The Toadstool Millionaires: A Social History of Patent Medicines in America before Federal Regulation

by James Harvey Young

Overview

Contents: Preface. Acknowledgments. Part One: Early Days. Part Two: Heyday. Part Three: Themes. Part Four: Legislation. Part Five: Epilogue. Index.

Originally published in 1961.

The Princeton Legacy Library uses the latest print-on-demand technology to again make available previously out-of-print books from the distinguished backlist of Princeton University Press. These editions preserve the original texts of these important books while presenting them in durable paperback and hardcover editions. The goal of the Princeton Legacy Library is to vastly increase access to the rich scholarly heritage found in the thousands of books published by Princeton University Press since its founding in 1905.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780691620008
Publisher:	Princeton University Press
Publication date:	03/08/2015
Series:	Princeton Legacy Library , #1855
Pages:	312
Sales rank:	806,678
Product dimensions:	6.10(w) x 9.10(h) x 2.40(d)

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The Toadstool Millionaires

A Social History of Patent Medicines in America Before Federal Regulation

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By James Harvey Young

PRINCETON UNIVERSITY PRESS

Copyright © 1961 Princeton University Press
All rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-691-04568-9

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CHAPTER 1

"AT THE SIGN OF GALEN'S HEAD"

Medicines affrov'd by royal charter,
James, Godfry, Anderson, Court-plaster,
With Keyser's Hoofer's Lockyer's Pills,
And Honey Balsam Doctor Hill's;
Bateman and Daffy, Jesuits drops,
And all the Tinctures of the shop,
As Stoughton, Turlington and Grenough,
Pure British Oil and Haerlem Ditto. ...

— NEW YORK PACKET, October 11, 1784

In the Boston News-Letter for November 26, 1761, Charles Russell of Charlestown advised that "At his Shop at the Sign of GALEN'S HEAD opposite the Three Cranes and near the FERRY" he had for sale, imported on the latest ships from London, "Drugs, and Medicines, Chymical and Galenical," and certain patent medicines. These last were listed: Bateman's and Stoughton's Drops, Lockyer's, Hooper's, and Anderson's Pills, British Oyl, and Daffy's Elixir.

American patent medicine history began in Britain. Its founders were certain ingenious Englishmen who combined medical lore and promotional zeal in an age when regular medicines left much to be desired. The barest of facts are these.

Anderson's Pills, a product of the 1630's, were prepared from a formula allegedly learned in Venice by a Scot who claimed to be physician to King Charles I. Daffy's Elixir and Lockyer's Pills were also first made in the 17th century, the Elixir the invention of a provincial clergyman. Richard Stoughton's Elixir was the second compound medicine to be granted, in 1712, an English patent. In 1726 a patent was also granted for the making of Dr. Bateman's Pectoral Drops: the patentee was not a physician named Bateman, however, but a businessman named Benjamin Okell, in league with a group of venturesome promoters with a warehouse and printshop in Bow Churchyard. Two decades later, Michael and Thomas Bretton patented "An Oyl extracted from a Flinty Rock for the Cure of Rheumatick and Scorbutick and other Cases." The next year a Reading apothecary, John Hooper, was given a patent for the manufacture of "Female Pills" bearing his name.

The 18th was a Cinderella century, at once an age of enlightenment and a time of superstition. As to what actually caused diseases, Sir William Osier has asserted, man knew little more at the end of the 18th century than had the ancient Greeks. This did not mean that the state of medicine was still dawn-age. Empirical discoveries of use in treating illness had accumulated, and since the Renaissance a genuinely scientific spirit had spurred individual scholars to engage in anatomical and pathological research. No earlier years had found so many forward-looking inquirers at work as did the 18th century, men anxious to transfer into the fields of biology and medicine the scientific revolution that had remade physics and astronomy. Yet the problem of disease and health was so vast and complex, the sum total of new medical knowledge still so small, and the weight of past traditions so pressing that even the keenest minds were perplexed. Or, if they were not perplexed but, in their own view, certain, they were most often wrong. Many physicians became disillusioned when biological research seemed to lead not to universal laws, like gravitation, but only to more complications and greater confusion. Anxious to get their single explanations for all disease, they did so by neglecting the scientific method, or by following it only a short way. They built vast theoretical medical schemes by speculative logic. The 18th century was a time of system-making.

Many of the new systems owed much to ancient lore. It was appropriate that the shop of a Massachusetts apothecary should hang out a sign of Galen's head. For it was this Greek physician of the second century A.D. who had systematized the older pathology of the humors, holding that disease resulted when the four liquids in the body — blood, phlegm, choler (yellow bile), and melancholy (black bile) — became unbalanced. Galen's ideas, although not uncontested, were the dominant force in medical thinking into the 19th century, and remedies that would restore the harmonious relationship of the humors, called galenicals, were for sale by any British or American apothecary.

So too were "chymical" remedies. These began with a 16th-century chemist-physician named Paracelsus who displayed his contempt for tradition by burning the works of Galen. He proclaimed that chemistry should forsake its forlorn effort to make gold from baser metals and devote itself to finding remedies to cure the sick. Paracelsus and his disciples added certain minerals to the materia medica.

The materia medica had expanded in other ways. One touchstone that had brought appalling substances into usage was the dictum that the worse a medicine tasted the greater its curative power. Disease was an invader that must be driven from the body by a substance as abhorrent as itself. Three London hospitals in the 18th century published a dispensatory recommending dried horses' hooves and wood lice. Even such a forward-looking chemist as Robert Boyle suggested for internal medication, in the phrase of Oliver Wendell Holmes, "most of the substances commonly used as fertilizers of the soil." Thus Cotton Mather, the Puritan divine in Massachusetts, was quite in accord with the practice of his age: he devoted a chapter in his medical manuscript, "The Angel of Bethesda," to the therapeutic properties of urine and dung.

Obnoxiousness often coupled with complexity in 18th-century medicines. The "blunderbuss" formula was popular, composed of many substances to cover many therapeutic bets. A good example of polypharmacy was theriaca or Venice Treacle, dating from the days of Nero, containing over sixty ingredients, one of them the flesh of the viper. Theriaca was widely used both in England and America.

Magic in medication had other facets. One was the doctrine of signatures, older than Hippocrates, perennial in folk medicine, and given so much attention by Paracelsus and his followers as to seem like a fresh idea in the years that followed. It arose from a cosmic view that God or Nature had provided remedies for the ailments of mankind and had furnished clues to direct man in his search. Thus the thistle was useful for a stitch in the side, walnut shells for a cracked skull, and pulverized mummy for prolonging life.

The age of discovery had flooded Europe with new products from the entire world. Exotic plants were quickly put to therapeutic use. By 1650 the medicinal garden at Oxford University, begun in 1623, was growing 600 native species and 1,000 plants brought from beyond the seas.

Medication in the 17th and 18th centuries was certainly laissezfaire, the multitude of remedies justified in terms of speculative theory or presumed empirical experience. No layman with an urge to suggest a new medicine felt any legal or moral restraint. Besides this therapeutic toleration, there were other aspects of the medical scene which encouraged the would-be medicine maker. English practitioners who possessed prestige and status were the fellows of the London College of Physicians, a body founded during the quickened scientific interest of the Renaissance but now grown arthritic. An age-old prejudice still held sway that a member of a profession should not demean himself by working with his hands. Thus surgery and experimenting in the laboratory were frowned upon. Disputation between proponents of conflicting theoretical systems was protracted and bitter. Preoccupied with questions of preferment and precedence, the physicians refused to expand their ranks even though there were over 1,300 serious cases of illness a day per every member of the College. The masses had to look elsewhere for treatment. They found it at the hands of surgeons and apothecaries, not yet fully reputable but increasingly countenanced because of the great need, and they found it at the hands of well-meaning empirics and unscrupulous quacks.

It would be hard to discover a time and place in which nostrum promotion was more brazen than in 18th-century England. Therapeutic claims achieved the very perfection of extravagance. Castigation of rivals reached the summit of acrimony. Name-stealing and patent-jumping were the lot of every successful proprietor. From Anderson's to Hooper's, all of the patent medicines advertised at the Sign of Galen's Head were in England the subject of intense rivalry. One enterprising woman, for example, marketed Scots Pills in boxes sealed with black wax bearing a lion rampant, three mallets argent, and the bust of Dr. Anderson. A male competitor sealed his boxes in red wax with his coat of arms and a motto strangely chosen for a medicine: "Remember you must die."

Stoughton's Elixir, upon the death of the inventor, became the subject of a family feud. A son of Stoughton and the widow of another son argued in most vituperative fashion. Each claimed sole possession of the formula, and each termed the other a scoundrel. The daughter-in-law accused the son of financial chicanery; the son condemned the daughter-in-law for having run through two husbands and for desperately wanting a third. In the midst of the battle a third party entered the lists. She was no Stoughton and her quaint claim for the public's consideration lay in this: that her late husband had infringed Stoughton's patent until restrained by the Lord Chancellor.

In the Boston News-Letter for October 4, 1708, Nicholas Boone, at the Sign of the Bible near the corner of School-House-Lane, advertised for sale: "DAFFY'S Elixir Salutis, very good, at four shillings and six-pence per half pint Bottle." This may well be the first printed reference in America to an English "patent medicine" (though the Elixir was not patented), and it certainly is the first newspaper advertisement for a nostrum. There had been only one gazette preceding the News-Letter in British America, and it had lasted but a single issue. Then its printer had returned to England to assume the role of nostrum vendor, selling "the only Angelical Pills against all Vapours, Hysterick and Melancholly Fits." It seems a likely assumption that some 17th-century emigrant, setting forth across the Atlantic to face the hazards of life in Jamestown or Philadelphia or Boston, had brought along a bottle of Daffy's Elixir or a box of Anderson's Pills. No record to support such an incident has been found. The News-Letter was four years old before Boone announced his supply of the Reverend Daffy's concoction.

The Elixir entered an American medical scene different from that of the mother country. Class and professional distinctions were much less extreme or important. Medical practitioners were not averse to being physician, surgeon, apothecary, and even midwife, all in one. The first American medical school was not to open until 1765, and only one in nine 18th-century doctors went abroad to seek a degree. The rest received their medical training as apprentices, and standards were lax. "Practitioners are laureated gratis with a title feather of Doctor," wrote a New Englander in 1690. "Potecaries, surgeons & midwifes are dignified according) to success." This situation put emphasis on practical matters rather than theory, and colonial doctors largely avoided the acrimonious disputes over conceptual medical systems that involved British physicians. Untrammeled empiricism could have its weaknesses, of course, and the wiser of the apprentice-trained physicians complained of evils. In 1738 "Philanthropos" wrote to a newspaper proposing a licensing system so as to remove the "Shoemakers, Weavers, and Almanack-Makers, with their virtuous Consorts, who have laid aside the proper Business of their Lives, to turn Quacks." But control efforts that were tried proved futile.

In one respect 18th-century America and England were alike: they both possessed an eager eclecticism with respect to medical remedies. Heir to the same ancient traditions, Americans dosed themselves with galenicals and chymicals, and swallowed complicated concoctions containing disgusting ingredients, in their efforts to drive away the ills that attacked them. These ills were many. Respiratory ailments, dysenteries, and malaria were the chronic diseases, taking a greater toll year in and year out than did the more feared smallpox and yellow fever, which occasionally struck with epidemic force. A corollary of the doctrine of signatures held that God had placed specific remedies for illnesses in the very regions where the ailments flourished. This view prompted a great searching of American fields and forests for curative plants and directed respectful attention to the healing arts of the Indians. Toward the end of the 17th century, for example, it was asserted that the Pennsylvania Indians were "as able physicians as any in Europe." Much effort was expended prying botanical secrets from Indian medicine men.

Thus when the English patent medicines began to appear on American shores they entered a therapeutic scene of considerable variety. Accepted in modest measure at first, to judge by newspaper advertising, they caught the public fancy beginning in the 1750's and were even more popular in the following decade. Sold throughout the colonies, the English medicines were listed over and over again in the advertising columns of papers published in Boston and New York, in Baltimore and Charleston. Zabdiel Boylston dispensed them in Massachusetts; Button Gwinnett sold them in Georgia. Nor were the imported pills and balsams confined to apothecaries' shelves for vending at the Sign of the Bible or the Sign of the Unicorn and Mortar. English remedies were sold by postmasters, goldsmiths, grocers, hairdressers, tailors, painters, booksellers, cork cutters, the post-rider between Philadelphia and Williamsburg, and by many American colonial physicians. A Virginia doctor, for example, who had migrated to America after graduating from the Royal College of Surgeons, founded a town on the frontier and dosed those who came to dwell therein with Bateman's Drops and Turlington's Balsam.

American newspaper advertising of the English packaged remedies was singularly drab. The apothecary or merchant had no proprietary interest in the imported brands. There was probably not so great a surplus of supply over demand in America as in Britain, and advertising space in the American weeklies was more at a premium than in the more frequent and numerous English journals. Thus, while the English proprietor sharpened up his adjectives and reached for his vitriol, in America, with rare exceptions, advertisers were content merely to list by name their supplies of imported English remedies. Typical was the advertisement in the Pennsylvania Gazette for December 1, 1768, by apothecary Thomas Preston. "At the Golden Mortar, opposite Black-Horse Alley," he announced as "Just imported from London" and for sale, "All the most useful kinds of patent medicines, as Anderson's, Hooper's and Lockyer's pills, Bateman's drops, British oil, Bostock's, Squire's and Daffey's elixirs, Stoughton's bitters, Turlington's balsam of life, Dr. James's fever powders, Godfrey's cordial."

In the whole span of the Boston News-Letter, beginning in 1704, it was not until 1763 that a bookstore devoted half a column of lively prose to extolling the merits of Dr. John Hill's four imported nostrums. One of them, the doctor claimed, was the restoration of a Greek secret which "convert[ed] a Glass of Water into the Nature and Quality of Asses Milk, with the Balsamick Addition." Two years earlier, in New York, a newspaper nostrum battle developed that rivaled in intensity the London feuds. Well it might, for one of the participants was Robert Turlington, the English patentee and proprietor of the popular Balsam of Life. He entered the lists late, after a handful of New York merchants had advertised his medicine for sale. They numbered among them one woman, a man at the Woman's Shoe-Store, and three male apothecaries. The dispute over who was vending the true article became so confusing to consumers that Turlington, alert to what was going on in America, decided to step in. In the pages of the Mercury he warned against counterfeiters, cut the Shoe-Store man off without another genuine vial, and announced he had sent a parcel of the Balsam to be sold by the Mercury's editor.

The infrequency of fanciful newspaper promotion was compensated for to some degree in broadside and pamphlet. A critic of the New York medical scene in the 1750's condemned physicians for using patent medicines learned about from "London quack bills." Often, the doctor complained, perhaps with exaggeration, these were their only reading matter. Certainly the English promoter sought to devise ingenious pamphlets and broadsides. Turlington, for one, had issued a 46-page brochure replete with didactic text in the best 18th-century fashion. Asserting that the "Author of Nature" provided "a Remedy for every Malady," which "Men of Learning and Genius" have "ransack'd" the "Animal, Mineral, and Vegetable World" to discover, Turlington avowed that his quest had led to the Balsam of Life, "a perfect Friend to Nature." The medicine, he said, 'Vivifies and enlivens the Spirits, mixes with the Juices and Fluids of the Body, and gently infuses its kindly Influence into those Parts that are most in Disorder." By so doing it cured a whole host of maladies, from dropsy to sprained thumbs. Its therapeutic potency, Turlington asserted, was proved by countless testimonials. Most of them were from humble people — a porter, the wife of a gardener, a hostler, a bodice-maker. Some bore a status of greater distinction — a "Mathematical Instrument-Maker" and the doorkeeper of the East India Company. The testimonials reached out toward America. One such certificate came from "a sailor before the mast, on board the ship Britannia in the New York trade"; another cited a woman living in Philadelphia. All who spoke were jubilant at their restored good health.

(Continues...)

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Table of Contents

• Frontmatter, pg. i
• Preface, pg. vii
• Acknowledgments, pg. x
• Contents, pg. xi
• 1. "At the Sign of Galen's Head", pg. 3
• 2. "Galvanising Trumpery", pg. 16
• 3. Vials and Vermifuges, pg. 31
• 4. 'The Old Wizzard", pg. 44
• 5. Hercules and Hydra, pg. 58
• 6. Purgation Unlimited, pg. 75
• 7. "To Arms! To Arms!!" and After, pg. 93
• 8. The Great Outdoors, pg. 111
• 9. St. George and the Dragon, pg. 125
• 10. "A Microbe Is a Microbe", pg. 144
• 11. The Pattern of Patent Medicine Appeals, pg. 165
• 12. Medicine Show, pg. 190
• 13. "The Great American Fraud", pg. 205
• 14. Dr. Wiley's Law, pg. 226
• 15. Half a Century Later, pg. 247
• A Note on the Sources, pg. 263
• Index, pg. 271