Patent medicines

Smith’s Live-Long Candy

Sometimes, patent remedies killed people. The Live-Long Candy did manage to get mentioned at an inquest, and there’d be a particular irony in a product of this name carrying someone off – but I reckon it’s innocent. Eight months before this ad appeared, 16-year-old Belinda Balls, housemaid to Mrs Waspe at Gusford Hall in Suffolk, […]

Curlypet

Australian Women’s Weekly, 17 Jan 1962 . Although I focus on medical advertising here at The Quack Doctor, I do like to feature the occasional beauty product when it catches my eye. I stumbled on this mid-20th-century Australian hair lotion while failing to find something else I was looking for. Curlypet’s heyday was the 1930s […]

Torpid Liver Positively Cured

I’m sure all The Quack Doctor’s readers have leapt out of bed bright and early this morning, clear-headed, sparkly-eyed and ready to go out and grab all the exciting opportunities that the New Year presents. But if you know someone who is feeling a little more fragile right now, you could point them towards the […]

Sequah – a Victorian Celebrity Quack

Source: The Graphic 11 July 1891 . From the moment of his sudden rise to fame in Portsmouth in 1887, Sequah knew how to win friends and influence people. He built up an almost cult-like following by giving the crowds what they wanted – miraculous cures, affordable medicines, and a lot of Wild West-style entertainment. Handbills […]

Paul Gage’s Tonic Antiphlegmatic Elixir

Source: The Liverpool Mercury, 30 December 1851 . Phlegm is generally white, greyish, or of a yellow colour, with streaks of black; its consistency varies from the limpidity of water to the thickness of jelly. This vivid description is from Parisian chemist Paul Gage’s Treatise on the Effect and Disorders produced by Phlegm in the […]

The Balm of Zura, or Phoenix of Life

Source: Trewman’s Exeter Flying Post, 3 April 1823 Much of the evidence on this one is anecdotal, but the proprietor of the Balm of Zura, Dr A. Lamert, certainly sounds quite a character. Lamert was the son of a London-based German quack who dabbled in ophthalmology before moving on to selling a Nervous and Rheumatic […]

Terradermalax – a skin laxative

Source: The Pittsburgh Press, 11 March 1923 . . Why, when a woman is 30, do her blushes no longer show? How does a skin grow dull and unlovely while the eyes are still clear and sparkling? Science has learned the reason, and – glorious news! – a painless, pleasant way to correct it in […]

Something to show and scare the people

TAPE WORM Removed ALIVE IN TWO HOURS with HEAD or no charge. (No Fee in Advance.) No fasting. Have cured over 2,000 people of Tape worms with this harmless infallible specific, 50 per cent of which were doctoring for various other diseases, thereby eking out a miserable existence as thousands are doing. (Also cured two […]

Atkinson & Barker’s Royal Infants’ Preservative

Source: The Patriot (London) 12 September 1853 It is no misnomer Cordial! —no stupefactive, deadly narcotic! —but a veritable preservative of Infants! Regular readers of The Quack Doctor might be able to hazard a guess at the active ingredients of this product. Like other infant quieteners, it did contain a narcotic, and, like them, it […]

Munyon is ready…

Would you buy a homeopathic remedy from this man? Source: The Morning Times (Washington D.C.) 13 December 1896 James Monroe Munyon’s pompadour hairstyle was a familiar feature of American newspapers around the turn of the 20th century. Having tried his hand at teaching, law, social work, publishing and song-writing, he started his Homoeopathic Home Remedy […]