Updated: 5 days ago
Not everything is bigger in Texas.
AUTHOR’S PROLOGUE: A single letter came to my attention a year ago while I was engaged in a project of digitizing the Gandy Collection of family and business records and correspondence for Montgomery County, Texas, from the mid- and late-19th century. It was a personal letter, written in October 1859 by Sarah Elizabeth Davis to her sister, Amelia Jane Davis. What struck me as so especially poignant was Betty’s discussion of the season’s dangerous yellow fever epidemic, followed a paragraph later by her personal experience of being repeatedly bitten by mosquitoes and seeing it only as a miserable inconvenience. There was no way for her to know that some of those mosquitoes could be the vectors of yellow fever. I have researched the impact of the 1859 yellow fever epidemic on Betty, Montgomery, Texas, and the region, and would like to share it now with you.
High Noon
A month of drought across Texas in August 1859 had baked the crops, greatly reducing their yields. People were anxious for better times. Houses, barns, and stores were little better than ovens on the landscape, made barely habitable by wide-open windows, handheld fans, and likely various forms of liquid refreshment.
Little changed as summer melted into fall. On September 15th, the hot, humid, sun-burned air continued to blanket the little town of Montgomery, 50 miles northwest of Houston; in other words, it was another typical Texas day. But it was also a day for celebration as the town welcomed it’s guest of honor, “the lion of the day, the hero of his country,” governor-elect Sam Houston.
Loud Cheering
A huge crowd, estimated at as many as 3,000 – more than the entire population of the town – thronged to the all-day festivities. It was the rare day like this that made all the heat, all the manual labor, and the many do-withouts of rural life bearable. It was likely a welcome diversion even for a woman like the pregnant Sarah Elizabeth Davis, who went by “Betty”; she busied herself daily with household chores in addition to her pregnancy and mothering her toddler. The celebration was a refreshing break indeed.
The air was full of sounds, sights, and smells to savor: cannons thundered tributes; the minister’s invocation lifted heavenward; the inevitably long-winded VIP speeches did their part to further warm the atmosphere; patriotic music of the brass band marched through the breeze; beckoning smells of the Texas-sized barbecue on a very long table set for 700 to be seated, and even a manned hot air balloon drifted up into the sky. Later, bright lamps were suspended over “the fair women and brave men” who danced into the night. In newspaper accounts of the celebration, no mention was made of a single mosquito; even an occasional minuscule blood-sucking puncture was a tolerable inconvenience in the mist of so much fun – it was just another fact of life in Texas and the least of their worries.
Low Moaning
Like many of the towns and villages in eastern and inland Texas, Montgomery was established close by water – several creeks along the west fork of the San Jacinto River. They were sources of water for drinking, cooking, farming, laundry, and sometimes waste disposal. Hot and humid Texas summers sometimes turned creeks into boggy swamps and the gasses emanating from them drifted under noses and into homes.
On October 10th, less than a month after the Sam Houston celebration, Betty wrote to her sister Jane in Mississippi, that with her husband away on business and her toddler sleeping, she was finally able to write the letter; she also gossiped about neighbors who were “splitting the blanket” (divorcing) and of another yellow fever epidemic breaking out nearby. In the hot season, outbreaks of yellow fever, nicknamed “Yellow Jack,” were always alarming news.
In that long season of hot, humid weather that dominates the Texas calendar, the bad-smelling air was the harbinger of sickness, the omen that people would soon die. The stink of rotting vegetation and other foulness often seemed to result in young and old getting suddenly, terribly sick. A healthy young man in one moment could become suddenly ill in the next with muscle aches, nausea, chills and a fever that could quickly push the mercury up the thermometer to dangerously high temperatures. The skin and eyes turned yellow, signifying liver failure which earned the disease its name, the yellow fever. The body became death’s barometer: the deeper and more wide-spread the yellow, the sicker the person was becoming. Within as few as three days, they often began puking what was called “the black vomit” – dark blood hemorrhaging from the nose and stomach – a sure sign that the end was near. Before Sunday dinner, the person who had sat next to you at the dinner table during last week’s sabbath was suddenly gone and often – too often – someone else at this week’s dinner table was starting to turn yellow.
Texans got sick from other lethal epidemics throughout the 19th century, like cholera, measles, smallpox, and dengue fever, but for frequency, yellow fever outpaced them all. Epidemics broke out in almost every hot season between 1839 to 1867. Doctors and patent medicine makers promised cures for the disease, but they were just guessing. The doctor’s mercury injections and mustard baths did no more good than St. Nicholas Stomach Bitters. It was advertised heavily throughout Texas during the hot weather epidemic of 1859 by incongruously using the symbol of winter, Santa Claus, sitting next to a chimney, holding a bottle of the bitters in his hands, promising that “As a Tonic in Cases of Yellow and other Fevers, incidental to Tropical Climates, it is unsurpassed.” Some may have taken false comfort in the graphic suggestion of a cold weather cure. A heavy frost (also called a “white frost”) stopped further cases and spread of the disease. Mother Nature could end an epidemic, but Saint Nicholas was a fraud.
Quiet Buzzing
In her October letter to her sister, Betty wrote that two local friends were away when yellow fever cases began showing up on the river (she didn’t specify which one), and they would therefore probably stay away until about Christmas. It was a common response to the earliest reports of confirmed cases of yellow fever – many would travel far away to protect themselves from the disease; residents of Galveston and Houston often ran away from the city to the interior when new cases were emerging in the coastal cities; Betty’s friends were doing the same thing, waiting until a heavy frost ensured the end of the epidemic.
The only effective defense to prevent the fever’s spread was quarantine, isolating the infected from the healthy. She explained further,
There is some excitement in town about yellow fever. Two persons have died with it[;] one a white man the other a negro belonging to Dr. Price[;] both had been exposed to it at Cypress City where it is now raging – The Town Authorities have been yesterday and today passing some [quarantine] regulations to keep any more cases from coming here -
Betty and her husband, Nathaniel Hart Davis, a lawyer and Montgomery’s first mayor (in 1848) would have been well aware of the yellow fever epidemic that had devastated the town of Cincinnati, Texas, in 1853. That small country town was only 44 miles to the northeast of Montgomery and it lost a quarter of its population, about 150 people, to the disease. Betty wrote to her sister that the 1859 epidemic was “now raging” in Cypress City, 33 miles to the south of her Montgomery home, and two men exposed to the yellow fever in Cypress City had come to Montgomery and died there. One report stated that 33 of the 54 residents of Cypress City were sick with Yellow Jack and there were three deaths within the last few days of the report: “The conditions of the place [are] truly deplorable.” Betty bravely told her sister that she didn’t “apprehend any danger unless some of the citizens here were to [catch] it that had not been exposed to it [elsewhere].” She was hoping that the new town quarantine regulations would prevent it from coming any closer to her house and family.
Then Betty’s letter shifted to more pleasant topics, like the new spotted flannel material she bought to make her toddler some winter clothes and the calico and gingham dress she had bought for herself. She tried to keep her focus, but she had become so tired, she couldn’t even finish her sentence: “You must tell me if you get any nice dresses – I am getting sleepy.” Then she told her sister that what was really messing up her focus as she wrote was not sleepiness but mosquitoes:
The musketoes are worse than I ever saw them. I can hardly stay in the house for they bite me so. I don’t know what I am writing scarcely. I wish we could have a white frost to kill them for we will be annoyed with them until we do have frost.
This woman, wife, and mother lived during an epidemic outbreak in a town with terminal cases, nearby another town where it was “raging” and strangers were stopping at and passing through her town that may themselves have the disease. The chances that an infected aedes aegypti mosquito would land on Betty or her babies were, in deed, elevated – she and her family were certainly at risk. Two weeks after Betty finished the letter to her sister, three more deaths occurred in Montgomery and two more men were expected to die. By November 30th yellow fever deaths had totaled 15 in the town, including one of its doctors; he was a 36-year-old husband and father of four small children, which included a newborn. The future of the Davis family of Montgomery, Texas, could have been far different if just one of those mosquitoes that were driving Betty to distraction as she tried to write her letter had been the lethal kind.
But don’t worry, happy ending lovers. Betty had not inadvertently written her own eulogy. She and Nat and their toddler all survived the yellow fever epidemic of 1859 and she successfully delivered a healthy baby girl on December 30th, whom they named after her sister Jane. A thick frost had settled in on November 12th, the temperature having dropped from 80° to 25° Fahrenheit in less than 24 hours and a newspaper reported.
The wind continued all Saturday night, and Sunday morning found ice everywhere, ice in the prairie, and ice in the town, ice in the gutters and ice in the houses, ice in the kitchens and ice in the bedrooms, And cold? – guess it was cold! Cold enough to keep lazy people and invalids in bed half the morning; … cold enough to freeze the horns off from a Billy goat! And of course, cold enough to freeze Yellow Jack’s ears off. Runaways can come back now. The frost we have had has killed the fever if frost will do it. Last night we had another heavy frost. And to-day is bright and beautiful, but not brighter or more cheerful than the faces of our citizens, who are all rejoicing that the dark days are over.
In the decades to come, Texas outlaws would become infamous for being the bad boys of the Wild West – mean, unpredictable, and dangerous. All combined, Texas-based outlaws like James “Killer Miller,” Sam Bass, Doc Holliday, John Wesley Hardin, Butch Cassidy, and the Sundance Kid were said to have killed about 63 people. Amateurs. There was another killer in Texas – Yellow Jack – a deadly terror that killed an estimated 4,000 in Texas alone during the 19th century, without a single bullet being fired from a six-shooter. It was the meanest, most unpredictable, and most dangerous killer of them all – and it was just a quarter-inch long.
AUTHOR’S POSTSCRIPT : By the way, if you’re enjoying my blog, the kindest favor you could do for me is to tell a friend about it. The blog has about 50 consistent readers at this point, which is wonderful, but now my goal is 100! Thanks very much for your continued support.
Lynn Massachusetts history - History of medicine - 19th-Century Health Remedies - Vintage Medical Ephemera - 19th-century medicine
- Andrew Rapoza
- May 6
- 21 min read
Updated: 5 days ago
He proudly specialized in upsetting the apple cart.
John Lackland Curtis lived just 50 years, from 1830 to 1880; exactly half of those years were spent as a doctor. During his abbreviated career, he attracted a devoted base of patients and a bitter group of enemies among his fellow physicians. Today, the scant evidence of his career could just as easily be interpreted to expose him as a dangerous quack or to shine on him as a valiant physician. Either way he is a fascinating actor on the Victorian stage of sickness and health – Shhh! The play is about to begin!
SCENE 1: (painted on the backdrop) – The Eagle Hotel
The three-story brick hotel was a hive of commotion, abuzz with activity. Workers and drones from near and far came to the Eagle Hotel and its watering hole, the Eagle Tavern. It was a landmark in the village of Batavia, New York, half way between Buffalo and Rochester; the village was building up quickly now that the Civil War was over, and the Eagle Hotel lorded over the bustle.
“Opposite the Eagle” was the key direction in advertisements of businesses that stood on the other side of Main Street, in the shadow of the hotel. The local news stand, the incongruously paired Oyster, Fish, and Fruit Depot, and the furniture store carrying chairs, coffins, and picture frames, all told their customers to find the hotel first in order to find their stores. The Eagle was also namedropped to help customers find the Sunbeam Gallery, a photographic studio in its second-floor perch on Main Street. Nearby businesses thrived on the existence of the Eagle.
The Eagle provided free omnibus transportation to and from the trains and it had large barns and an attentive hostler to take care of the carriage and wagon teams of those who came by horse. The Eagle also had its own tavern “furnished with the best brands of Wines, Liquors, and Cegars,” as its 1866 advertisement promised. The Eagle’s telegraph connection had also given it some national attention back on 15 April 1861 when President Lincoln’s call for 75,000 volunteers was read at the hotel and immediately responded to with what a congressional investigation later confirmed was the Union’s first volunteer. In 1869 an ambitious salesman was allowed to set up his American brand sewing machines in the hotel’s drawing room (parlor). The Eagle also served as a wedding venue in 1867 for a groom from Battle Creek, Michigan, and his bride from the nearby village of Pavilion. From hotel and tavern to wedding venue, salesroom, and local landmark, the Eagle was a gathering point for everyone and none relied on it more than traveling doctors.
A well-located, affordable hotel provided traveling doctors everything they needed: a place to sleep, set up a temporary office, receive patients, and leave quickly when it was prudent. Temporary doctor’s offices in hotels happened so frequently and in so many of the nation’s hotels, those needing medical care often accepted such a location as a standard part of the medical landscape during the mid and late 19th century.
The doctors’ hotel accommodations served as clinics, examining rooms, and operating rooms, when necessary. In July 1866 a local farmer injured in a carriage accident had his leg amputated at the Eagle Hotel and he was reportedly recovering favorably “under the circumstances." Four years later he was still lame but for the balance of his life he was able to resume his career as a farmer.
The public were nonetheless generally leery of traveling doctors – the very term smacked of quackery and those claiming special skills made them even more suspect – but there were those whose advertisements were well written with tones of supreme medical knowledge, accompanied by testimonials of astounding success and, well, they just sounded so doggone believable. People who were sick enough and already disillusioned by the ineffectiveness of their regular, local doctor were ready to try something new because maybe, just maybe, that new doctor at the Eagle Hotel had the cure. So the desperate and hopeful went down to the hotel quickly because the traveling doctor was usually there just a day or so before he had disappeared in the morning haze or the dusk of twilight.
The Eagle Hotel was that kind of hotel, a favorite stopover for traveling doctors. Dr. Bort, the “Celebrated European Eye, Ear and Lung Physician,” was an eclectic doctor, meaning he tried a little bit of everything in his healing. Dr. Williams assured Batavia he was “no impostor or quack” but a “master of his profession,” thoroughly educated at a university, and Dr. Liston from the Albany Eye and Ear Infirmary would operate on your eyes there in his hotel room. Dr. Crumb promoted himself as an “Oculist and Aurist” who could also remove cancers without pain or use of the knife, and Dr. Vescelius, Magnetic Physician, had “performed such wonderful cures in this village recently.” In 1867 the Batavia newspaper wrote admiringly of its prompt-paying customer, Dr. White, an Analytical Physician:
We do not count the doctor as a "travelling physician," since his appointments are so regularly kept. … we have always found him … a good example to the many jugglers who wander the country over, calling themselves "physicians"! Dr. White must not be confounded with these. The Doctor will be at the Eagle Hotel on Monday, Oct 21st.
Even the Genesee County Medical Society held meetings at the Eagle Hotel, probably while protesting that quacks were allowed to nest under the same roof for the day. It was bad enough that the Batavia newspapers were filled with ads for quack medicines, like Cherokee Pills, Dr. Wright’s Rejuvenating Elixir, and Dr. T. B. Talbot’s Medicated Pineapple Cider, all designed to thwart the use of medical society doctors; and J. W. Poland’s Humour Doctor – a veritable doctor-in-a-bottle – but in the eyes of the medical society, the Eagle Hotel had become a den of iniquity, a seedy shelter for pay-by-the-day medical scoundrels. On 25 May 1867, Dr. John L. Curtis, “Physician, Surgeon and Obstetrician” was the newest of those non-medical society doctors to set up in the hotel for a one-day stay. He had already been selling his medicines out of Batavia from June through August 1866 and was the only doctor advertising surgical services during that time, so he might have been the one who performed the farmer’s amputation in July. It was getting crowded at the Eagle; feathers were going to fly.
SCENE 2: (enter) – The Villain
By their way of thinking, there was a lot for the Genesee County Medical Society to dislike and disapprove of about Dr. J. L. Curtis; to them, he was the poster boy for quackery. He made and advertised his own medicines, the principal one being Curtis’ Cholera King. He also promoted himself in Batavia’s The Spirit of the Times newspaper from 1867 to 1868, touting his specialization in cancer, consumption (tuberculosis), and “Obscure Diseases of the BRAIN and MIND.” He duplicated the wording from his newspaper ad on an eye-catching advertising trade card that also let people know he would be at the Eagle Hotel each Wednesday afternoon.
I believe Dr. Curtis's choice of card style was a significant reflection of his personality. He was innovative in his medical methods and not afraid to explore options for the optimal solution to a problem. This card style, developed during the closing years of the Civil War, was a little-used choice among advertising trade cards at the time he selected it, being overshadowed by designs transitioning from the century-long use of ornate copperplate engraving to the arrival of color lithography, often with illustrations of flowers, animals, and children. Instead, Dr. Curtis chose this avant-garde technological advance that blended together a piece of albumen print photography glued on to a card printed in letterpress. His card focused not on the intense detailing of copperplate, nor the attraction of color or appealing florals or animal designs, but on himself and his business – and given the description of his practice, which stated that he was a physician and surgeon specializing in such difficult and usually hopeless diseases as cancer and consumption and, more radically, “Obscure Diseases of the BRAIN and MIND,” his card was quite unusual and distinctive in the public’s hands. They knew exactly who he was and what he said he could do, as well as where he would be doing it.
In the medical society court of opinion, however, Dr. Curtis was a medical heretic. An ugly, painful wart on the backside of the medical profession. They were convinced he was just another quack, no more creditable than Dr. Vescelius, the magnetic healer; just another nostrum maker who bottled and sold his fraudulent cure to a gullible public, using newspapers, these “private cards,” and handbills to attract their business. They were right about one thing – he was not one of them.
The medical journey of John Lackland Curtis started long before he came onto Life’s stage. His father, Newman Curtis, the son of a farmer, engaged in a personal migration in search of his own farm. He traveled from his home in the hills of western Massachusetts, across upstate New York, and settled on the fertile black muckland of the Genesee Valley. The land treated him well, providing bounteous harvests of wheat, corn, and potatoes, and feeding his many sheep, swine, horses, and cows. There, on a farm in Shelby, Orleans County, one mile south of Millville, he and his wife, Mariah, raised their eight sons and six daughters in a way few parents equaled – all fourteen survived their childhood and became adults.
In the process of guiding them through their young lives, all of the children were enrolled in Millville Academy, where their father Newman served as president of the academy’s board of trustees for at least a year. The Curtis farm was 120 acres; it was larger and more profitable than a majority of the 200 farms in the county. The Curtis farm and family were both doing well; five sons continued the family legacy of farming while the other three continued their education, two becoming lawyers and one, John, becoming a physician.
In 1855 new opportunity called John’s parents to Iowa. They sold their 120-acre Shelby farm and purchased 250 acres of prime farmland in Iowa. Ten of their children moved west as well, of which six continued their father’s farming legacy with their spouses. The three daughters and one son remaining in New York were adults; two of the daughters were already married and settled down, and the third may have been engaged, since she married shortly after her parents’ move. The only son remaining in New York was 25-year-old John L. Curtis; in 1855 he had gotten married and graduated from medical school, the culmination of ten years of medical education. The Iowa soil did not call out to him; New York was the young doctor’s past, present, and future.
SCENE 3: (backstage) – The Medical School Marathon
John started down a medical path early in life when he had developed a passion for reading and study. After his graduation from Millville Academy, his parents sent 15-year-old John 53 miles away to Genesee Wesleyan Seminary in Lima, NY, to engage in more advanced studies, ranging from chemistry and electricity to trigonometry and zoology. A year later in 1846, the 16-year-old was able to begin his medical apprenticeship, training for the next five years under Dr. Azotus M. Frost, physician, druggist, and county coroner in Medina, NY (next to Millville), then with Dr. Almon V. Belding (a physician in Shelby who later became a dentist), and finally with a Dr. Benjamin.
In 1852 the 22-year-old John went off to Geneva Medical College, a school noted for producing the nation’s first female physician, Elizabeth Blackwell in 1849, and the Native American physician, Wa-o-wa-wa-na-onk of the Cayuga tribe in 1844. While there, John was advised and influenced by the school’s chair of surgery to attend the Philadelphia College of Medicine to get specialized training in treating obscure diseases of the brain and mind and chronic diseases considered incurable. The highly motivated medical student took his mentor’s advice.
For the next two years, John prepared for his matriculation at the Philadelphia Medical College by first attending the Philadelphia School of Anatomy where he specialized in microscopic anatomy, specifically cell structure. He then entered the Philadelphia Medical College, a five-story building with two lecture rooms, an anatomical theater, a dissecting room, classrooms, and a pharmacy department to instruct advanced students. He took two semesters of courses from its vigorous medical curriculum, which included such subjects as chemistry, obstetrics, toxicology, surgery, and pathology. The courseload involved five or six lectures daily, except for Wednesdays and Saturdays, when those mornings were devoted to attendance at hospitals and the college clinic, where patients were “exhibited, operations publicly performed, and lectures delivered.”
There were six requirements for graduation; the student must have: (1) been at least 21 and have spent three or more years acquiring knowledge of medicine; (2) studied two or more years as a pupil of a regular and reputable physician; (3) taken two full courses of lectures; (4) completed a thesis upon some medical subject; (5) presented a letter of recognition from a preceptor; and (6) successfully passed an examination before the faculty. John Lackland Curtis, age 25, had passed through all the hoops of the medical gauntlet and he excelled as he did so, having been named the college’s prosector for several terms (the student appointed by the college’s surgical chair to have the privilege of dissecting the corpses during anatomical demonstration). He was one of nineteen in his graduating class, receiving his medical degree on 7 July 1855. His parents probably missed his graduation – two months earlier they were almost a thousand miles away, purchasing their new farm in Iowa. Then two months after becoming a medical doctor, he married Lucy Cram back in New York. Babies followed shortly thereafter, as babies usually do.
SCENE 4: (stage right) – The New Physician Breaks the Mold (with brief cameos by his children)
Marriage and career can both be demanding masters, which can make their co-existence a challenge. The newly minted Dr. Curtis was now juggling both, dividing his time between providing for his family and succeeding in his new career. The year following his graduation and marriage, he returned to Philadelphia and studied at Dr. Warrington’s Obstetric Institute; only graduated physicians were invited to attend. The post-graduate study of the diseases of women and children was a professional choice, but preparing for his own family may also have been on his mind. After ten years of almost continuous medical study, he was ready for the practice of medicine, settling his new family in the village of Elba in the Genesee Valley, close by the old family farm of his youth. And then the children made their appearances, some in brief cameo roles.
In 1858 Bellanora “Bell” Curtis was born, but she died after just a little more than two months of life. It was a bitter reality for 19th-century families, but perhaps a little more bitter when a doctoring father couldn’t save his own baby. The next year Lucy gave birth to their second daughter, Cora Belle Curtis, and she was able to slip past the lethal accidents and diseases of youth. Then in 1862 John and Lucy were blessed with their first son, Franklin H. Curtis, but in another ten months, he too had passed away; today the graves of Bellanora and Franklin share a single white marble headstone with two weather-worn carved lambs resting peacefully on the top. Three months after Franklin’s death, Lucy gave birth to their last child, John L. Curtis, their only surviving son, named after his proud father.
During the Civil War, Dr. Curtis was busy trying to create his family and establishing an income. He took up manufacturing goods for market, starting with grape wine; he was taxed on 160 gallons in 1865. He then began advertising his own medicines in 1866. He undertook making and selling conventional medical products of the day, like a croup balsam, a blood and liver corrector, and medicated plasters, all of which were put up in bottles and boxes that simply had glued-on labels. None of his medicine bottles were embossed; the glass was probably aqua tinted and riddled with bubbles, but all sides were smooth and slick. The majority of embossed bottles on store shelves were nostrums competing for attention and full of empty promises – perhaps young Dr. Curtis was trying to distance his product from those his newspaper advertisement called “Life Elixirs, Quack Cures, and Pain Eradicators, &c. &c.” Even his principal product with the high-toned name, Curtis’ Cholera King, came in plain, labeled bottles. The price of his medicines were also not exorbitant like so many patent medicines that cost a dollar or more; his were fifty cents per bottle and twenty-five cents per plaster.
Dr. Curtis had focused on making medicines that he said benefited the entire family; he called them “FAMILY MEDICINES.” He vividly described what he saw when his oldest and youngest patients (perhaps even his own children) were attacked by Asiatic cholera, “when scorched by fever, frantic with pain, writhing in colic cramps, or seemingly torn in flesh and broken in bone by convulsive spasms.” He again wrote with the first-hand knowledge of a doctor and perhaps, also as a father, when he called his croup balsam “a Heaven-sent harbinger of good to the family during Fall and Spring,” when lung diseases hit, “decimating the ranks of childhood, dangl[ing] the pall of death over every hearthstone.” Selling his own medicines was an excellent way of generating some cash in the post-war economy and it was a practice he had seen his medical predecessors engage in while he was under their tutelage. Dr. Frost, for example, ran his own pharmacy and had been actively promoting the sale of Vaughn’s Vegetable Lithontriptic Mixture for kidney stones and James McClintock, M.D., the founder of John’s alma mater, the Philadelphia Medical College, also sold an entire line of his own proprietaries, including Dr. McClintock’s Diarrhea Cordial and Cholera Preventive; Dr. McClintock’s Dyspepsia Elixir, and Dr. McClintock’s Vegetable Purgative Pills.
In 1866 Dr. John L. Curtis advertised his medicines in the Batavia newspaper. Unlike the flashy, brassy claims and promises other medicine companies splashed around in the same newspaper, his ad copy read more like a treatise for medical students; in fact, his erudite writing style probably made it too difficult for some of the less-educated readers to follow:
Cholera King is a therapeutical agent of acknowledged pre-eminent merit. Thoroughly scientific in its chemical combination, while it possesses mildness, safety, and marvelous potency of remedial action, combined with an extended range of application in domestic practice.
While he understood a memorable product name was important, it seemed as though he had no idea or just wasn’t concerned that it was equally important to keep the message simple; or perhaps he just lacked the requisite skills for effective marketing and compelling copywriting.
After just three months (from June to August 1866) of advertising his medicines in Batavia’s The Spirit of the Times, the advertisements disappeared from the newspapers – even his trade card in 1867 didn’t mention his medicines; his focus, first and foremost, was on being a successful physician.
John Curtis did well as a doctor and provider for his family. In 1860 he was recognized by the census taker as a “Phisisian & Surgeon” with an estate valued at $1,850; by 1870 it had increased to $10,000 ($71,281 in 1860 vs $239,325 in 1870, when inflation-adjusted into 2024 USD). His increasing affluence allowed him to contribute $25 ($503 today) to a fund-raising campaign for purchasing a site for a blind asylum in Batavia in 1866. His prosperity also seemed to be a measure of his popularity. He was repeatedly elected to be one of the county coroners, like his early apprenticeship master, Dr. Frost had been. He was an active Methodist and was chosen by its members to represent them at several conferences.
Depending on who was looking, Doctor Curtis might have seemed like other shady traveling physicians who practiced strange, unorthodox, and even dangerous methods out of a hotel room and were gone by the next day’s light. But neither his travels or his methods were borne out of devious design – right or wrong, he did what he did because his believed his education and self-confidence elevated his ability above the standard, orthodox practice of medicine in his day. His travel was not a shady itineracy but a well-publicized travel triangle with a scheduled pattern of stops in Buffalo, Batavia and Rochester, each on the same day or days each week, at the same hotels. He was recognized for using many non-standard medical tools and methods in his practice that reflected his medical education in electricity, chemistry, and microscopy. He used electricity and magnetism “for those multitudinous diseases of the nerve and brain which are so alarming on the increase”; for lung congestion and consumption he used electro-atomic pulmonary baths (whatever those were); and his treatment of cancer involved hypodermic medication of the parts, accompanied by electrolysis with the galvanic battery – hypodermics were a new technology that had only become available for general use after the Civil War. His allies and apologists in the newspapers said his unusual methods were all a reflection of his approach to medicine,
(1874): His method of treating disease varies according to the requirements of the case. He will not be tied down to any one straight-jacket theory or practice but is a reformer in every sense of the word; and yet he adheres strictly to the use of only approved remedies and remedial agencies.
(1875): Dr. Curtis is a specialist in the ranks of the old school of practice.
(1876): While adhering, as a basis, to the old school of practice, he has had the independence to seize upon and apply every discovery of modern thought and science, from whatever source it came, that promised any valuable aid in the art of healing. … his mission is to … break down all merely arbitrary barriers, and extend all such limits … [emphases added]
The rather awkward high-brow advertising copy for his medicines were a reflection of who he had become: a well-educated, innovative, non-conforming doctor. Depending on who was speaking, he was called a medical reformer, pioneer, or an outright quack. Wounded and angered that Dr. Curtis was being hoisted on a pedestal at the expense of their reputations and “old school” orthodox practices, the Genesee County Medical Society publicly excoriated him, it being centuries too late to stone him.
SCENE 5: (stage left) – The Bull in the China Shop (cacophonous crescendo)
The Genesee County Medical Society loathed everything about Dr. John L. Curtis; every diagnosis he made, every treatment he advised, and every medicine he sold was an abomination. To them he was an iconoclast, a revolutionary disrespectfully breaking every rule they lived by – he was the proverbial bull in their China shop. When he applied to join their medical society they refused his application. Their list of his violations to the rigid code of conduct for a member of the medical society ranged from major and minor infractions to ones that were totally fabricated. Their list of 13 sweeping objections can categorically be synthesized town to a half dozen:
He practiced “irregular” medicine (practicing outside of the codified medical society standards). (major violation that was true)
He was unschooled in medicine (he didn’t attend medical society-approved schools). (major violation that was false)
He bought his medical diploma. (major violation that was false)
He filled out the medical society membership application incorrectly. (minor violation; the truth is unknown)
He advertised his medical services. (major violation that was true)
He made, advertised, and sold his own medicines. (major violation that was true)
The newspapers analyzed the medical society’s objections differently:
… he incurred the hostility of certain members of the county medical society because he sometimes differed with them as to the proper mode of treating certain cases or forms of disease. [He preferred practicing] medicine in his own way, rather than to be hindered or interfered with by any society. This so irritated the members … that they began to [spread rumors that he] was a mere quack and medical swindler; that he had no diploma; that he couldn’t become a member of the society. (Jamestown [NY] Daily Republican; emphasis added)
Dr. Curtis took the Genesee Medical Society to court – the New York Supreme Court – and won his case. The court ordered the medical society to admit him as a member and said that, once a member, if he didn’t abide by the by-laws, “the question of expulsion will arise.” The society received him as a member in January 1872, “under protest.” Like a stern parent, the court had laid down the law between two squabbling children, but neither side was willing to play nice. Nothing had been resolved.
SCENE 6: The Expulsion and Life Beyond (trumpet flourish)
The court’s opinion proved prophetic – Dr. Curtis was expelled from the Genesee County Medical Society slightly more than two years later, on 9 April 1874, for “gross violation of the Code of Medical Ethics.” Yet Dr. Curtis’s career didn’t skip a beat – if anything he became more successful. The newspapers in all three corners of his travel circuit supported and praised the doctor and consistent advertiser. At each destination he had established his own staffed pharmacy (called “one of the most elaborate and extensive in the country”) and medical office, where “he did a large business both in the sale of his medicines and by his practice.” In 1877 the editors of a Buffalo newspaper proclaimed,
Dr. Curtis is a Physician whom we can endorse from personal knowledge, and we venture to assert that no man in the United States has, during the past three years, treated the same number of difficult cases, of all sorts of diseases, with anything like the average success that Dr. Curtis has met with. … if you are suffering from any obstinate or malignant disease, seize upon the first opportunity of consulting Dr. Curtis.
In 1878 the Buffalo and Batavia newspapers published a three-part guest lecture by Dr. Curtis on the subject of diphtheria, a highly contagious and often-lethal disease, especially of children that ultimately ended in their suffocation by formation of a greyish membrane that blocked the entrance of air into their lungs. The well-meaning doctor declared that a clean body, inside and out, were the best means of removing blood poison that he believed caused diphtheria to end fatally. He emphatically concluded,
… any legalized practitioner of medicine who ignorantly or wantonly allows his patient to pass on day after day with skin unbathed and bowels constipated, should have his diploma nullified and his action held answerable to the charge of malpractice.
He sounded, at least, like the local expert on diphtheria.
SCENE 7: The Double Finale (curtain closes)
In March 1879, three months after the diphtheria series concluded, Johnny, the only remaining son of Dr. John L. Curtis, just a little over 15 years old, died at his parents’ residence – of diphtheria.
The disease which caused his death was diphtheria, contracted while tenderly caring for his father’s patients. He was a bright, manly little fellow, loved by all who knew him. To have him taken away at this time when he was just on the threshold of manhood was a cruel blow to father, mother and sister …Johnnie’s most marked virtue was his devotion to his father and mother …The sports which are so dear to others of his age, he freely gave up that he might render assistance to his father in his visits to the sick, with whom he often stayed all night to administer the remedies which his father prescribed. … He was taken sick on Wednesday, and the Lord received his released spirit on the following Sunday.
A few months before Johnny’s death, the Daily Morning News of Batavia had found it newsworthy to mention that Dr. Curtis had managed to walk up two flights of stairs to their office, “This was the first time the Doctor had ascended alone to such an elevation since he was injured a year ago last September, and his many friends will congratulate him upon this evidence of increased strength.” The injury had taken a lot out of him, but it wasn’t due to his age – he was only 48. There was apparently something else wrong with his constitution and it was probably in evidence at his death.
Despite his personal health problems, he tried to keep busy after his injury and the loss of his beloved son. In October 1879, he was summoned by telegraph to Medina to serve as a medical expert in a murder trial, to give his opinion about the sanity or insanity of the accused. Less than a week later he was attending a Methodist conference in Buffalo at the request of his church; they were confident in his ability to represent their interests, “He will do his work well, for whatever he becomes interested in he pushes with zeal that knows no defeat.” (emphasis added) It was a fitting summary of his character throughout his life’s labors. In March of 1880 another telegram summoned him to Fredonia, NY, to visit a bank president from Pennsylvania who had sought him out because of his reputation in curing cancer.
On the 15th of June, after a restless night of not feeling well, he took some of his medicine and decided to go outside for some fresh air. “He walked out into the yard, where he was suddenly seized with faintness, and when his friends reached him – which they did in a few seconds – they found his mouth filled with blood and he was unable to speak.” He passed away quickly, before medical aid could arrive. He was just 50 years old. The immediate cause of his death was a ruptured blood vessel, which caused faintness and suffocation. “It is thought that the loss of his only son, a few months ago, wore upon the doctor. He also suffered from injuries received by the recent overturning of his carriage.”
Months after his decease, a Batavia newspaper complimented their deceased and admired friend one more time, “We knew Dr. Curtis from his boyhood and never had a doubt of his being an upright man and a Christian gentleman, and multitudes of our best citizens will testify to the excellence of his character.” As late as 1894, fourteen years later, Dr. Curtis’ Cholera King was still being advertized as a first-class medicine and was kept on hand at a pharmacy in Batavia that promised, “We have all of Dr. Curtis’ Receipts and can put up any of his remedies that are called for.” His reputation and his medicines lived on after him and now, his story lives on as well.
AUTHOR’S PERSONAL NOTE: In 1867 Dr. Curtis represented one of the few hopes for people suffering from mental illnesses – dementia, retardation, depression, senility, and so much more. As my dear wife struggles with the onset of a dementia-related disease in her brain, the trade card of Dr. Curtis called out to me, telling me that if we lived back in 1867, in my anxious pursuit to help the love of my life, we very well might have searched out Dr. Curtis because of that phrase on his avant-garde, sophisticated, photographic trade card. I have no reason today to believe he had any valid knowledge or skills in dealing with “Obscure Diseases of the Brain and Mind” but I do understand how worried, despairing people could cling onto that hope, hold on to that card like it was gold, and search out that doctor, whether or not he was a member of a medical society.
Lynn Massachusetts history - History of medicine - 19th-Century Health Remedies - Vintage Medical Ephemera - 19th-century medicine
- Andrew Rapoza
- Apr 24
- 4 min read
Updated: 5 days ago
Shadow Cards in 1908
What Mr. Birtz held in his hands was clearly very special; the beauty and intricate craftsmanship of these paper amusements spoke for themselves. Each of these very delicate, die-cut advertising trade cards showed in amazing detail how to form one of ten different creatures in the shadows. There were lots of shadow cards on the market at the tail-end of the Victorian era, but none quite as fine as these. Fingers were articulated with artistic precision and anatomical accuracy, pointing and flexing in as many directions as necessary to form the fascinating shadow creatures. Across Europe and North America, little fingers struggled in delight to mimic the positions on each card that the beautiful tangle of ten digits quietly demonstrated.
No one could appreciate their artistry as much as Albert Birtz de Desmarteaux, a “temperer” in a knife works who strengthened and sharpened the cutting edges of knives and machine blades. He saw the card set while on a trip to his native Montreal, Quebec, in 1908; perhaps they were even evidence of his craftsmanship on the blades that had freed all those fingers and knuckles from the paper stock that had held them. The discriminating bladesmith instantly decided to bring the envelope of paper fingers to someone very special back in the U.S.A.
Albert brought the extraordinary collection home to Southbridge, Massachusetts for his one-year-old daughter, Claire, as her very first birthday gift. When she was old enough to understand, she was told to take them out only once each year, on her birthday, to look at and enjoy them. Albert and Claire had a very close father-daughter relationship; she turned out to be an only child, making her treasured even more by her father, who died when she was only fourteen. Claire never married or had children of her own. As a remembrance and tribute to her beloved father, she kept her promise and looked at that first gift only on her birthday each year. She then carefully returned them to their envelope and tucked them away for safekeeping for another year.
In 1994, the 87-years-old Claire Birtz attended one of my talks on advertising trade cards and came up to me afterwards, saying there was something she wanted to give me because she could tell I would appreciate and take good care of the cherished items. I met her at her home later that week. There she told me the story about these treasured cards from her father. She entrusted them to me, instructing me to protect and to display them as I thought best – this was about thirty years ago. Early this past August, I showed them to the public for the first time in my display at the national expo of the Federation of Historical Bottle Collectors (FOHBC) in Houston, Texas.
The expo concluded several weeks ago, but I still feel the need to share them in a more long-lasting manner. It then dawned on me that I should reach out to my long-time friend, Diane DeBlois, of the Ephemera Society of America. What better audience to admire and enjoy the enduring Birtz family story and legacy than the world’s largest group of ephemera enthusiasts?
The back of each card (translated from the French) explains the health benefits of adding Phoscao-Bébé, (a powder of phosphates and cocoa), to a child’s milk:
PHOSCAO-BABY
CHILDREN’S FOOD
MAKES TEETHING EASIER
HELPS WITH BONE FORMATION
On the other side are the detailed images and text instructions about how to make the shadow creatures. The French text on each card reads,
This cutting, exposed in front of a bright light, projected onto the wall in the image below. To get the same “animated” shadow, join your hands like the model.
Each card showed placement of the hand in front of a candle, since lightbulbs were a very new and uneconomical technology that still had a while to go before they would become the standard illumination across the land. The Phoscao-Bébé shadow cards probably suffered and disappeared in the hands of many children’s hands, their paper fingers getting bent, pulled, and eventually amputated from their ephemeral hands, and others probably were placed too close to real candles, going up in flames instead of shadows. Such is ephemera.
But not this set. Claire Birtz’s paper hands were treasured mementos from her dear father – her way of reaching out to him on every one of her birthdays for 87 of her 93 years, until she knew that her own end was near. Please join me in enjoying these cards and perpetuating the love for them that was never ephemeral, but eternal.
