USA

Hunt’s Remedy

ADvent Calendar Day 7 Take THAT, Death! POW! The skeletal figure of the Grim Reaper drops his scythe and cowers before the might of a strong, healthy opponent wielding a bottle of Hunt’s Remedy. The Remedy became popular in the 1870s after it was acquired by William Clarke of Providence, Rhode Island, and heavily advertised. According […]

ADvent Calendar 1: The Health Jolting Chair

Every day until Christmas, The Quack Doctor will be showing a different historical health-related advertisement. First is this brain-refresher and household blessing – the Health Jolting Chair (1885), courtesy of the US National Library of Medicine. . .

An ulcer as big as a hen-egg

Patient testimonials were (and indeed remain) an integral part of the promotion of non-evidence-based health products. While 19th-century newspaper advertising only had room for concise endorsements, promotional books and pamphlets allowed medicine proprietors to give more detailed case studies of those who had supposedly benefited from their products. This one by Mr M C Battey, […]

Wonder-workers and styptics

When your Magic Chicken is suffering from cholera, there’s no need to panic. This bottle for the Magic Chicken Cholera Cure is one of around 195 medicine bottles in the collection of Michael Till, a retired GP from Gloucestershire. Michael became interested in historical remedies after looking into the story of his practice’s founder, Dr […]

Lazy salesmen and popular bachelors

The life of a travelling salesman in the early 20th century US might have involved stuffy railway carriages, soulless hotels and rejection by jaded druggists, but that doesn’t mean there were no lighter moments. The reports of the Illinois Pharmaceutical Travelers’ Association, established in 1903, give a delightful glimpse into the fun and games to be had […]

A nameless tramp’s discovery

Deep in the piney woods of Louisiana there grow certain herbs. Clean, fresh, green little herbs they are, redolent with the smell of the pines and of the wholesome earth that has given them birth. Years ago, a nameless tramp discovered that these little herbs contained a marvelous power to relieve kidney and bladder disorders […]

Bomb the first sneeze with Kilacold

If you think a chlorine bomb sounds more like something from the battlefield than the medicine cabinet, then you’d be right about the origins of this 1920s remedy. The product, and a brief trend among physicians for treating colds with chlorine, arose from experiments made by the US Chemical Warfare Service after the First World […]

Habitina – an infallible remedy for addiction

Source: The Fort Wayne Journal-Gazette,17 April 1907 —————————————————————————————— 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 […]