The Crittenton Six

To trade card collectors, he is best remembered for six unforgettable medicines.

C. N. Crittenton was as distinctively colorful as his trade cards.

His work career started on his family farm in upstate New York and later as a country store clerk. By 1860, the newly married 27-year-old was living in New York City with the plan to become a music teacher, but he accepted a job offer to be a liquor store clerk when he was on his way to giving his first music lesson! Not long after, with a few business skills under his belt, he entered the drug and medicine trade. He became a very successful manufacturer and distributor of drugs and patent medicines, and starting in the 1870s, he also became a Protestant evangelist and a philanthropist.

His decision to distribute Lydia E. Pinkham’s Vegetable Compound was a big boost to that new medicine’s successful launch. The six patent medicines he advertised the hardest didn’t become renowned superstars like Pinkham’s Vegetable Compound, but he advertised them heavily in newspapers and trade cards for many years, from about 1878 and onward through the remainder of the century.

He became the proprietor for a stable of six products, each of which was featured on its own trade card. Each card had its own unique design on the front, but the distinctive cards shared the same ornately Victorian typestyles and filigree flourishes, softened with blushes of pink and touches of powder blue. Together, the series of six Crittenton cards were popular to collect. Crittenton also heavily advertised these medicines in newspapers, but these finely illustrated and colored trade card artifacts are what most successfully has kept his memory alive.

1.  Hale’s Honey of Horehound and Tar was for “the speedy cure of Coughs, Colds, Influenza, Sore Throats, and all Lung and Bronchial Complaints.” An older girl has her hand on a very young girl positioned just inches away from a large beehive; the scene was meant to be comforting and instructive, but today it is unnerving.

2.  Glenn’s Sulphur Soap was for the complexion, making it “Fair and Spotless as the lilly,” making it “soft as velvet.” The scene is of four young maidens with unblemished skin, dressed in undergarments, relaxing at water’s edge, obviously meant to represent the success of washing with the sulphur soap..

3.  The Japanese Corn File was “worth its weight in gold,” eradicating “Corns and Excrescences” (meaning bumps and growths of any kind). A woman dressed in a formal gown and petticoat uses the corn file at the end of her foot, exposing the private moment half way up her leg.

4.  Hill’s Hair Dye (available only in black or brown) would change hair color in ten minutes. The gentleman expertly applies the product to his long Dundreary whiskers, complete with his pinky finger genteelly elevated.

5.  Hair Revivum promised the healthy growth of hair, making it “soft and silky, strengthens the roots, and prevents its falling out.” Where was this stuff when I needed it? The featured man and woman both proudly exult over their newly blackened beard and long hair while the reader is reminded, “The Crowning Glory of Man and Woman is a Beautiful head of Hair.”

6.  Finally, Pike’s Toothache Drops promised to remove tooth pain in one minute. It was promoted as “The One Minute Cure”. The confident dentist applies the drops to his wary patient, hoping the drops will work quickly. Like other such promising tooth pain relief medicines, it had to contain morphine or other opium derivatives to be able to quickly blunt nerve signals. It did nothing to fix the underlying dental problem, so the pain would return and more of Pike’s would be applied – often leading to serious opioid addiction – on top of the still bad tooth. (This card definitely seems to be the rarest of the bunch.)

Curiously, a miniature of the Pike’s Toothache Drops card was produced as well; I don’t know why but I would love to learn the reason and share it here, if someone out there knows. I have never seen miniature cards of the other five Crittenton cards, which makes the Pike’s miniature all the more mysterious.

While the designs and products were all quite different from each other, there are similarities in design and colors that, when assembled together, make them feel complete, like long-lost relatives at a family reunion.   

TRAGEDY TRANSFORMED INTO KINDNESS

C. N. Crittenton's drug and patent medicine manufacturing and distribution business was fabulously successful, transforming him into one of the most successful and influential medicine distributors in the country. Starting with just $60 to his name in 1861, he parlayed it into an $800,000 business (over $28 million in 2025 USD) in a little more than three decades.

Despite all their money, the Crittentons did not escape the cruelty of Victorian mortality; they, too, suffered the early losses of their little ones. Of their three children, their first and only son died in 1861 at 1 year, 9 months; and Florence, their youngest, died of scarlet fever at 4 years old. Devastated and in the depths of despair over his little daughter’s sudden loss, Crittenton grasped for hope through religion. He began evangelizing young women who lived in the streets: homeless young women, unwed mothers, and those immersed in the sordid world of prostitution.

In 1883 he opened "The Florence Night Mission," a place of respite for the outcast women. Crittenton expanded his advocacy for women in crisis by setting up Florence Crittenton homes for unwed mothers across the nation. He had opened 70 homes nationwide for unwed mothers and their infant children, often at his own expense.

C. N. Crittenton died in 1909 at 75 years old having done much good. He invested much of the fortune he had made from selling patent medicines to rescue young women whose lives had become perilously unsafe. The medicines he sold may have often done more harm than good but give him credit for being a patent medicine seller who cared more for others than he did for his own pockets.

THE ORIGINAL FLORENCE NIGHT MISSION. About 16 young women appear in the windows and on the balconies, guests of the mission who have found refuge and sanctuary from economic and social ostracism and physical abuse. C. N. Crittenton appears to be the man with the white pocket square standing on the right side at the top of the stairs. From THE BROTHER OF GIRLS: The Life Story of Charles N. Crittenton as Told by Himself. 1910

Giving People What They Want

Dr. Alfred Hargrove explains his Spirit Table to a patient. (AI composition by the author.)

“Yellow Journalism” dominated newspapers in the late 19th century using loud, shocking headlines and articles trumped up with exaggerated claims and falsehoods dressed as facts. It was a bunch of nonsense and sensationalism, but it sold papers. The newspapers claimed they were giving the people exactly what they wanted.

  Alfred Hargrove did the same thing. He had a talent for sensing what people longed to believe. When they looked to the stars for guidance, he promoted himself as an astrologer. When women hoped he could sense what was wrong in their lives, he became a clairvoyant. Soon thereafter, he transformed himself into a spirit medium, able to organize the spirits to ease their troubles and even claimed to have built a medicinal table by following instructions from the spirits. When men worried about their manhood or the consequences of their indiscretions, the so-called doctor reinvented himself as a specialist in men’s diseases.

Alfred Hargrove gave people exactly what they wanted. He was always a shameless fraud, but he sure could sell it. 

MEET THE HARGROVES

The story of the Hargrove family started off pleasantly enough. In the mid-19th century, William Hargrove was a successful assistant foreman at a foundry near Aston Manor, outside of Birmingham, England. He and his wife Maria Louisa were newly married and starting a family in the midst of a rapidly growing Victorian industrial center. Birmingham wasn’t dominated by massive mills and factories; instead, it earned the nickname “City of a Thousand Trades” because the large workforce were scattered among small workshops, backrooms, and attics to create their wares made of metal, glass, and bone. Even women and children made buttons and pins for poverty-line wages.

As an assistant shop foreman of a foundry (a senior, salaried position overseeing workshop floors) William and his family were better off than the throngs of low-wage workshop craftsmen and pieceworkers whose income was frequently disrupted by trade depressions and the vices of the alehouse. At 19 Walsall Road, the Hargroves lived comfortably, though daily life would have been dominated by the sights and sounds of industrial progress – the clanging of the nearby railways, horse-drawn wagons on the turnpike, and the smoke from local foundries drifting across the Aston sky.

The Hargroves had started their family shortly after their 1845 marriage; their first two children were fine, healthy boys: William Randolph, born in 1846, and Alfred Alonzo, in 1848. But then something went wrong; their first daughter, Maria Lavinia, was born in February 1850 and died just eight months later, in October. Shaken but undaunted, they had another boy, Sydney Bulwey, a few months after Maria Lavinia’s death, in March 1851.

 

THE FAMILY CRUMBLES

In July 1852 they had their fourth son, Christopher, but he died after a brief month of life. A year after Christopher’s birth, Maria Louise gave birth to their fifth son, Leopold Walter Albert Henry; he was born and baptized in England. Three months later, the Hargrove family had crossed the high seas with their new infant and settled in Montreal, Canada, where they had to bury baby Leopold within a few months of their arrival. Of their six children, only three survived infancy.

The loss of babies was brutally difficult, but the loss of their father during a cholera epidemic was a sudden, shattering blow. William Hargrove died in July 1854, when Montreal was at the height of a devastating cholera epidemic. He was only 30 years old. He was buried in the Mount Royal Cemetery in Montreal the day after his death – no wake, no open-casket viewing – speed was considered essential to avoid the spread of the cholera contagion.

Thousands of working-class laborers and Irish immigrants died rapidly and were buried in unmarked mass graves or chaotic city plots. For William Hargrove’s family to successfully arrange a proper, individual burial at the brand-new, manicured Mount Royal grounds meant the Hargroves had sufficient funds to shield his memory from the indignity suffered by the less fortunate during that terrifying summer. 

Maria Louisa Hargrove was unwillingly thrust into the role of widow and sole parent to three young boys, aged 8, 6, and 3 years. There they were, in a new land, an ocean away from everyone and everything they had called home.

 

GROWING UP QUICKLY

Instantly, Mary Louisa had to become a single parent and income-producer, and her three little boys would have to mature much more quickly than their bodies. Mrs. Hargrove was listed in Canada’s 1861 census as a grocer, 33, and a widow, which she would remain for the rest of her life. While their mother worked at the grocery store – William, 14, Alfred, 12, and Sydney, 10, were attending school. Mrs. Hargrove also rented out some rooms to two boarders for extra income. She and her boys moved to Brantford, Ontario, 400 miles southwest of Montreal, but just a little over 60 miles from Niagara Falls and the United States.

Their move so close to the U.S. may have been part of a long-term plan to move there, but when the Canadian census was being performed in mid-January 1861, it was quite clear that the U.S. was on the verge of war; South Carolina, Mississippi, Florida, and Alabama had already seceded from the Union and three months later, the Civil War had begun.

At an age far too young, Alfred Hargrove crossed into the United States to join the Union army. At just 16 years old and standing 5 feet 3 inches, he presented himself as 19 and successfully enlisted at Brooklyn, New York, in the 15th NY Engineers in 1864. He may have left home with a teenager’s passion for adventure but it is more likely that he determined to help his mother, as many young men did, by sending her some of his pay, bonuses, and enlistment bounty.

His unit constructed earthworks, forts, and trenches around Petersburg, Virginia, as well as assembled pontoon bridges across the James and Appomattox rivers to move Union troops. The 15th NY Engineers were among the first troops dispatched into the burning Confederate capital of Richmond to extinguish fires, clear the streets, and repair infrastructure.

Union engineers digging fortifications during the Civil War. Haas & Peale photographer. (Public Domain, via Wikimedia Commons.)

At sixteen years old and barely five feet three inches tall, Private Alfred Hargrove entered the Union Army not as a seasoned soldier but as a laborer in one of its most demanding units. Company M of the 15th New York Engineers spent the summer of 1864 carving the war into the earth, and Alfred’s days were defined by the weight of a shovel and the sting of raw blisters. He dug trenches that stretched for miles across the Virginia landscape, hauled dirt in wheelbarrows, and cut saplings for the timber revetments that held the earthworks in place. The older, stronger men handled the technical carpentry and bridge work; boys like Alfred supplied the endless muscle needed to keep the siege lines expanding. His world was mud, sweat, and the steady rhythm of digging—simple work, repetitive work, but absolutely essential to the Union’s slow advance on Petersburg.

Alfred mustered out in July 1865, which meant he would have marched with his regiment through the streets of Washington, D.C., in the historic Grand Review of the Armies on May 23-24, 1865, celebrating the end of the war. Alfred had survived the war and later moved to Massachusetts, carrying with him a remarkable story of survival that started with a lie to a recruiting officer in 1864.

 

MENIAL JOBS WITH NO PROSPECTS

 

With the war over, the 17-year-old veteran had to figure out what to make of himself and start earning money as a very young civilian. The only skill he had developed was the use of a shovel, but he had no interest in making that back-breaking and hand-stinging work a career. Instead, his first post-war employment was as a grocery clerk, work that he had likely done as a young boy back at his mother’s grocery store in Brantford, Ontario.

By at least 1870 and probably earlier, he was a grocery clerk, reunited with his mother and younger brother, Sydney, in Boston, Massachusetts. Maria Louisa Hargrove was running a boarding house; at the time of the census, her boarders included a druggist, a brass finisher, two dressmakers, a teamster, a steam engineer, and a cap maker. Much as it had been back in Aston, England, the Hargroves lived right in the midst of working folks and made their living from the people who passed through the doors of the Aston foundry, the Brantford grocery, and the Boston boarding house.  

 

Alfred’s older brother, William Randolph, had struck out on his own, never again living or working with his mother and brothers. In February 1865, at the tail end of the war, he had enlisted in the Union Navy at Buffalo, New York. In July 1867, long after the war’s end, he was injured in an altercation. A surgeon’s report from the U. S. Naval Hospital at Mound City, IL (on the Ohio River) wrote that William had "Received a contused wound of scalp about three inches in length, last night, while engaged in some row with a party of Negroes – no fracture of skull. Injury did not originate in the line of duty." He was 21 at the time of his admission to the hospital. William then disappeared into history until 1896 when he committed suicide in Brooklyn, New York; it was surmised that despondency led him to eat the arsenic-based vermin poison, Rough on Rats – a horrible, agonizing, but all-too-frequent method of suicide in the late 19th century.

In 1871 Alfred married Isabella Packard of Lynn, Massachusetts, a city nine miles northeast of Boston and renowned for its shoemaking industry. The marriage record shows that Alfred was still a clerk. The marriage was brief as Alfred remarried in Lawrence, Massachusetts to Frances Flora Bickmore in 1875; something seems a little fishy though, because the marriage record claimed it was Alfred’s first marriage. It also listed him with a new occupation – a “book agent” – someone who travelled door-to-door selling subscriptions and taking orders for books. His career as a book agent put him on the road, starting in Lawrence along the New Hampshire border, then to Providence, Rhode Island in 1876, where Flora gave birth to their first child. It was given no name however; their first child was stillborn.

ANSWERS FROM THE STARS

Something triggered Alfred to study the zodiac, planets, and stars for answers to life’s hard questions – or at least to claim he did. Perhaps he turned to astrology because of the staggering repetition of tragic family losses during his youth that were following him into his own new family. But then again, he may have been covertly targeting the blind faith of those who found comfort in astrological forecasts in order to exploit their gullibility.  His advertising claimed that he started the study of astrology back in 1870 when he was a grocery clerk and began offering his services as an astrologer in 1873 when he was actually selling subscriptions door to door. He may have developed his astrologer business gradually while keeping his day job, but more likely, such early dates padded his astrology credentials, making him sound very skilled, experienced, and other-worldly wise.

Advertisement for Dr. A. Hargrove, Physician and Astrologer, illustrated with a comet in the night sky. The Daily Item (Lynn, MA), 11 DEC 1882.

The newly minted astrologer took his wife on the road, traveling in 1879 to Framingham and Worcester, Massachusetts, in the center of the state. No longer knocking on doors to sell books,  he had transformed himself into an astrologer at the same time that his younger brother Sydney took over as the book agent of the family. In that year, Alfred’s wife Flora gave birth to their second child, a girl they named Maria Jenet. So hectic was their travel, their daughter’s birth was recorded in each town’s records, listing Alfred and Flora as residents of both towns. In Worcester’s birth register, Alfred was an astrologer; in the Framingham record he was listed for the first time as a physician. The boy-soldier and ditch digger who had stocked grocery shelves and sold books door to door had crafted himself into an astrologer and a physician, learning intimate details about people who entrusted him with their private problems and paid him for his vaunted expertise.

The young family had roamed down to Providence in 1880, but the traveling suitcase lifestyle no longer worked well with a baby included, so the Hargroves settled down in Boston in 1882, at 1243 Washington Street. As quickly as Alfred had refashioned himself into an astrologer and physician, he had transformed his rented apartment house into the “English Independent Medical Retreat.” The name used all the right words. “English” marked him as pleasantly distinct, familiar, and respectable, not someone with an awkward accent and of suspicious culture. “Independent” established him as practicing a form of medicine unlike the regular methods practiced by the often hated and distrusted medical establishment; and “Medical Retreat” conjured up a health sanctuary – a place of rest, cure, and safety.

Washington Street was on the south side of Boston. The neighborhood had breweries, a brick works, and a cemetery while the area to the south became devoted to maritime and manufacturing. It was part of the area that became known as an immigrant and tenement district as well as a place for theatres, penny arcades, and other amusements. Upper class Yankees officially avoided it even though many, including T.S. Eliot, were known to be there at night. It had attracted a large number of social service organizations including settlement houses and a bathhouse for the city’s poor. The water was kept lukewarm so that no one would take too long of a shower. The area housed immigrants including many Jewish, Italian, and Irish residents as well as Black Bostonians. Some of the neighborhood’s streets were lined with peddlers selling fruits and vegetables as well as other household necessities. It was Aston, England, and Brantford, Ontario, all over again. It was the place Alfred Hargrove could afford and these were the people that he knew and understood best. His medical retreat was an oasis in their midst, located for success. All he had to do was attract them into his retreat by giving them what they wanted.

Free private Clairvoyant Medical Examinations for Ladies ... Every ache and disagreeable feeling in the human body described with wonderful accuracy.

 

He started off right – free is always attractive – and a clairvoyant medical examination was intimate without awkward exposure. And in that one offer, Alfred Hargrove had promoted himself from astrologer and physician to medical clairvoyant – he was starting to carry more badges of honor than his officers in the war. The claim of clairvoyance meant he had the ability to see beyond what others could with their eyes; his internal vision transcended space and time; it was vision into the body and soul, the past and the future. In some ways it was far more convenient than astrology, since it didn’t require producing zodiac charts to explain things.

DRS. HARGROVE, HARGROVE & HARGROVE

His next business move was to have his wife Flora and brother Sydney introduced as fellow physicians. Flora became Mrs. Dr. Hargrove, providing medical treatments in the office for a hefty $3.00, usually a signal that women could come to her for some private and delicate assistance pertaining to their sex. Younger brother Sydney, whose only prior work experience was selling books door to door, was also anointed a physician; in fact, the two brothers called themselves “Intuitive Physicians,” implying they both possessed the gift of clairvoyance. One of their trade cards even spun the tale of their clairvoyant origin:

The remarkable powers claimed by the Doctors [Alfred & Sydney] was first noticeable, when in childhood, relatives of their family liv[ed] in different parts of England. If anything unusual occurred to them, the Doctors would describe and give full particulars of the event.

 

And from those precocious beginnings, miraculous powers developed to the astonishment and benefit of thousands, or so the familiar trope went:

So rapidly did these wonderful powers develop, that some thirteen years ago the Doctors were put to a thorough test in regard to the different diseases of the body, and to the astonishment of those present, diseases and their symptoms were described with wonderful correctness; and the vegetable remedies most suitable, selected and compounded, which have proven satisfactory in thousands of cases, and in no case a failure.

 

At least to modern ears, calling themselves “Intuitive Physicians” – discernment without conventional physical examination – sounds like an admission that their real skill was in figuring out what their patient needed to hear; not that they were, in fact, clairvoyant. But they were making all the promises that had made clairvoyant mediums such a fascination for so many:

... thousands have been surprised by their startling revelations and wonderful cures. Their advice in regard to all events of life is valuable and reliable.

    Questions of health, such as cause of illness ... and the best mode of treatment, critical periods, etc.; matters of business – gains, losses, speculations, lawsuits, buying selling, removals and the like. Matrimonial predictions, giving full explanation of time and condition of marriage, if any; what kind of a husband or wife, and the hindrances and objections to happiness therein; travels, wills, secret undertakings, divorces, enemies, etc. ...

 

There was no question that Alfred was the initiator and “lead physician” in what became a family medical practice. Some of his advertising in the 1880s and 90s continued to be focused on him alone and he was the only one of the three that ventured to neighboring communities to generate more business. For a while in late 1882, he stayed at Lynn’s landmark hotel, the Sagamore House, drumming up business and exposure in the nearby large city of laborers. He called the combination of his specialties “Astro-Physic”; it sounded like something out of a Jules Verne novel:

An astrological judgment wherein can be correctly ascertained the true cause of chronic diseases, either atmospheric or constitutional, by erecting a map or figure of the heaven, and by careful observation of the different positions of the planetary bodies ... at once see with wonderful accuracy the origin of the disease, the nature, symptoms, and the changes from one stage to another, together with full particulars in regard to the organs which are afflicted.

 

It sounded like so much more than medical society doctors offered. At a time when astronomy, comets, and the like were of increasing popular interest, the Hargroves were purveying astrology as a science of the stars to cure disease and assured that they had “treated thousands of cases by this method” and provided “purely vegetable remedies prepared by us.” Such specialized expertise cost more than the more mundane methods: ladies paid $1.00 and gentlemen $1.50. Advice by mail cost $2.00 and a stamp. While Dr. Hargrove could do a clairvoyant examination or an astrological chart for someone who visited him in the Sagamore House, he made it clear to all that they would have to come to his Medical Retreat in Boston to use the Table.

 

ANSWERS FROM THE SPIRITS

Any spiritual medium worth his salt had connected to a Spirit Band – a group of spirits, from Indians to kings, dedicated to communicating with him and giving him guidance for his customers. Alfred Hargrove’s spirit band were an especially high-spirited bunch, willing to give him directions to create a unique table that would cure people of their ills. “This wonderful invention,” one of his trade cards explained, “consists in disposing the medicinal substances,” wafting up through holes in the table upon which the patient placed her hands. A central chamber in the pedestal of the round table held the vegetable matter instructed by Dr. Hargrove’s Spirit Band, and the vapors “electro-magnetically” followed channels cut through the tabletop to the holes above.

When in use, the patients ... sit at the table, and two of the openings are uncovered for each sitter at the table, and the hands of the patient are placed over the openings, and the active medicinal properties of the vegetable substance which the disease of the patient requires are transmitted through passages to the system of the patient, and produce the desire effect ... Spirit forms are frequently seen and described by the medium and others at the table. Manifestations of a remarkable nature are continually occurring.

Astrologer, Physician, Medical Clairvoyant, and Spiritual Medium – Alfred Hargrove kept adding and changing according to what he perceived the customers wanted.

Cross-section and table top views of Hargrove's Spirit Table, generated by AI using the description on Dr. Hargrove's trade card (see the end of this blog post.)

Dr. Alfred Hargrove teaches and convinces a patient of the electro-magnetic properties infused in the plant substances and the table by his spirit band. (AI composition by the author.)

In the mid-1880s, it certainly seemed like the spirits were in harmony and the stars were aligned over Alfred Hargrove. His business seemed to be thriving, he was advertising heavily in Boston and Lynn newspapers and on trade cards. He seemed to be establishing his tenement as a veritable séance center and medical complex, renting out rooms to two spiritualists, “Mrs. L. F. Hancock, CLEAR-SEER. Test and Business Communications” and “Mrs. E. A. Cutting, “MAGNETIC and Developing Medium. Nervous Diseases and Female Weakness a specialty.” In May 1884, Alfred Hargrove’s wife gave birth to a son, Sydney G., and a few weeks later, his brother Sydney B., got married. The celebrations were short-lived.

In September 1884, the Hargrove curse had returned. Four-month old baby Sydney died of teething (as best as they understood). The following year 1885, Alfred’s cherished mother passed away, then in the next year, 1886, Alfred and Flora lost the one child who had lived beyond a few months: Maria Jenet, aged 7 years and 2 months, died of the croup. All of his intuition and spiritual guidance couldn’t stop the sable train of death.

FOR MEN ONLY  

Something different was afoot. Dr. Hargrove, who had been advertising as an astrologer through 1887, suddenly stopped advertising altogether in 1888. The silence was deafening; it almost seemed like the Hargroves had pulled up stakes and disappeared from the region, or had met with some terrible illness or tragedy that dragged them under the ground to join all the other Hargroves that had died untimely deaths.

He did return. When he re-emerged in 1889, he was a different doctor – in every sense. He and his brother focused exclusively on a new audience that they barely touched on in the previous decade – men. Gone were any mentions of astrology, Spirit Bands, clairvoyance, or the Spiritual, Medical and Developing Table. The new message, big, bold, and emphatic, was that they were specialists in the diseases of men. Same address. Consultation free.

Passing mentions were made that Mrs. Dr. F. Hargrove had a remarkable and successful method in the treatment of chronic diseases and the she had dedicate the past 15 years to the study of “Woman and her Diseases,” but the advertising saturation was devoted to Dr. A. & S. Hargrove, specialists in men’s diseases. Dr. Alfred Hargrove, an 1890 advertisement assured, had “20 years’ practice. 10 Years at the Same Office.” That would again mean that he started that specialty when he was still a grocery clerk, but fact-checking wasn’t pursued as rigorously as it is today.

The two male specialists of men’s diseases said they had a “NEW METHOD” of curing kidney and urinary troubles, unhealthy discharges, seminal weakness, want of energy, and more. “Special attention given to Bright’s Disease and Diabetes.” In fact the 1890 ad assured that over 7,000 cases had been treated successfully in 3 years. In 1893, the number was increased exponentially: “25,000 bona fide cures in 10 years. No mercury used.” The ad poked at the use of mercury for venereal diseases by the regular medical establishment and to justify their own “independent” practice, as irregulars usually did. They also gave the regulars a hard time because  their medicines smelled and tasted so bad:

Many physicians in their practice employ medicines which are so thoroughly disgusting, both in smell and taste, that the patient would rather face death than to undertake such treatment. I can assure you that if such remedies poison the mind they must certainly poison the body; and how can you expect to be cured under such circumstances? ... Cut this [ad] Out [and save it]. ... N.B. Working people should take advantage of the Sunday Hours.

Ad for the Drs. Hargrove, English Specialists for the Diseases of Men. (The Boston Globe), 13 MAY 1894.

Urbanization and crowding in Boston increased infections: strep, tuberculosis, and other bacterial illnesses surged in cities often damaging kidneys. The industrialized work environment that men were faced with increased toxin exposure; factories, chemicals, and polluted water supplies contributed to chronic kidney injury. The profligate ways of many men also earned them one or another of the venereal diseases; even when committed years or decades earlier, some of the strains followed them to the grave. Repeated infections and poor nutrition meant chronic diseases like diabetes and nephritis advanced rapidly, making sick men desperately in need of medical care – and there they were, two amazingly successful specialists in men’s diseases – the Drs. Hargrove, in a busy part of town.

Alfred Hargrove may have had several reasons for leaving astrology, spiritualism, and clairvoyance behind, but bursting into the newspapers again in the form of specialists in men’s diseases was a reaction to opportunity more than a distaste for the  challenges of maintaining his former roles. Just call it intuition.

In 1893, Flora gave birth to their last child – another stillbirth. All five of their children failed to survive to adulthood – heck; none of them made it to 8 years old. In the 1900 census, Alfred, Flora, and Sydney were all listed as physicians; their wealth had allowed them the luxuries of a servant and a housekeeper in the house, but their home missed the joy of children.

In 1905, Alfred provide his testimonial for a proprietary medicine called X-Zalia. He had burned his arm with a cigar and the sore became red, inflamed, and very painful. As the story went, “he tried many remedies, but it grew worse and worse. Yesterday, Dr. Hargrove was treated at Putnam’s drug store, and in less than three hours the sore showed signs of healing; the inflammation had gone and the doctor was free from pain.” No zodiac or spirits were needed.

Mortality finally caught up with Drs. Hargrove, Hargrove, and Hargrove. Flora died in 1907 and Sydney died in 1909; both were in their 56th year.

During the 1910 census, Alfred Hargrove lived alone in his large house at 1243 Washington Street, a widower and the last of his family. In 1912 at 63 years old, still practicing as a specialist in men’s diseases, he finally succumbed to kidney disease and kidney stones, one of the “men’s diseases” that he had promised to cure. Maybe his star chart had revealed his end of days was near at hand; hopefully his spirit band welcomed him home.   

 

Dr. Hargrove's Independent Spiritual Retreat, 1243 Washington St., Boston. One of three trade cards in the Rapoza collection; this one gives the details to the construction of the Spirit Table. All three card have stock images on the front. The historical value, however, lies in the extraordinary amount of detail on the back side of each; all three have widely different content.

              

The Caregiver and The Medium

Protection vs Victimization of the Vulnerable

     After 40 years of reading and researching 19th century advertising and literature to understand popular perceptions about the quality of life, I can tell you that society’s focus, then as now, was on physical health. Despite the unsettling “before” stories of the hucksters, people usually recovered from most sicknesses: fevered brows cooled down, guts stopped puking, and wounds healed. The sincere and insincere often praised the product or healer that cured them and life went on.

     In contrast, mental health issues were unpopular topics in the public discourse; squeamish Victorians tried to hide the subject in the dark cellar of public embarrassment, alongside discussions of venereal disease, while whispering about probable links between the two. Capitalizing on the public's discomfort, unabashed nostrum vendors weren't shy to claim their nerve tonics or brain restoratives cured nervousness, melancholy, hysteria, and insanity. As ridiculous as such promises sound now, at the onset of mental decline, they were popular options to avoid the devastating alternative. When erratic behaviors were identified by family, medical professionals, government officials, or a combination of all three, those stricken were often isolated from society in almshouses or institutionalized in facilities that the century frequently referred to as the “lunatic asylum” or the “madhouse.” Unfortunate souls suffering from any type of mental illness or decline were often institutionalized like pariahs, forbidden to return to the society of former friends or fitting back into the family circle. And to be clear, confinement was not limited to such severe issues as bipolar disorder, schizophrenia, and psychotic disorders, but also to those suffering the cognitive decline, behavioral changes, and motor function losses that often accompany aging, like those that manifest as Parkinson’s and Alzheimer’s diseases.

      I have a particularly tender spot in my heart for this issue because my dear wife of almost 49 years has been enduring a decline from Parkinson’s Disease for 16 months now. I have recently added a letter, dated 1881, to my collection that describes the efforts of the author, Hannah, to be a caregiver to her mother and I feel a shared bond with her experience, being in many respects like my own. It touches my heart to have a private glimpse of this woman’s courageous efforts to care for her mother; I feel her worries and her hope. It has been a privilege that Hannah shared her story with me and I hope to honor her efforts by sharing them with you.

      Hannah shared several experiences that, intentionally or not, demonstrate two very different outlooks on the treatment of the mentally and/or emotionally vulnerable public in that year: the compassionate care she gave to her declining mother and the victimization of the emotionally vulnerable she witnessed by a spiritualist medium that brushed through her world.

Hannah, the Caregiver

      Hannah’s letter reads like a play without a program. We don’t know the last name of her family or how many unnamed members there were in the cast; we’re only sure of Hannah, the letter writer; her sisters Lyde & Mollie to whom she jointly addressed the letter; Harry, who seemed to have the role of her husband; and then there were Mother and also Father, who was only referenced in terms that implied he was recently deceased, his loss perhaps being the primary reason for Mother’s decline. The only other well-described character in Hannah’s letter was the archvillain of this story, Mrs. Bliss, who we will meet later.

      The vast majority of the story is set in Hannah’s house; from the scant evidence provided by the letter, Mother was living with Hannah and Harry at their home, which was apparently in London, Ohio, roughly 25 miles west of Columbus. The location of the house where Hannah's parents had been living is not clear, but Lyde and Mollie were apparently living nearby, watching after it in Mother’s absence.

Portion of the first page of an 8-page letter from Hannah to Lyde and Mollie. Folded letter, missing envelope. Dateline: London, Apr 1st 81 [1 APR 1881]. Rapoza collection.

      Hannah’s primary purpose in writing the letter to both sisters was to get them caught up on how Mother was doing. Hannah had received a letter from each of her two sisters over the previous 24 hours and her response may be a reflection of the concerns they had expressed about their mother’s well-being. Some of the subtext in Hannah’s response hinted that Father had recently passed away and Mother was unwilling and perhaps unable to stay in their home alone and hoped to never see it again, “she said she did not care a snap for the home [and] wished it would burn down.” Mother’s personality had become an unpredictably emotional forecast of gloomy fog with sudden downpours, occasional thunder, and intermittent rays of sunshine. “And so it goes,” Hannah wrote philosophically. Mother was a mess and her daughters were very worried.

      Hannah noted Mother had broken down in tears and carried on in a flood of emotions while reading Lyde’s letter (Hannah regretted that she had not gotten to read it before Mother). It was Harry’s intervention that got Mother under control; he “talked strong and to the point til she braced up.” It was the remedy for the moment, but there were many more moments. She had her “gloomy spells and her bright ones.” The news that daughter Lyde was planning to move out of Mother’s house “upset her entirely” to the point that “she could not move.” Today this is called a “freeze” response, where the nervous system shuts down due to overwhelming stress or trauma; in 1881, Hannah could only muster, “[it] was her worst day.” But a letter from Mollie that Mother next read

… just brightened her up like magic, and after [a] while, she went to her room and came out with her new cap on, and says she, Hannah, I am going to wear my new cap and look on the bright side like the rest.

      Despite all of Hannah’s good works and intentions, the responsibility to care for her aging, infirm, dependent mother was a heavy weight and was taking its toll on Hannah; she wrote,

I feel better to have her here than there [at Mother’s old house], for I have had more sad hours thinking about her [when absent from her] than I have when I can see her even in her most despondent moods.

      Hannah realized that those who had known Mother before she started her mental decline would see the difference; maybe Hannah had already heard some of the snickers and sneers. Fairweather friends would be judgmental about the changed woman they had once known, but a loving and protective daughter would have none of it; through all of her mother’s changes, Hannah saw the angel inside:

… the world wags on in its own way. … False impressions will arise among outsiders and all that, but we must do what is right and let people outside form opinions to suit themselves. If the inner life is correct it matters little what the outer is. And right here Mother’s inner life is far better and lovelier than her outer indicates. She is so honest, so artless and a child of nature. There is much to admire and emulate in her.

      As a caregiver to my spouse, I read Hannah’s description of her mother, “so honest so artless [without guile] and a child of nature [innocent; child-like]” as signs of her mother having cognitive decline – dementia; I would describe my dear wife the same way.  

      It was obvious to Hannah and Harry that they had to care for Mother with love, tenderness, and understanding. Each one of Mother’s difficult moments needed a proportionate response, customized to the situation. It was a constant challenge since Hannah and Harry were not doctors or psychiatrists, but just a daughter and son-in-law; they were compassionate caregivers, however, which was exactly what Mother needed. One evening she “asked in all sadness” how she could visit her old neighbors without seeing her old house. Once again it was Harry who brought her out of her funk: “‘Why Mother, you can walk backwards.’ She just laughed in her tears at his ridiculous answer, said in his yankee way.” Hannah reassured his sisters, “Mother is doing well here. … It is well for her that she is here.”

      The day would come, Hannah realized, when Mother would need to go back to her own house, but Hannah was committed to ensuring her mother would continue to be safe and thrive, even when that day eventually came:

I do not intend to let her dig [a] ditch for herself … I [in]tend to keep her just as long as I can for I know I am the one to control [be responsible for] her. … I am coming home with her when she goes [back home]. … [Do] not flatter yourselves that she will be contented [back home, but] that has to be tried. We are all doing as daughters the best we can and that is all we can do. [emphasis added]

     

Mrs. Bliss, the Medium

      Hannah’s letter to her sisters made only one detour from the subject of homecare for their mother, but it was a dramatic, unexpected detour; sort of like blurting out she had witnessed an aerialist walk across a tightrope over Main Street or a neighbor’s cow had given birth to a two-headed calf. To Hannah, the diversion was equally startling and disturbing: a spiritualist medium was holding séances in town.

      Hannah performed her caregiving service for her mother quietly, in the privacy of her home, without fanfare, spectacle, or the slightest thought of compensation; it was exactly why she would have made a terrible medium. As the 19th century rolled on, spiritualism had cleaved apart the population into devoted believers and harsh critics and the reputation of mediums split down the same divide of amazing and devious. When Mrs. Bliss appeared in London, Ohio, she already had a tarnished reputation, except among the most devoted, gullible disciples of spiritualism; in fact, it wasn’t even believed that she could legitimately be called “Mrs. Bliss.” An 1877 Philadelphia newspaper claimed that when the real Mrs. Bliss had been sick back in Boston, “her husband … transferred his affections to his wife’s nurse, and when he subsequently came to Philadelphia (starting in the spirit business in 1874), that woman followed him and was known as Mrs. Bliss.” The Bliss family historian struggled and stumbled over just how much to write about the sordid affair.

8186: James Albert Bliss, extremely well-known materialization medium, along with his equally well-known partner in illusion, Christiana Baptista Bliss. John Homer Bliss, Genealogy of the Bliss family in America, from about the year 1550-1880 (Boston: 1881), p.603. Courtesy of Internet Archive.

    Like most Victorian genealogies, the Bliss Family volume elegantly laid out the family tree, proudly tracing its generations from ancient roots in Great Britain to the glorious fruit of its American progeny. The exhaustive book of begats meticulously detailed every person in America with even a smidgeon of Bliss – at least until it stumbled upon descendant 8186, James Albert Bliss. His is the only name and family group in the online version of this 820-page tome that jars the reader with all kinds of post-published markup, looking less like another refined specimen of purebred Bliss on its pedigreed promenade through the centuries and more like a bug-splattered windshield after a long road trip. The entry described him as a machinist but he was more infamously known as a spiritualist – a “notorious goblin manufacturer” – and an exposed fraud at that. Further sullying the Bliss family name, the author thinly disguised his suspicion that 8186 had a bigamously begotten brood by some wanton woman haltingly identified as “Christiana”; but she was, in fact, as well-known as he was, his partner in nefarious seances and other spirit swindles. The genealogist had reluctantly confessed the facts about number 8186; the tainted fruit in the Bliss harvest was an embarrassment that unfortunately had not quietly fallen out of the family tree.

      This newly revealed female medium was a performing oddity shrouded in mystery. Born in Cuba, she was Christina Baptista Suaz D'Alverda Norton, the daughter of a French-Canadian sea captain who married a widow from Cuba. A newspaper stated she had a deep brown, shiny complexion, “flashing black eyes and straight, raven, Indian-like hair.” Her Spanish accent was apparently seldom heard at that time in London, Ohio; Hannah incorrectly thought it was Dutch. She was often described as being stoutly built (one newspaper wrote, “broad enough to be called dumpty”); Hannah told her sisters, “Her landlady told me she was a big eater and ate like a wash woman.”

      Hannah had met Mrs. Bliss face-to-face at her boarding house (purposely or by chance was not explained) and while newspapers focused on the medium’s superficial features, Hannah’s observations were far more insightful:

She is a travel-wise woman, clever and broad, but that she practices deception on the people is in harmony with her make up and intelligence that she has gathered from observation. … she is a good-looking clever Dutch woman with a great deal of magnetism and no doubt makes the audience see anything they want to see.

      And her audiences got to see plenty. Hannah told her sisters that Mrs. Bliss was one of those mediums who held materialization séances. One such performance by Mrs. Bliss in Kansas City, Missouri, just days before Hannah wrote her letter, was attended by a reporter from The Kansas City Evening Star, and he was quite flustered by what he had witnessed. He was one of a dozen people brought into a small, dimly lit room with a “neatly painted” pinewood enclosure within it with a curtain drawn across the front. It was commonly referred to as a cabinet, but in his article about the event, which he titled, “GHOSTLY VISITANTS,” he referred to it as “the mysterious and awful ABODE OF THE SPIRITS … something never to be forgotten”:

With the first notes of the national anthem, a startling thing occurred which it must be confessed, chilled the journalistic blood. The curtains were thrust aside, and in full view stood the manly form of a United States army officer in full uniform. He was announced as Captain Davis. … the ghastly visitor in glittering uniform standing in the door in full view, surrounded with all the mystery of that other world from which no traveler is supposed to return, made a scene only to be borne by nerves of the stoutest, well-fortified by moral strength and immense willpower.

The level-headed investigative reporter was clearly becoming unraveled by the supernatural events he had never expected to see.

… the awful apparition … appeared again and again … Imagination could hardly conceive a more blood-curdling sight, and yet there was a reality about it all which quieted the nerves, which would otherwise have been entirely unstrung. Language simply fails to describe it, and reason is impotent to explain. 

      The next materialization was of Valentine, the deceased son of Mr. and Mrs. Clary, two of the attendees. The Clary couple were described as “agitated” (meaning quite shaken by the experience) to see their long-lost son and then even getting to shake his hand before he had to leave behind the curtain. It was the ultimate hope of ardent spiritualists – to communicate with deceased loved ones. The grief over lost family members, especially children who had suffered untimely deaths, and the fervent desire to be even briefly able to see them again, made many vulnerable to the theatrical chicanery of sly materializing mediums.  Later in the evening, the Clary’s dead teenage daughter, Jessie, also appeared. She showed her parents “a ring of peculiar pattern which they had given her a year or more ago in Philadelphia.” The Clarys were understandably described as “agitated” once again.

      Several more apparitions appeared in turn, including a humorous boot black, “a bashful little French girl,” “Blue Flower,” a Ute Indian squaw who regularly materialized for Mrs. Bliss, an old Black woman “dressed in the regulation kitchen costume” of a cook, who performed a brisk dance, and the actress, Lucille Western, whom the reporter had personally known in life, but had now been deceased four years.

      Mrs. Bliss had directed a theatrical spirit extravaganza, complete with actors, costumes, roles, and a trap door behind the stage curtain, but in the dimly lit room with a well-paying and anxious audience of often grieving, fragile, hopeful believers, it was an answer to prayers. Most newspaper articles pooh-poohed spirit mediums and said their followers were “credulous old lunatics who would believe that the moon was made of green cheese if they were so informed in a darkened parlor by a spirit form with a beery breath”; this time, however, the Clary’s believed they had communed with their dead children and the investigative reporter was himself too “agitated” to casually dismiss what he had witnessed that evening.

      Hannah knew that James and Christiana Bliss were fakes; she had probably read about both of them in the newspapers along with much of the country in late 1877. Their appearance in court had exposed his abandonment of his first wife and children and his bigamous cohabitation with Christina Baptista Norton and their fraudulent performances in spirit materialization; there was nowhere for them to hide from their sordid activities, yet they still held on to a following of true believers like those in Kansas City, bilking them every chance they could get. Hannah wrote, “Mrs. Bliss is a fraud of course to all but those that would see like Jack Bridgman and Dr Jones, &c &c.” Mrs. Bliss had victimized the vulnerable right in Hannah’s backyard: Jack Bridgman was a 49-year-old auctioneer in London, Ohio, and Dr. Jones was a 61-year-old physician there, but as Hannah put it, Mrs. Bliss’s séance participants “heard the voices of friends and saw them as plain as you can see your family in a dim lighted room, very dim though. … You folks had better lay low next June,” Hannah warned her sisters, “for Bliss may give you a call or make it hot weather ….”

      That was enough about Mrs. Bliss for Hannah. She couldn’t imagine living the medium’s lifestyle of deception for the love of money any more than the medium could adopt Hannah’s lifestyle, selflessly doing so much for the love of Mother.

      Hannah closed her letter with some final reflections on Mother: Hanna had spent the day pasting interesting bits from newspapers into her scrapbook and reading them aloud while Mother was knitting a second sock; she had knit the first one since arriving at Hannah’s. “She is doing first rate,” Hannah reassured her sisters, “never has missed a meal and some nights sleeps all night. She thinks next week she will have to go home but I am going to keep her just as long as I can and see she is not fretting to[o] much.” After all, it was her mom.     

UPDATE:

Response from the great-great-grandchild of "The Medium"

This Bliss descendant sent a very thoughtful and eloquent response to the response above. They've graciously given me their permission to add it here, while keeping them anonymous.

Andy:

Thanks for the link to your article, which I enjoyed very much.  The article, like Hannah, considered Christina to be an unmitigated fraud.  That is certainly a possible, even a likely, interpretation of the facts, but I think it needs to be tempered by the fact that Christina and James Albert Bliss Senior apparently had an unshaken and deep conviction that people could communicate with the dead,  Though it is easy to consider them to be no more than quacks and conmen, out for an easy buck, and certainly the evidence from the 1877 Philadelphia trial seems to show this, this interpretation needs to be tempered by that they appeared to really believe in spiritualism.  Perhaps they knew that aspects of their "materializing" seances were completely fake, but they justified this internally by the conviction that spiritualism was true.  In other words, the ends justify the means (a principle that I oppose),

Perhaps I am partially justifying them because Christina and James Albert Bliss were my great-great grandparents.  Christina had only one  picture of James A Bliss Senior, so apparently she threw the pictures out after they had a huge falling out between 1884 and 1887, when he married his third wife (though she continued to tell the story that he  was "the handsomest man in Massachusetts").

I frankly have veered from viewing Christina and James Albert as complete frauds to viewing them as misguided but sincere spiritualists.  I find it pretty impossible to justify some of the things they did, especially the "materializing" seances of recently dead children for grieving parents, but they probably had some good qualities  too.

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