Did Hazard’s Pearl Oil really have pearls in it? This was the question on my mind when I first saw this 1868 patent medicine label in the Library of Congress collection several months ago.
C.G.C. Hazard was a Brooklyn druggist whose store was at Myrtle Avenue and Oxford Street, and he “prepared and sold” this American Pearl Oil as “the Great Pain Alleviator of the Age” – to be used externally or internally (or both) to cure anything from rheumatism to headaches, diarrhea and earache. Relief, Hazard cautioned, was “almost instantaneous” – although one would have thought that “the Great Pain Alleviator of the Age” could cure you more quickly than that.
Did American Pearl Oil contain real pearls? Perhaps. Actual pearls were often ground up and used as medicine. A remedy for the plague involved powdered pearls and the sap of ash trees (it didn’t work very well). In Gem Magic (2004, p. 160), Brenda Knight writes that “pearl oil” was used for nervous conditions, but does not explain how the oil would have been made (I assume powdered pearls were simply added to a mineral oil) or in what period this was available.
At the Great Exhibition in London in 1851, pearl oil was one of the “artificial oils” displayed. It was said to have “an agreeable odour of Jargonelles, and [was] used for bonbons.” [Journal of Horticulture and Practical Gardening, vol. 23, 1872, p. 51]. But the Journal of Horticulture did not specify what was in this particular pearl oil.
Pearl Oil was also sold as a fuel similar to what one writer called “lard oil,” in the 1870s [Executive Documents, Minnesota, vol. 2, 1874, p. 1007, in which a letter to the Board of Health is reproduced, documenting several explosive accidents which occurred when people used Pearl Oil in their lamps].
Or perhaps the “Great Pain Alleviator of the Age” was simply – margarine. Pearl oil, writes Robert Allen Palmatier in Food: A Dictionary of Literal and Non-Literal Terms (2000, p. 258), was a poetic name for “butter substitute” dating from 1854. This is because the word oleomargarine comes from the Greek for oil (oleo) plus pearl (margaron, from which comes the name Margaret, too) – because it was made from pork fat, which looked (apparently) like pearls. Palmatier notes that margarine was available in France in the mid-19th century but did not arrive in the US until the 1870s.
Whatever was in American Pearl Oil, it does not appear to have been advertised much, nor does it seem to have been made for many years, as this label is the only trace of it that I was able to find.
[Image from the Library of Congress.]
The Vintage Medicine Cabinet 