Van Bysterveld’s practice as a ‘fraud and a swindle’ and a ‘picturesque, but vicious humbug’. As for the Wonder Doctor, however, he ignored them and cheerfully carried on treating his patients.

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Last October I blogged about the Magic Foot Drafts, a remedy for rheumatism that required the patient to stick pine-tar-coated oilcloth plasters to the soles of their feet. This was supposed to draw out uric acid through the pores, but as Samuel Hopkins Adams said in The Great American Fraud,

…they might as well be affixed to the barn door, so far as any uric acid extraction is concerned.

A few weeks ago, Linda Riordan, who lives in Ohio, found the blog post while searching for some info about a letter that her late grandma had kept in a shoebox since 1915.

Linda’s grandfather had sent off for a trial pair of Magic Foot Drafts but sensibly decided not to place a further order. By then, however, he was on their mailing list and they weren’t about to let him go. Linda kindly sent me the letter – it’s in beautiful condition and a very entertaining read.

It’s signed by Frederick Dyer, Corresponding Secretary of the Magic Foot Draft Company, and he doesn’t take the softly-softly approach to sales.

Dear Mr. Greene:

If you have written us a letter regarding the Dyer Foot Drafts we sent on your order last week, it has failed to reach our office yet. We were quite disappointed not to get your letter this morning, for you must know we expect you will be prompt to inform us just how your case is progressing.

The letter goes on to explain that the effect of the Drafts will vary according to the severity of the disease and how the plaster is applied – in other words, if it doesn’t work, it’s because your case is a complicated one or you put the plaster on wrong. Chronic cases might require up to 6 applications.

Any effect like this comes by degrees, perhaps slowly at first, but none the less surely if the patient is faithful in the effort and not over-eager to see a miraculous change right away quick.

Once again, an unsatisfactory result is the patient’s fault for being too impatient or giving up too easily.

Dyer then goes on to ask Mr Greene to read ‘every one of the enclosed fifty-odd letters’ from satisfied patients (these testimonials have not survived). The hard sell continues:

Now then, to be fair with yourself and square with us, what do you intend to do? Try to get rid of your misery as others have, or go on suffering the rest of your natural life? There is positively no reason in settling down and saying: “Oh, I believe my case is incurable, for I have tried so many things, etc., etc.”

There was a money-back guarantee if the Drafts didn’t work, but the company probably relied on the patient wanting to believe there was some improvement, or feeling like an idiot and putting the episode down to experience without bothering to claim a refund.

The letter ends:

Unless you have already sent your order we shall expect a letter from you very soon, and there will be no failure to send the treatment just as you instruct, so you will have it and keep your recovery going steadily on day and night until every last twinge of pain has left you.

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A huge thank you to Linda Riordan for sending me this letter.

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 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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Do You Want A Vacation?
It’s Make-Man Tablets You Need.
Fifty Cents Worth of Make-Man Tablets Often Do More For A Man or Woman Than a Three Hundred Dollar Vacation.
Do you feel played out—nervous, tired, irritable, don’t sleep good, wake up every morning with a bad taste in your mouth and a dull, hot, tired feeling in your head? Of course a vacation seems just the thing—but it cannot reach the seat of your trouble.
It’s your nerves nine times out of ten that make your back ache. It’s your nerves that give you that dull, dumb headache. Your muscles are just as strong as ever, but the nerves are off tune.
They need feeding—rest is no good for them. There is some constituent—nerve constituent—the blood lacks, and Make-Man supply it.
Men and Women who have let their nerves go so long without feeding that they are pale, listless creatures, instead of strong, lively, full of vim and energy for the day’s work, have found quick results in the use of this splendid tonic, blood purifer and nerve strengthener.
Manus Bonner, 33 W. Market St., Pittsburg, believes he has found something better than a vacation:—“Since I began to take Make-Man Tablets I feel better and stronger. I have gained five pounds in weight and otherwise feel fine.”
Man-Made Tablets will make you well. You can try a 50 cent box, free, by writing—today—to the Make-Man Tablet Co. 145 Make-Man Building, Chicago, Ill. If you are already convinced that Make-Man Tablets are what you need, you can obtain them from your druggist at 50 cents a box, with money back if not satisfied.

Source: The Pittsburgh Press 14 Sept 1910

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Any woman whose cheapskate husband refused to go on holiday in favour of taking these pills would have the last laugh – the main ingredients were arsenic and strychnine.

The Make-Man tablets were an early casualty of the US Food and Drug Act. In 1910 the government seized a consignment of 360 tins, and analysis showed the presence of the poisons together with aloes, potassium sulphate, iron carbonate and iron oxide. The product was judged to be misbranded and the company was fined, but they reformulated the tablets to contain quinine and iron, and continued to promote them until at least the mid-1930s, when they were still only 50 cents a box.

From a 1920 ad:

Source: The Syracuse Herald (NY) 7 Sept 1919

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Every Woman needs a Vibrator
La Vida $7.50

The Vibrator EVERY Woman Needs
There comes a new world, a generous world of abundant health, of comfort, of beauty measured by long years—when La Vida enters in.

To own La Vida is every woman’s right—it costs so little; it brings such rich results.
La Vida is essentially a woman’s vibrator; no parts to get out of order. La Vida fits into your hand snugly; it is small light, compact.
Make La Vida a part of your home, for your own health, pleasure and satisfaction—for the good of your family.
Your La Vida is waiting for you now here at our store. We want to give you the new free Health and Beauty Booklet.

La Vida Electric Vibrator

It is the rapidity of the action—not the force of the blow—that produces the most successful results from vibration.
No other vibrator is so rapid, no other gives such quick health-building action, as La Vida. This marvelous little cheery “home comfort” brings to you continuously the highest results to be gained by modern scientific vibration.

POWERS DRUG STORE
Formerly Snows, Next to Postoffice
216 SOUTH WARREN STREET
This Store Closes Monday, Syracuse Day, at 12.30 P.M.

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There’s loads of equally snigger-worthy stuff in early 20th-century papers and magazines, often alongside ads for other useful home appliances such as sewing machines. Electric vibrators worked by plugging them into a lightbulb fitting but there were also mechanical hand-powered ones such as the ‘Veedee’; this was promoted at big faith-healer-style lectures where sufferers of a variety of ailments could go up on stage and apparently be cured at once. For photos of such gadgets, have a look at the Antique Vibrator Museum.

While some brands, like the La Vida, were presented as beauty products, using facial massage to increase circulation and improve the complexion, others were marketed as health products for all the family. They claimed to help such diverse problems as rheumatism, obesity, deafness, hay fever, lung complaints, piles and chilblains, and were very much aimed at men as well as women.

Ads like the one below, however,  (from The Rotarian, March 1914) make it pretty clear that the manufacturers were aware of vibrators’ more ‘intimate’ potential. In the 1920s they started cropping up in porn, and lost their reputation as a wholesome household appliance.

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