Evolving Advertisements Before Modern Medicine:

AHTC 2007 Summer Institute

Gregory Chew

Urbana High School English, Speech, Drama

According to Dr. Williamson Murray, keynote speaker of the AHTC Teachers’ Collaborative Summer Institute, the availability of penicillin to the Allies was a major advantage - the quicker recovery rate of soldiers made a huge difference. Before the war, he said that penicillin was disregarded, as the mold was excessively expensive. Prior to that, he stated, there was no real medicine in the 19th century, when surgeons were also barbers. Tellingly, there were a couple early advertisements provided as primary documents from 19th-century Urbana newspaper ads.

A perusal of pharmaceutical advertisements provided from the Urbana Drug Store and J.E. Hunt gives an indication of how medical advertising long preceded products of real value.

First, we meet two men, forty years apart. The first ad comes from the Urbana Union July 21, 1853 (first newspaper published in the county) and is an advertisement for the wares available at the Urbana Drug Store in 1853. The patron of the ad, J. W. Jaquith, was named one of two associate judges of the county who helped present in 1851 the successful election for the incorporation of the town of Urbana. He was also school commissioner for one month, from March to April 1853. Jesse W. Jaquith was mayor from June 22, 1857 to June 28, 1858. He was later the editor of the short-lived local newspaper Hickory Boy, suspended after the 1860 election. Online I find mention of his public meetings engaged in attempts to limit the expansion of slavery through the Missouri compromise. This is clearly a man who has weight in the nascent community.

He speaks in the ad of his numerous friends of whom he asks their continued patronage and the public’s by offering drugs and medicine at the lowest rates and highest quality. In the ad he notes how his stock is carefully selected and his determination “not to deal in an inferior article of any kind.” He then lists an extensive stock of goods followed by a representative list of oils, cordials, and “nearly all of the valuable patent medicines of the day”. He thanks his friends using the words sincerely and humbly in his “attempts to merit a share of its [the public’s] patronage.

Clearly Mr. Jaquith was an important local citizen, as can be seen by the positions he held in young Urbana. He alludes to that reputation, as well as recognizing the need to be humble in his “announcement” (“...has the pleasure of informing his friends and the public...”). It is his reputation that assures customers of quality product.

The second ad is for Dr. Thomas’ Eclectric Oil (sic) as sold in Urbana by J. (Joseph) E. Hunt. (Clearly giving a first name would compromise the dignity of the 19th-century Urbana man - neither one had his first name used in print. I had to search quite a while to find the first names. Maybe this says more about me…)

According to the Champaign County Herald, Mr. Hunt was chairman of the Republicans on the township committee. Minutes from county meetings show him being repaid $17.60 for providing medicines for prisoners and $6.70 for “sundries for jail”. He was noted in Urbana City Council meetings speaking on school issues and liquor licenses beginning June 2, 1879. He was appointed to the Urbana Free Library Board of Trustees in June 1877 and again in November 1884. Although the ad is undated, the company preparing the medication, Foster, Milburn & Co. of Buffalo, New York, didn’t acquire the Dr. Thomas product property until a few years after the 1880’s and J. E. Hunt died in 1891, indicating a publishing date in the late 1880’s.

There is a clear difference in advertising for medicines that shows how Urbana (and America) had changed in the intervening 40 or so years.

In Mr. Jaquith’s 1850’s, the nation had undergone the effects of Jacksonian democracy, which had bred a distrust of book-learning, raised to a national fever by the time Jackson was elected in 1828. Into this climate stepped a New Hampshire farmer named Samuel Thomson. Thomson distrusted doctors - "The priest, the doctor, and the lawyer," he wrote, all were guilty of "deceiving the people." The self-reliance of Thoreau became a reliance on folk medicines and packaged cures, known as patent medicines, and a clear repudiation of the over-educated. Thomson wandered through the woods, taste-testing different plants - or amusing himself when other boys vomited after one of his recommendations. He came up with 65 botanicals, six of which he patented, with his favorite being lobelia. His drugs included ginseng, peppermint, turpentine, camphor, and horseradish, plant products which he considered healthful because they grew towards the sun, source of heat, light and warmth. The prevalence of herbal remedies are clear in Jaquith’s ad listing such products, as well as the “mix-it-yourself” grocery list of products available for physicians and public alike.

A second feature of the ad is the lack of hucksterism. According to James Harvey Young, author of The Toadstool Millionaires: A Social History of Patent Medicines, “so long as the demand for a product exceeded the supply...the role of advertising could be simple and unsophisticated. Retailers could insert into newspapers the simple message: "Here it is. Come and get it." Customers would hurry to the store.”

This is the nature of J. W. Jaquith’s ad in 1853. The market for nostrums became competitive long before other products, because these unregulated products could be made from just about anything. Jaquith probably needed no more than his ad to announce his local monopoly - he announces himself as the local agent for all the popular patent medicines.

And what of the medications? Many of them are traditional herbal remedies, tending to be purgatives. Thomson believed that plants were beneficial because they grew towards the sun, the source of heat, light and life., as opposed to cold, lifeless minerals, such as mercury. His treatment began with strenuous purging to cleanse the body followed by healthful herbs bringing new heat to the body. Thomson used sixty to sixty-five herbs and drugs including ginseng, peppermint, turpentine, camphor, and horseradish. Lobelia remained his favorite way to cleanse the body through vomiting; cayenne pepper then was used to raise the temperature; and finally baths of hot steam to raise a sweat.

“This is the whole subject in a nut-shell, / Whatever makes bad digestion breeds disease; /whatever makes good digestion cured disease.”

Benjamin Brandreth, 1862

Inventor of Dr. Benjamin Brandreth's Vegetable Universal Pills and author of The Doctrine of Purgation, Curiosities from Ancient and Modern Literature, from Hippocrates and Other Medical Writers -- some two hundred sages were cited -- Covering a Period of Over Two Thousand Years, Proving Purgation Is the Corner-Stone of All Curatives

Dr. Brandreth was fond of the Biblical quote, Leviticus 17:11: "The life of the flesh is in the blood." Poor food, tainted water, and bad air (the origin of the term malaria) threatened to adulterate the blood and unbalance one’s health. So we see laxatives such as root and pulverized rhubarb, jalap powder, tinctured jalap, calcined magnesia, and tinctured senna. There are powerful purgatives, cathartics such as castor oil and epsom salts. Present too are mild diuretics, such as juniper oil, or the more powerful (and vile-tasting) Harlem oil. Stimulants also abound - lobelia, both a stimulating and a relaxing agent for childbirth, ammonium carbonate, piperine and other products of peppers. The market suggests a grocery list of medications that align with the Thomsonian movement in medicine. And asafetida? A gum resin with garlic-like odor to prevent spasms (note the word fetid ) which was sewed into a bag to be worn inside the clothes around the neck, especially for youngsters, to keep them from catching disease. If it worked, it was because the horrible smell insured that no one would get close enough to transmit anything.

In the decades following the Civil War, much changed. Urbana had grown. The expansion of manufacturing capacity caused supply to catch up with demand, and selling had become competitive.

The ad for Dr. Thomas’ Eclectric Oil shows in its very name the changes of society: the combination of “electric” and “eclectic.” “Electric” captures the modern science of “selected and electrized” as explained at the bottom of the page. The potion is electrized because electricity had captured the excitement of the age, even seen as the very basis of life in Mary Shelley’s new creation. (The illustration in the ad shows electricity generated by the bottle clasped in a man’s hand - both it and he are bursting with electrical energy). We still speak of electric as a means to produce energy of color, brilliant and vivid sense of excitement. The potion is eclectic because it was selected - chosen from a free market of ideas to be the best of a wide variety available. It was an age of inventors and practical men best described as eclectic - selecting what appears to be the best in various doctrines, methods, and styles.

Dr. S.N. Thomas formulated his famous oil in the late 1840s, and very profitably sold it for 30 years until he sold the name and formula in the 1880s. By then he had developed a huge national and international market, even being sold in Canada right up to the end of World War II. Collectors of patent medicine bottles in Canada consider it “uncollectible” because of the millions of bottles still found in old dumps.

The ad emphasizes the value of not containing alcohol or other volatile liquids, which would be lost by evaporation. Hence is shown the emphasis on value - the motto “worth its weight in gold”. The product is not valued cheaply – the $1 bottle would be a day’s pay for a female teacher in 1880, although male teachers would fare about 50% better.

This ad is competitive: first of all, the product needs to be known, by name, with an eastern (New York) following evidenced by fervent and detailed testimonials, and a name made familiar by repetition and a distinctive and stylized type-face.

The product is versatile - scores of internal and external ailments are alleviated by this product as proclaimed in the testimonials in the many newspaper ads - and especially trade cards, with attractive color lithographs on one side and advertising on the other.

An interesting aspect of these medicines was the availability of these trade cards. These cards began as copper engravings in the 17th century (Paul Revere made many of them) and grew to a huge industry with the advent of color printing. Collecting these colorful cards became a popular Victorian pastime, with attractive themes of history, patriotism, beauty, humor, and sentiment. These cards only lost their appeal at the beginning of the twentieth century with new techniques of color printing for magazines opening a new mass audience for advertisers. Although Dr. Thomas’ Oil bottles may be uncollectible, the cards given out freely by pharmacists and other health workers are today very collectable.

So in the intervening 40 years populism and pioneering self-reliance had given way to a new reverence for science (however unfounded), and a competitive market economy required new techniques of mass advertising and mass appeal. Mr. Jaquith’s quiet assurance of his reputation among his neighbors had been supplanted by the testimonials of strangers.

How have we progressed? We again find ourselves at a time when we begin to question the healthiness of our lifestyles, our environment, and even the medications we use. Local newspapers have recently raised alarm about pharmaceuticals in ground water, adulterated ingredients in medications outsourced overseas, and the dangers of a chronically over-medicated society.

I selected these ads because I teach persuasion in speech class, and do an advertising unit for a sales speech. I was intrigued by the difference between the two ads and wanted to know more about what these two documents show about the evolving media, advertising, and markets. Students should clearly be able to see the more aggressive approach used by the end of the century and start to see the outlines of the century to come.

I will have students identify the emotional and logical appeals from the colorful advertising cards as well as contrasting them to more sophisticated medical advertising today, techniques of which were already becoming apparent by contrasting Mr. Jaquith’s simple announcement to J.E. Hunt’s ad, clearly an ad which was standardized boilerplate from a national advertising campaign.

I found two sources that will reward further attention. One is a website that examines medical fraud, (quackwatch.org) which featured James Harvey Young’s The Toadstool Millionaires: A Social History of Patent Medicines.

I also found a wonderful slide talk at the American Institute of the History of Pharmacy, showing 19th century Proprietary Medicine Trading Cards. (http://www.pharmacy.wisc.edu/aihp/Excerpts/Helfand_Slides/index.htm)

I was drawn to pharmacy ads, as well, for personal reasons - after four years of college, my son will be applying to graduate pharmacy programs next year.

Finally, I enjoyed researching the origins of Mr. Jaquith’s stock-in-trade as they revealed the early attitudes toward self-medication in America. I came to my conclusions after researching the nature and the origins of a number of his items. I can envision an activity for students to learn much about the early history of medicines (perhaps an interesting side trip for them after meeting the apothecary in Romeo and Juliet).