Author: Quackwriter

‘A Damnable Villain’ – Byron H. Robb and the Electro-Magnetic Brush Co.

The Quack Doctor is delighted to welcome guest blogger Robert K. Waits, author of The Medical Electricians: George A. Scott and His Victorian Cohorts in Quackery. In this two-part article, Robert discusses the colourful career of 19th-century fraudster Byron H Robb. . In 1878 George Augustus Scott gained fame in London and New York for […]

Ramey’s Medicator: an inventor’s survival

Advertisements for Ramey’s Medicator claimed that it would overcome ‘death dealing disease.’ What most customers didn’t know, however, was that the inhaler would never have existed at all if its inventor had not survived a gruesome surgical ordeal. The Medicator was patented by Alfred H Ramey and Frank D Rollins on 3 June 1890. Its […]

Guest post: England’s ‘only female doctor’?

Last year, The Quack Doctor featured some bottles from the collection of Michael Till, including this gorgeous and rare example of Cavania’s Wonder-Worker Lotion. A father and daughter team, Professor and Mademoiselle Cavania practised in the north of England during the 1860s and 70s. The prospect of formal medical qualifications for women was only just […]

Mr Grimstone and the Revitalised Mummy Pea

In a Highgate garden known as the Herbary grew plants destined to invigorate nostrils all over the world. Savory, rosemary and lavender scented the air, while orris-root thrived under the carefully cultivated soil. Dried, powdered and mixed with salt, they would become Grimstone’s Eye Snuff, promising to cure cataracts, eradicate the need for spectacles and […]

Stay Vigorous at Seventy

ADvent Calendar Day 23 Ah, good old John Harvey Kellogg – everyone knows the cornflake-inventing, masturbation-disapproving, enema-giving sanitarium owner of Battle Creek, Michigan. It’s not much of a surprise that he would be promoting something called Sanitone Wafers… But, hang on a minute, this ad says F. J. Kellogg. Who’s he when he’s at home? Frank […]

An advertising poster in the Art Nouveau style, showing a knight on horseback sticking a lance into a humanoid figure composed of tobacco leaves. The desing includes the words 'Narcoti-cure, cures the tobacco habit in from 4 to 10 days. The Narcoti Chemical Co., Springfield, Mass. Price $5.00. Book of particulars free.'

Narcoti-Cure: ‘Why smoke and spit your life away?’

Last updated: 20 April 2024 This beautiful 1895 poster, created by leading Art Nouveau designer William H Bradley (1868-1962), formed part of a widespread advertising campaign for Narcoti-Cure, a product that was only available for about a year. Narcoti-Cure claimed to put smokers, tobacco-chewers and snuff-takers off their filthy habit for life. ‘Why smoke and […]

To whiten hands and skin

ADvent 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 […]

Failure of ‘606’

ADvent Calendar Day 20 This 1915 advertisement is perhaps not as wacky as some of the products I’ve featured this month, but I find it interesting because it names neither the medicine nor the disease it aims to cure! The mentions of ‘blood poison’, ‘Mercury and Potash treatment’ and ‘606’, however, would leave readers in […]

Acme Worm Bouncer, from the Morning Sun News Herald, Iowa, 22 December 1927

The Acme Worm Bouncer

ADvent Calendar Day 19 This wonderful product name conjures up an image of Wile E Coyote speeding along a dirt road on a go-kart-mounted trebuchet, firing little worms at Road Runner until the cart hits a stone and tumbles into a lake, attracting thousands of ravenous fish to the bait. Well, that’s what it conjures […]

I was a tub of fat!

ADvent Calendar Day 18 Korein claimed to contain Fucus vesiculosis (bladderwrack), which enjoyed a vogue as a weight loss supplement in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. When the Connecticut Agricultural Experiment Association analysed Korein in 1915, however, they reported that it was 40% sassafras oil and 60% petrolatum, presented in red gelatine capsules. […]