To whiten hands and skin

ADvent Calendar Day 21ADvent Calendar Day 21

The juxtaposition of ‘harmless’ and ‘arsenic’ is quite amusing, but the manufacturer’s assertions about the product’s safety were more believable than they might now appear. In the 1890s, the fashion for arsenic as a cosmetic led vendors to cash in on the poison’s reputation for creating a pale, wrinkle-free complexion. While people did use arsenic for this purpose (sometimes with disastrous results) the quantity in commercial pills like these was minuscule.

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MacKenzie's Arsenic Wafers, 1890s

During the 1890s several British retail chemists were summoned to court for selling arsenic beauty soaps – but not because they were putting the public in danger. Find out the real reason in The Quack Doctor: Historical Remedies For All Your Ills. There’s still time to order it (the book, that is, not the arsenic soap) as a Christmas gift!

The Quack Doctor - a selling point

A glass bottle containing sand.

A Fortune Built on Sand: Health Grains

In early 20th-century New York, a mailman introduced a new patent medicine called Health Grains for indigestion – but the ingredients were far from beneficial. Mrs Bertha Bertsche, a 38-year-old widow, could often be found supervising the pans on the kitchen range at her home in Glebe Avenue, Westchester Square, New York. Inside the pans, […]

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Dr Batty's Asthma Cigarettes

Victorian asthma cigarettes: who was Dr Batty?

While browsing your local newspaper in the 1890s, an asthma-cure advertisement might distract you from tales of the latest sensational crimes. ‘Agreeable to use, certain in their effects, and harmless in their action, they may be safely smoked by ladies and children,’ ran the promotional copy. The product was Cigares de Joy, handy little cigarettes […]

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Sanitized Tape Worms - a spurious 'vintage' ad

‘Eat! Eat! Eat!’ Those notorious tapeworm diet pills

Peoria, Illinois, 1912: the horror begins. A society lady, encouraged by a friend’s success with an easy new weight-loss treatment, pays $25 for ‘two rather large and suspicious-looking pills.’ Her husband sends the pills to be analysed by the Washington public health service, and before long a ‘government secret official’ appears, informing him that the […]

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