A Pink Abomination

Pink, but quite nice really (The Bottle Depot)

Toothpaste and tooth powders were first made my the ancient Egyptians, but it was only in the late 18th, and increasingly in the 19th century, that they started appearing in various fancy flavors such as honey, cherry,orange and areca nut (betel). Toothpaste ingredients included chalk or salt, and sometimes bits of old toasted bread “blackened in the fire, reduced to powder and…mixed with a little honey and a few drops of essence of peppermint”* – not the sort of thing that would make your teeth clean!

In 1879 The Living Age told the story of an fictional inventor whose tricks were probably pretty close to those employed in some Victorian advertising:

1887 ad – will not go mouldy (in theory, anyway) as is “Climate Proof”

A tooth-paste had grown mouldy upon the counters of a score of chemists. The inventor, in an access of despair, sent a pot to the Princess of Wales, and then printed forty thousand labels calling his pink abomination the “Royal Sandringham Tooth-Paste” as used by H.R.H.” What followed? The tooth-paste thus relabeled found a thousand purchasers, and in an incredibly short space of time the inventor was rich enough to fill a column of the Times with testimonials, all proving that until the Sandringham tooth-paste came into use there never was known in England such a thing as a really white set of teeth. Why did the public buy this tooth-paste?…It likes to buy what royalty buys. [The Living Age, vol. 142, 1879 p. 256]

And of course we do still like to buy things because celebrities wear them, eat or drink them, or lose weight using them. The closest thing I found to the imaginary Royal Sandringham Toothpaste was Gabriels’ Royal Tooth Powder, made in the 1870s and 1880s in England. But the Gabriels’ ads were rather terse and didn’t have any testimonials or amusing illustrations, unfortunately. Their tooth preparations were not pink abominations, it seems.

*Lippincott’s Magazine (vol. 18, 1876, p. 125).

A Thrilling New Tooth Powder

Life, Sept. 13, 1937 [big version here]

Do you ever get bored with everything…the same old things every day?

Um, yes. Yes, I do! How did you know? I am tired of getting up and doing the same things every day: working, cleaning things that just get dirty again, cooking the same old dinners, and don’t get me started with what’s on television… 

Right now, I’m sick of using the same old tooth powder.

Oh, right. Tooth powder. That’s toothpaste’s dry boring ancestor. Back in the 18th and 19th centuries, tooth powder (also called dentifrice) would have been made of things like salt, or powdered chalk or brick or even charcoal. And in Britain tooth powder might have meant crushed-up cuttlefish bones or china! The cuttlefish bone mixture was sold as “white coral-powder” in the 1870s. Frightening, don’t you think? Now in the up-to-date 1930s, you could always have used some baking soda to brush with, I suppose – but that wasn’t exactly peppy, is it?

Just like pearls maybe, but not thrilling (Vintage Ad Browser)

Well, brace yourself, dear. There is a new one. LISTERINE TOOTH POWDER made without soap.

Wow, without soap! That really is good news. My teeth will be thrilled. They are tired of all those suds. And foaming at the mouth is not my best look, really.

Yes, this is going to change my whole life. I know it. Just promise me that Listerine Tooth Powder doesn’t have any cuttlefish bones or chalk in it, all right?

A Medicine Chest In Itself

From Ward Lock & Co.’s Guide To London (1935), an ad for the only medicine you will ever need, apparently. Depending upon how you feel about the use of opiates and hallucenogenic drugs, of course.

Chlorodyne was a patent medicine invented by British Army Dr. J. Collis Browne, who developed it while in India as a treatment for cholera. It was a dangerous opiate, however, consisting of laudanum, tincture of cannabis and chloroform.

It was also popular in the US throughout the 19th century. One advertisement from 1871 calls it “the most wonderful remedy ever discovered…the best, safest, and most effectual remedy for COUGHS, COLDS, BRONCHITIS, CONSUMPTION, ASTHMA, DIARRHOEA, COLIC, CRAMP, NEURALGIA.” The General Board of Health in London is quoted in the ad as saying that Chlorodyne had “immense value” and that they could not recommend it strongly enough.

Unfortunately many people died from accidental or intentional overdoses of Chlorodyne. During the 20th century, the opiates were decreased, and the tincture of cannabis was removed from Dr. Browne’s mixture. But it was so popular that chemists and other medicine companies made their own versions of Chlorodyne.

It is startling to see an ad for Chlorodyne as late as 1935; the text and the design of the ad look quite Victorian. It was still being touted as a cure for nearly everything that could ail one. Most of the 1871 ailments are listed (excepting consumption) and by 1935 Chlorodyne was also supposed to be good for toothache, all bowel complaints, stomach chills (whatever they were), gout and rheumatism.

According to Wikipedia, there is still a medicine available in England called Dr. J. Collis Browne’s Mixture -it is supposed to be good for coughs and diarrhea. The main ingredients are peppermint oil (which was a harmless component of the original, and morphine.

The Only Smith

Well, he was the only Smith who ran a Homeopathic and Allopathic Pharmacy in Brooklyn. He certainly wasn’t the only Smith in Brooklyn. In fact, I didn’t find him in the census at all, and in only a few city directories. And there was a different Lewis H. Smith in Brooklyn who was a truckman, listed just beneath “Lewis H. Smith, drugs,” in the 1878 Lain’s Brooklyn City Directory. So calling himself “the only Smith” was a bit of a misnomer.

Smith did business under the sign of the golden mortar at 134 Court Street, which is in downtown Brooklyn, near the ferry docks. The Brooklyn Homeopathic Dispensary was just down the street at 83 Court, in the early 1860s. This ad, from the city directory, dates from 1861-62.

Homeopathic medicine works on the principle that the cure for an illness was a diluted dose of a preparation than, in its concentrated form, would mimic (homeo being the Greek for “same”) the disease in question, in a healthy individual. It was first developed by German physician Samuel Hahnemann (1755-1843). Allopathy, or conventional medicine (a term created by Hahnemann, from the Greek “allo” or different) featured medicines that would evoke, in a healthy person, a response opposite to the symptoms of disease. in other words, conventional medicine cures the symptoms by counteracting them. Homeopathy cures roughly the same way that a modern vaccination works: it gives the person a mild, simulated form of the disease itself. However the homeopath creates the medicine by diluting the mixture so that, theoretically, the elements that provoke the disease are diluted, and the strengthening elements remain.

Several homeopathic hospitals and institutions were founded in the New York area in the 19th century, incuding Hahnemann and Flower Hospitals in New York City, and Dr. Clemence Lozier’s New York Medical College for Women. Dr. Lozier, a colleague of Dr. Elizabeth Blackwell’s, was a dedicated homeopath.

Lewis H. Smith was an equal opportunity “pharmaceutist” ready to dispense to homeopaths, allopath, and the general public. He also sold “proprietary, toilet and fancy articles.” The “Proprietary Articles” were products that he alone had the right to produce or sell – in that sense he would certainly have been “the only Smith.” “Fancy” items were ribbons and sewing notions (as in a fancy goods shop). The toiletries were of course products such as soap, talcum and perfumes.

If you wanted special water, you were in luck: Smith sold “Soda, Missiquoi, Gettysburg, Kissingen, Vichy, Selters [Seltzer?] and other Mineral Waters, always on draught, or by the bottle and case.”

The “sugar of milk” that Smith advertised was a sugar derived from the whey of milk and recrystallized, used in the trituration (powdering) of medicines. It would also be used in pellets or globules (spherical capsules made of saccharose or lactose, which were filled with a diluted medicine). “Envelopes” were simply envelopes filled with pellets or globules, and “powder papers” are self-explanatory: powdered medicines dispensed in folded paper.

For more information about the history of homeopathy:

A Homeopathy Timeline

A Vital Force: Women in American Homeopathy, by Anne Taylor Kirschmann

History of the New York Medical College for Women

Cotton Root Pills

Cotton root pills were a common Victorian abortifacient, which like many things in that era, were known about (by some people) without being overtly discussed. This 1893 ad from the newspaper, the Toronto Telegram, implies the true use of cotton root pills by stating that they were not to be taken during pregnancy. The euphemism “Female Regulator” could cover any number of women’s issues, of course. Note also that the ad warns that one’s druggist might not even carry them, in which case you could buy them through mail order – as long as you sent the money first.

Cotton root is still said to be an effective means of starting menstruation and terminating pregnancies, as can be seen in this discussion at Sister Zeus. In their 2001 book, Regulating Menstruation, Etienne Van de Walle and Elisha P. Renne mention a number of so-called “female regulators” than were marketed to address menstrual problems, including pills and liquids which contained either cotton root, tansy or pennyroyal.

In Nostrums and Quackery (1912 edition), the American Medical Association discuss the cotton root pills sold by the Darwin Medical Company of Rochester, New York. The company was supposedly run by a Martha C. Potter and Dr. Darwin Potter. There was indeed a Dr. Darwin Potter residing in Rochester in 1900, but there was no Martha C. Potter in his family. His late wife’s name was Adaline; he had a daughter Justine and a daughter-in-law Elizabeth. Martha was most likely a fictional proprietor created to make customers feel more comfortable ordering their Female Regulators from the Darwin Medical Company:

Dr Darwin’s Compound
COTTON ROOT TABLETS

Will positively relieve the most obstinate female IRREGULARITIES, any cause, in twelve hours. Price $1. Guaranteed a powerful, harmless regulator for women. Will not injure the most delicate person. Specialists of 40 years’ experience. LADIES’ RELIEF. Particulars and testimonials free. LADY ATTENDANT. Office or mail. Hours 12 to 2 p.m. Refuse dangerous substitutes. SOLD ONLY by Dr. Darwin Medical Co., 108 Beckley Bldg., Rochester, N.Y.

The AMA authors state that a “post-office inspector” wrote to the Darwin Company under a false name to see “if this was an advertisement of an abortifacient,” and received literature from them indicating that this was indeed the case. The inspector then wrote back pretending to be a pregnant woman, and was sent a box of tablets in a box labelled “Throat Tablets.” The company was issued a “post-office fraud order” in 1906 and possible criminal proceedings were launched, though the outcome of all this is not made clear in Nostrums and Quackery. The AMA did not follow up every patent medicine that they discuss. This is understandable, as the book is over 700 pages long.

SOURCES

Nostrums and Quackery (Chicago: American Medical Assocation Press, 1912, 2nd ed.), pp 205-6.

Van de Walle, Etienne and Elisha P. Renne, Regulating Menstruation: Beliefs, Practices, Interpretation (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2001), pp 54-5.

Darwin Potter household, 1880 U.S. Census, Minden, Montgomery, NY; FHL #1254865, National Archives # T9-0865, p. 294C.

Darwin Potter household, 1900 U.S. Census, Rochester City Ward 1, Monroe, NY; p. 12A, #185/271, GSU # 1241074, Ref. #36.

Yonkerman’s Tuberculozyne

By 1900, tuberculosis was one of the biggest public health problems both in Europe and the United States. A contagious disease which most commonly affects the lungs, it killed roughly 50% of those who entered sanitariums, the first of which was established in Germany in 1859.

Therefore it is not surprising that many people tried to sell medicines which purported to cure tuberculosis. One of these was a veterinarian from Kalamazoo, Michigan named Derk P. Yonkerman.

Yonkerman’s passport states that he was born in Kalamazoo, Michigan on September 26, 1859. A “Durill P. Yoniker” is listed in the 1860 census in the Village of Kalamazoo, Michigan, age 9 months, son of John Yoniker, a 30 year old Turner born in Holland and Anne, age 28, also born in Holland. The family was in Cleveland, Ohio by 1880. John Yonkerman was then 53 years old and working as a veterinary surgeon; his wife Annie was two years younger. Their son [Derk] Peter, listed under his middle name, was age 21 with no occupation listed.

Yonkerman married Elizabeth Born about 1886, and had at least one daughter (who also married a veterinary surgeon). By the time of the 1910 census Derk Yonkerman was a veterinary surgeon back in his hometown of Kalamazoo. But by 1910 his aspirations went far beyond the treatment of sick animals. He was actively marketing his “cure” for tuberculosis, both in the United States and in Great Britain, which he called Tuberculozyne. In fact, the D.P. Yonkerman Co. Ltd. is listed in the 1910 London Post Office Directory at 6 Bouverie Street, EC (in Holborn).

The American Medical Association’s 1912 book Quackery and Nostrums devotes several pages to Tuberculozyne. They note that Yonkerman was of “Kalamazoo, Michigan and London, England” and that he sold his medicines “on opposite sides of the Atlantic.” In his promotional material he states that he “graduated from Ontario College, Ontario, Canada.” There is no such place; but apparently Yonkerman was indeed an 1882 graduate of the Ontario Veterinary College in Toronto; it is not stated why he went to Canada to train. Yonkerman also lists “Stuttgart University, Germany” as a place where he had studied, though the AMA points out (with exclamation points flying) that “there is no such university!”

In 1884, D.P. Yonkerman applied for a passport. He requested that it be sent to him at the Ashland House, a hotel at 24th Street and 4th Avenue in New York City. It is entirely possible that Yonkerman’s passport was applied for so that he could travel to England to set up his Tuberculozyne company. His passport application does not state where he would be travelling, but has the curious addenda of a note asking that the application be hurried as Yonkerman wishes to sail “Tuesday.” He is listed in the London Post Office Directory for several years after 1910, at least into the early 1920s. He probably travelled back and forth across the Atlantic quite a bit.

The Yonkerman Company in Michigan published a book entitled Tuberculosis and Allied Diseases by Dr. Freeman Hall, in 1909. An advertisement for this book, reprinted in Quackery and Nostrums, states that:

If you know of anyone suffering from Consumption, Bronchitis, Asthma or any throat or lung trouble, or are yourself afflicted, this book will help you…Write at once to the Yonkerman Co., 5136 Water St., Kalamazoo, Mich., and they will send you the book by return mail Free and also a generous supply of the New Treatment absolutely Free, for they want you to have his wonderful remedy before it is too late.
Note how a whole range of diseases are said to be cured by the Tuberculozyne – it has become a miracle cure for many medical problems; and also that is is all free – initially. In many cases in the AMA book, the initial free sample has a charge appended to it later on. Even in 1910, there really was no such thing as a free lunch – or a free miracle cure, either.
The section on Yonkerman in Quackery and Nostrums was originally printed in the Journal of the A.M.A. on October 8, 1910. They note that the English Tuberculozyne was packaged with far more sweeping recommendations printed on the packaging than the American product was. The English label states that it is “The Only Known Remedy for all Forms of Consumption” and that it is “of the greatest Therapeutic Value” whereas the American label merely states that it is “a New Remedy for Consumption” and “is not a Patent Medicine.” The American version sold for $10, the British version for the equivalent in pounds of $12. The AMA notes that the elements of the medicine cost about a nickel a bottle to manufacture.

The AMA analysed the two kinds of Tuberculozyne that were available. Tuberculozyne No. 1 was a bright red liquid consisting primarily of potassium bromide, glycerin, red coloring (cochineal) and oil of cassia (which gave it a cinnamon taste). The No. 2 variety was a brown liquid with glycerin, oil of almonds and something that the testers thought was probably burnt sugar to give it a brown color.

It is interesting to note the differences in the advertising and selling of the same product in the US and in England. The English advertisements are much more florid and tell of Yonkerman’s prize-winning abilities at school, hinting that he was a celebrated M.D. in the United States. The American ads are far more restrained, though they are quite complimentary, as such ads always are. Sadly, the advertisements gave a lot of people false hopes for a miracle cure for the disease. It was not until 1946 that the antibiotic streptomycin was developed that there was truly any cure for tuberculosis.

Sources

Nostrums and Quackery, 2nd ed. (Chicago: American Medical Association Press, 1912), pp 175-82.

London Post Office Directories, various, 1910-1922

US Passport Applications, Cuyahoga Co., Ohio; Application of Derk P. Yonkerman, issued 19 May 1884 [Ancestry.com]

1860 US census, Kalamazoo County, Michigan, Village of Kalamazoo, M653_548, p. 0. John Yoniker household.

1880 US census, Cuyahoga County, Ohio, Cleveland FHL Film 1255006, Na Film No. T-9-1006, p. 41D. John Yonkerman household.

1910 US census, Kalamazoo County, Michigan, Kalamazoo Ward 3, District 141, Roll T624_684, p. 17A, ED 141. D.P. Yonkerman household.

Goff’s Magic Oil Liniment

Camden, New Jersey is a town that is famous for being very near Philadelphia, for being RCA Victor’s headquarters from 1901 to 1969, and for being a center for shipbuilding. Camden was also the home of the first drive in movie in 1933.

It was also the home of this supernaturally excellent cure-all, manufactured in Camden around 1900.

This bottle of S.B. Goff’s Magic Oil Liniment could cure just about anything that was the matter with you. That included rheumatism, neuralgia, toothache and earache, Gravel and Kidney Affection, Frosted Feet, chapped hands, and cuts.

When you were feeling better you could go out to the stable and use it on the horses for their sprains, stiff limbs, Frosted Feet and other ailments.

It is also “free from the fiery qualities,” which is surprising since it is so good at assuaging the frosted qualities of feet both human and equine.

Image from the National Museum of American History’s wonderful Balm of America collection.

We Cure Eye Troubles

We Cure Eye Troubles

It doesn’t matter what your eye trouble is, or how serious or chronic it may be, this great Eye-Book will show you how to treat your own eyes at home. No knife. No pain. No trouble. Not necessary to see a doctor.

Our book about eyes, sent free, tells all about it: things which you ought to know, but which your doctor has never told you, and contains letters from many that have been cured.

A postal card will get the book and we will give you our free advice if you will write us a short description of your case.

Write now while you think about it.

An easy-to-resist offer from 1909…What if, for example, your eyesight was such that you couldn’t actually read the free book? And don’t you need keen eyesight to perform medical treatments?

In addition, the lady in the picture appears to be self-administering something closer to a cosmetic eye-lift than, say, cataract surgery. It’s a temporary eye-lift, though; as soon as she takes her hands away, she will be drooping again.

And if the book and the advice was really free, how did the North American Eye Specialists stay in business?

Advertisement from Popular Mechanics, March 1909, p. 155 – link here.

Telephone Headache Tablets

Here are Charles W. Horn’s oddly named Telephone Headache Tablets, dating from about 1900-1910. The telephone is probably analogous to the quickness with which the tablets are supposed to deliver their therapeutic “message” to your headache.

You could order them quickly over the phone, too, as the lady with a symbolic headache rag tied around her head is doing: “Hallo! Send me none but the ‘Telephone.’ I know what they are and many of my friends have used them without a single failure.”

They were not safe for children, says the ad – and as it turns out, you will not be surprised to learn that they weren’t safe for adults either. They were found to contain acetanilid[e], which is made of analin (a by-product of coal tar) and acetic acid. Acetanilide (now spelled with the final ‘e’) is related to acetominophen, used in headache medications today – but it is incredibly toxic and used in the manufacturing of rubber and dyes. Taking these tablets would give you more than a headache, no doubt about it.

The advertisement was scanned from my copy of Nostrums and Quackery (Chicago: American Medical Assocation Press, 1912), p. 539.

Bah Humbug Oil

The FDA or Food and Drugs Adminstration was established in 1906, the same year that President Theodore Roosevelt signed the Pure Food and Drug Act. Also known as the Wiley Act, after pioneering food chemist Harvey Washington Wiley, it allowed the government to inspect and ban adulterated foods and patent medicines.

They had plenty of work to do, as you can see just by glancing through the American Medical Association’s 1912 opus Nostrums and Quackery. This book is a cornucopia of strange potions and conniving salespeople, lavishly illustrated with ads and written with a mixture of sarcasm and outrage. Just my cup of unadulterated tea, in other words.

Take, for example, the offering of one Mrs. J.F. Marshall Smith – whom I had hoped to present to you through census records, but cannot find (yet – there is always a ‘yet’). The combination of a devastatingly common surname, the fact that none of the Smiths in Minnesota in 1900-1920 used this combination of initials and extra name, and no hometown mentioned – resulted in…absolutely nothing. A couple of possible Mrs. Smiths, but nothing certain.

At any rate, imagine for a moment that you are that mysterious Mrs. Smith living somewhere in Minnesota in the early 1900s. And imagine that you have decided to make a little extra pin money by manufacturing a patent medicine. First you need a recipe of sorts, of course. And bottles. And perhaps a marketing plan. But above all you need a really good name for your amazing miracle cure which “relieved diphtheria of the most malignant type.”

Well, that is the position that Mrs. J.F. Marshall Smith found herself in. And the name she came up with for her medicine was – Humbug Oil. Not in a spirit of irony, either. It is not clear what sort of spirit she had in mind. Perhaps she was inspired by Ebenezer Scrooge. The Oil consisted of turpentine, linseed oil and what the government chemists called “a watery-alcoholic solution of ammonia water, ammonium salts and a voltile alkaloid, probably coniin.” [Nostrums and Quackery, Chicago, 1912, p. 506]. The last ingredient mentioned, better known as coniine, is a derivative of hemlock – not at all the sort of thing you’d want to be taking as medicine.

Humbug, indeed.

The FDA fined Mrs. Smith $5 in 1911 for shipping her Humbug Oil from Minnesota to Utah. As one of the anonymous authors of Nostrums and Quackery writes: “If no other claim than that denoted by its name had been made, Mrs. Smith could doubtless continued to sell her nostrum unmolested.”

[The word ‘humbug’ can be traced to the mid-18th century in Britain and was originally student slang for a hoax. By the 19th century it became synonymous with nonsense or with an outright fraud. It was especially associated with Dickens’ Ebenezer Scrooge (who used the word in the first sense) and with the showman P.T. Barnum, whose sensational exhibits were referred to as humbugs in the second sense of the word. Humbugs are also a British mint-molasses hard candy, striped brown and white or black and white. And you can still find mint humbugs today – though there are no medicinal advantages (or disadvantages) to them.]

Unfortunately there was no Humbug Oil ad pictured in Nostrums and Quackery, so the image is of another nostrum called Wolcott’s Instant Pain Annihilator (which one might have needed after a dose of Humbug Oil), from the Library of Congress.

Samuel Hopkins Adams mentions Mrs. Smith and her Humbug Oil in The Great American Fraud (AMA: Chicago, 1912), p. 130.