Prospectors, Fool’s Gold, & Nervous Laughter

THE PROSPECTORS:

Dr. Edgar Mason & Dr. Abiathar Pollard **

      Once upon a time, these two star-crossed doctors left their homes in Missouri and New York to find their fortunes in the great California Gold Rush. In their hometowns, their medical professions had raised their value and brought them respect. But among a swarm of other men in the wilderness equally infected by gold fever, they were just two more miners in a mind-swirling, body-aching race for gold.

      The gold hunters came from Europe, Central and South America, China, and all over the United States. Tinker, tailor, soldier, sailor; rich man poor man, beggar man, thief – they all collided along quiet stream beds, river shores, and pond edges to pan and sluice for gold. But few of the gold bugs found a rich vein; sometimes it seemed like the only ones having success finding veins were mosquitoes.  

      For Drs. Mason and Pollard, fortune apparently stayed in the river, so they fell back on their medical skills to make some money, perhaps to recoup some of their expenses. The two doctors stumbled upon each other in Marysville, California, the first sign of significant civilization when they emerged from the disappointing wilderness after their gold hunting misadventures in 1852.

      Marysville was named after Mary Murphy, one of the few survivors of the ill-fated Donner Party which became synonymous with the insatiable human hunger for survival. Two years later and not far from Donner Pass, the rugged wilderness at the base of California’s Sierra Nevada mountain range to the east continued to make survival more difficult than finding gold.

      At first a trading post in the wilderness, Marysville had become a major miners’ supply depot during the gold rush. Early in 1850, its population grew from 300 to 1,500 in less than a month; for a brief time in 1852, it was California’s third largest city,  behind only San Francisco and Sacramento. Thousands of men swarmed through it to get to the gold fields to the east; it was the last city before those stream beds, shorelines, and caves allegedly teeming with gold and the first city when they came out. It was a beehive of commotion.

      The singular evidence of the two doctors’ collaboration was a medicine product that bore both of their names, Mason & Pollard’s Anti-Malaria Pills; it was first advertised in 1854 and in those early days, the few newspapers that listed it seemed to be getting mixed messages from its owners, sometimes listing the pills as “Mason & Pollard’s” and other times “Pollard’s & Mason’s.” What the two doctors agreed on was the region’s medical need for such a medicine – malaria was on a rampage; at certain times of year as many as twenty people a day in California’s gold region were dying from the disease. The earliest newspaper mention of the medicine reported,

“These gentlemen have been practicing their profession for several years in Marysville, and from a long familiarity with those diseases most prevalent in the Sacramento and Feather River Valleys, have been enabled, after numerous experiments, to present to the public a pill peculiarly efficacious in those diseases resulting from the malaria universally prevailing in all the lowlands of California.”

      But from the outset, the malaria pills, by any name, did not become their next attempt to stake a new claim for gold – a Marysville medicine distributor took over making and selling the medicine, while Drs. Mason and Pollard, like a disgruntled couple, went their separate ways. Five years after they had sold off their medicine to the local distributor, the Marysville newspaper was still trying to remind Dr. Pollard that he had letters at the post office that needed to be picked up.

      Dr. Mason had moved on to the northwestern corner of California in Crescent City, where he spent the rest of his life with his family. Dr. Pollard stayed for a while longer in the gold region east of Marysville, listed once again as a doctor instead of a miner in 1857 and then as a doctor and surgeon surrounded by goldminers in the 1860 U.S. census. In the same census year back in Mooers, New York (the northeast corner of the state, next to the Canadian border), his wife and two children waited for his return; by 1863 he was back on the New York tax rolls and he was listed with his wife and children in the next (1870) federal census; he then stayed in New York for the rest of his life. In 1881 and for the next several years, his enthusiastic testimonial for what was Dr. J. A. Sherman’s Rupture Curative Mixture ran in the immensely influential New York Times, but only small, unimpressive efforts were being made to advertise Mason & Pollard’s Anti-Malaria Pills in papers like the Yonkers Statesman and the Poughkeepsie Eagle News. That medicine affair from the old days was probably as much of a distant, unpleasant memory for Dr. Pollard as it was for Dr. Mason. Their medical tryst in Marysville had given birth to a single offspring that carried both their names, occasionally popping up as if to haunt them for the remainder of their lives.

 FOOL'S GOLD

      Seven generations of medicine distributors over a span of 30 years had handled the manufacture, advertising, and selling of Mason & Pollard’s Anti-Malaria Pills, but none of their hearts – or wallets – seemed to be in it. Most of the distributors had made little to no effort to promote the medicine. The Reddington Company of San Francisco had been its sole agent for the longest period, from 1869 until all advertising ceased in1884, but during those last 15 years, their efforts to advertise it were lackluster at best: while promotion of the pills was fairly strong in California, it appeared in Oregon, New York, and New Jersey newspapers less frequently than a gold nugget in a miner’s pan.

      Back in 1862, an earlier distributor had tried to draw attention to the anti-malaria pills by claiming its new packaging was “to guard against Counterfeits”; the pills were

“now put up in a new and permanent style, in oval wooden boxes secured by a strap, printed in red type so as to read continuously, the directions folded around and the whole in a wrapper of Enameled paper, with the name of the Pills in red type on the top, and the names 'Mason & Pollard,' one on either end of the package.”

Eight years after the two doctors had parted ways over the medicine, they were still as far apart as possible; not only were they living at opposite ends of the country, but their individual names even appeared on opposite ends of the box.

      As the years passed and patent medicine advertising tried to evolve alongside scientific advancements and promotional sophistication, new promises were added on to the same old Mason & Pollard Anti-Malaria Pills. In 1871 the public was assured that the pills were “exclusively vegetable,” meaning there was no mercury or other minerals or chemicals in them; they assisted digestion and “add flesh and muscle to the frame”; and they were also promised to be good for all ages and both sexes. Ten years later, advertising for the pills dropped the promises of muscle mass and weight gain, focusing instead on their laxative properties and their usefulness to families: “As a Family Medicine in a bilious climate, they cure in three-fourths of the diseases incidental to a family … They may be given to the youngest child.”

      Broadening the medicine’s promised curative properties seemed to be a conscious attempt to make it be thought of in the public’s mind as more than just a medicine for those suffering with malaria, which though a terrible and dangerous illness, was largely limited to hot, wet, humid areas of the country, like the gold fields of California. The entire Gulf Coast region, from Texas to Georgia, renowned for heat and humidity, would therefore also have been a great area in which to advertise, but they never did (unless it was done by local drugstores and businesses that carried the product and promoted it on their own). Mason & Pollard’s Anti-Malaria Pills were test-advertised in California by its several timid owner-distributors and when the Redington Company added a partner named Coffin in New York City, the advertisements for the pills cropped up occasionally in New York. The anti-malaria medicine was promoted almost entirely in California and New York, where it’s distribution outlets were based and, ironically, where its two creators, Drs. Mason and Pollard, resided; the doctors and their medicine were living out the remainder of their days alienated but together.

 

NERVOUS LAUGHTER

      Truth be told, as I always try to do, Mason & Pollard’s Anti-Malaria Pills are little more than a footnote in the history of 19th century patent medicines and a dreary, uninspiring footnote at that. This whole story may never have come to be, if not for three bursts of color that were brought in at its end of days, perhaps as a long-shot effort to bring the dying brand back to life. Three advertising trade cards were commissioned by the Reddington Company to tell the story of Mason & Pollard’s Anti-Malaria Pills with pictures in a way that words alone just could not do.

      The stories these three cards tell are stunning and fascinating, brightening up the brand in such colorful ways that, if the pill product had any pulse left, its boxes on drugstore shelves should have revived and danced a jig. From a mishandled, under-promoted, blandly advertised medicine product that failed to attract a large customer base during the dying days of the California Gold Rush, these three pieces of advertising are some of the finest, most brilliantly designed examples of medicine advertising trade cards to emerge among 19th century patent medicines. They share three timeless stories that reveal ancient fears and faith still being held onto by our ancestors in the late 19th century … and perhaps by us today.

      The prominent New York chromolithographer, Mayer, Merkel & Ottmann, was chosen to design three advertising trade cards to convince customers that Mason & Pollard’s Anti-Malaria Pills was more than just another medicine – it was the very picture of supreme power and vitality. One look at the product package pictured on each card easily explains why the chromolithographers decided on very colorful cards and action scenes. The earlier oval brown boxes wrapped in red-printed enamel paper had devolved into a plain and somber gray box bereft of ornamentation – it was as lifeless as could be – looking very much like the pills were entombed in wet cardboard. Color and commotion on the card could do nothing but help distract the consumer from the lifeless box they were being encouraged to buy.

      The first card below depicts the personification of miasma: creatures of the swamp – gaseous entities that floated over the dank, rotting vegetation of the wetlands. Malaria holds up a snake, another creature of the wetlands; Biliousness holds up his club, threatening another brutal blow to the stomach, and Chills wafts past some swamp water. The foreboding woods in the background have lost most of their vegetation, just like trees do on their way to ruin in swampy regions.

Author's collection.

The men throw objects at the evil entities from behind the protection of a box of Mason & Pollards Anti-Malaria Pills. A close look at the weapons they’ve piled in front of them and are throwing at the fleeing fiends prove to be not black or brown stones, but the only thing that would really set disease on the run: the white projectiles they’re using are the anti-malaria pills. It’s interesting that the most surreal player on this stage is the stoic Stonehenge-like monolith, larger than the men and obviously larger than life.

      A generation or two before the Victorians who were taking in the subliminal messages of the miasma card, their Colonial grandparents would have easily comprehended the scene on the next Mason & Pollard’s trade card.

      As I’ve shown you in a previous post (4 May 2024: “Devils, Demons & Disease”) the belief that witches, demons, and devils cursed people with sickness was a very serious and pervasive fear. The scene on this card brings us into the recesses of Hell itself, with a hint of fire and darkness in the background, bats and an owl (both creatures of the night) overhead, a human skull and bones on some type of table, along with empty bottles of failed medicines that contributed to disease victims becoming just skeletal remains.

Author's collection.

But the grim world of “the Enemies of Mankind” is being upended by the prize fighter. Hell knows no fury like a box of Mason & Pollard’s. Powerful enough to beat devils but gentle enough for children.

      Both cards were designed to send a light-hearted and reassuring message about the anti-malaria pills. Children and adults could safely look and laugh at the scenes unfolding and subconsciously feel a little peace that the medicine defeats the notions of illness that had been handed down in their families for many generations. They provoked a nervous laughter – they were funny if they were right.

Author's collection.

      The last of these dramatic trade cards takes the viewer away from swamp gas fiends and hell spawn to a tiny-winged, chubby-cheeked cherub (yeah, those cheeks too), about to administer a box of Mason & Pollard’s pills to the malaria sufferer below. The artwork is an excellent example of trompe l’oeil (“deceive the eye”) design that was quite popular at the time: the cherub appears three dimensional, hovering in front of the door, innocent in its nakedness with a ponderously long red sash, symbolic of its heaven-sent mission among mankind.

      The despondent, sick young man is in shirt sleeves, neckerchief, and knee-high boots, sitting at a scuffed-up table in his spartan and somewhat rundown home; he seems designed to portray the quintessential goldminer suffering from malaria. It seems to be up to the viewer to decide whether the cherub is compassionately delivering the box of relief or impishly about to bonk the sufferer with it.

      The overarching message of all three creative cards was that Mason & Pollard’s Anti-Malaria Pills was the answer to disease – the promising cure. How could I not love these cards?

      Alas, these grand cards were not enough to resurrect the dying product. By the century’s last decade, the true cause of malaria had been determined and revealed. Health department instructions on preventive measures to eliminate mosquito breeding areas and to further protect exposed skin combined with the already long tradition of using quinine to treat malarial infections. Mason & Pollard’s Anti-Malaria Pills had become an anachronism unsupported by a feeble pedigree of manufacturing distributors and long-forgotten by its creators. But on the merits of these three small paper cards alone, the reputation of the pills is ephemerally lifted to help us glimpse the medicine as a dominant force among 19th century patent medicines that it never was.

      I for one will be forever grateful for this last-ditch effort to put Mason & Pollard’s Anti-Malaria Pills into the spotlight; for me, it’s still there.

 

** AUTHOR’S NOTE: 

All of my blog posts are the result of intensive research, but this is a blog, not a book, so to keep each post relatively brief, I do not include the sources for each fact. Nonetheless, I am always happy to share my sources if you reach out to me through my Contact page.

The life details of Dr. Edgar Mason of Missouri and Dr. Abiathar Pollard of New York marry perfectly with the facts and timeline I established for Drs. Mason and Pollard in Marysville and other locations nearby in the gold districts of northern California. If you find any facts that contradict or add to my findings, please share them with me so that we can correct and improve this or any blog post I write. Corrections and updates to historical data only improve the two most important results: historical accuracy and a better understanding of our past.

Lynn Massachusetts history - History of medicine - 19th-Century Health Remedies - Vintage Medical Ephemera - 19th-century medicine

Blowing Smoke on the Ideal Victorian Lady

NOTICE: This article has been updated as of 20 June 2024: additional image of a woman smoking in an ashtray - contributed by Sonny Jackson of California. See bottom of article - well worth the look!

The 1890s were a decade squarely focused on ideal form and fashion: women with hourglass shapes, perfect complexions, and smoldering Gibson Girl looks, expertly coiffed and always wearing the latest fashions. No one felt the strain of presenting properly for public appearance more than the Victorian woman. She was told by men and media to be stylish, beautiful, and a lady. There was more pressure on a woman to be ideal than there was on her body from the corset she wore, and just like the corset, she was expected to maintain proper form all day long. It was considered undeniable that she was “the weaker sex,” physically and intellectually inferior to men, dependent upon and subservient to her husband, and designed for beauty, virginal modesty, domestic duty, and motherhood. Any behaviors breaching this mold were viewed as morally, socially, and physically dangerous, and signs of an unvirtuous and fallen woman – certainly no lady.

A perfect example of this physical and behavioral confinement of woman was the rigid social construct that a gentleman could freely smoke but a lady never should. A New York physician’s statement on the matter was copied in many newspapers as if it was a public service health announcement:

… ladies … take the use of cigarettes to their very great detriment. … men are [not] often injured by the moderate use of tobacco in smoking. But the female body is no more adapted to the use of tobacco than the female mind is to mathematics. It causes neuralgia, headache, dyspepsia, palpitation of the heart, and worse than all, ruins the complexion and disorders the teeth. ... all will agree that the stale odor of tobacco coming from a woman's mouth is worse than the same smell exhaled by a man. ... men's nervous systems are not so impressionable as women's, and hence a man can do many things with impunity, or even benefit, which would be impossible for a woman to do without great risk. ... beauty ... is the smallest gift a woman can have, for it not only means aesthetic enjoyment for all that look at her, but it means a healthy mind and a healthy body ...

Cigarette display box label - updated image, 3/28/2024; collection of the author

Poor frail, fragile creatures, the doctor insisted, clearly the weaker sex ...

Despite laws and social mores, women and adolescents were smoking those “obnoxious and injurious cigarettes” and men and boys were spitting out tobacco juice at or across the path of oncoming members of the fairer sex for amusement or out of sheer meanness. Tobacco use was becoming ubiquitous and its smokey seduction was settling over men, women, and children across the country like a London fog. On January 1st, 1891, a newspaper squib read, “A good many New Year anti-tobacco resolutions will end up in smoke.”

Some companies quickly recognized the growing interest of young women to explore the cigarette experience by sneaking smokes, so they tried to pitch the social acceptability of allegedly medicinal cigarettes to alleviate symptoms of colds, allergies and asthma (pretty much all conditions falling under the catch-all term, catarrh). A few of these products, like Perrin’s and Marshall’s, offered cigarettes made from cubebs, a tropical bush of the pepper family with a very pungent taste and aroma that was often difficult for the smoker and bystanders to enjoy. But hey, it’s medicine, and strong, off-putting aromas and flavors were considered signs of its medicinal qualities and benefits: if it was yucky, it must be good medicine.

The two companies were producing the same type of medicated cigarettes, using the dried-up, ground berries of the cubeb plant, but their approach to advertising was very different.

Dr. Perrin’s advertising trade card showed their cubeb cigarettes being used by the whole family: Grampa and Gramma are in the lower corners, both looking old and weary; the son in this family is wearing knickers and has schoolbooks tucked under his arm and his sister is in the other corner (with a short skirt that emphasized her youth rather than suggesting her to be a fallen woman); and in the center was mom, relaxing in her comfy stuffed chair, her feet up on the hassock, a book in one hand and her Dr. Perrin’s cigarette in the other. The message was clear: cubeb cigarette smoking is okay – "everyone's doing it." The smoke that emanates from the entire family's cigarettes or lips is clear – it was purposely understated to make the activity less offensive and to get the reader to focus on the medicinal nature of the advertising message. Perrin’s was trying to encourage the use of their cubeb cigarettes by both sexes and all ages because of the product’s alleged health benefits for all; they were definitely trying to avoid any impression that they were attempting to break Victorian mores.

Marshall’s went in the opposite direction with the subtlety of a runaway freight train. What I find especially interesting about the Marshall’s advertising matter shown here is the manufacturer’s effort to show that the trademark woman smoking their cubeb cigarette is still the Victorian ideal of a beautiful, genteel lady. But if that was the intention, it just doesn’t work. It seems highly unlikely that those who frowned on females smoking could have their opinions changed by this image. She looks like a tough,

hardened woman with smoke rising from her cigarette and her lips; she’s not even trying to exhale discreetly to the side. She looks completely relaxed, not at all worried about being caught in a guilty pleasure – and she is purposely blowing billowing plumes of smoke like a factory smokestack, not to mention that she is demonstrating a skill at creative smoking – not just making smoke rings, but a full advertising message: “Marshall’s Prep’d” ("Prepared," emphasizing they were ready-made, so ladies didn't have to futz around with rolling the ground cubebs into cigarette papers like the men were constantly doing to make their tobacco cigarettes). So by skywriting in smoke she had “skills,” I guess, but she still looks more like a saloon floozie than a Victorian lady.

Then again, that may be exactly the type of woman Marshall’s was going for – not a floozie, but a young woman who was ready and willing to break barriers, listen to her own desires and blow smoke in the face of stodgy, controlling husbands, crusty clergy, and prim society women who still weren’t willing to make waves – or clouds of smoke.

For more on Victorian women and cigarettes, see:

     PROMISING CURES,

Vol.3, Chapter 9: Heroine Addiction

Vol.4, Chapter 10: Exposing the Naked Truth

UPDATE (28 March 2024): My dear friend, Barbara Rusch, offered me the use of the following image from her collection as an appropriate addition to this post on the Victorian cultivation of young women as smokers. She called it my article on "Smokin' Hot Women" - indeed, a better title for this topic than I had given to this blog. Given the manufacturer's use of this young model to promote Sweet Sixteen cigarettes (not "medicinal" cubebs but actual tobacco cigarettes), this advertisement is clearly designed not only to sell this brand of cigarettes but to encourage the sexualization of young women and immodest behavior. Then as now; some things never change.

Courtesy of the Barbara Rusch Collection.

UPDATE (29 June 2024): Sonny Jackson of California sent me this image of an ashtray he owns. He immediately thought of the great graphics in the ashtray when he read my article, "Blowing Smoke on the Ideal Victorian Lady", "Smokin' Hot Women" in the July/August 2024 issue of Antique Bottle & Glass Collector. He wrote to me:

"This item was dug here in the San Francisco Bay area and dates between the late 1890s to sometime after the San Francisco earthquake. ... A young friend gave it to me about 45 years ago - he dug out in Hastings Slough near Concord.  Looks like maybe it's made of some type of pewter. The little emblem in the left top corner shows the Capital and says Washington, DC.  Measures approximately 5 x 7 inches."

Thanks so much for sending me this image, Sonny. I love how the design combines the young woman and the smoke of her cigarette. If you follow the smoke trail from her cigarette, it becomes the long strands of her hair, or vice versa. I also think its more than just coincidence that the geometry of the smoke rings she's artfully blowing is repeated in her hoop earring. The subliminal message seems to be that through her vice, she and the cigarette have become one.

The surreal element turns out to be the U.S. Capitol building framed by the words "Capitol" and "Washington D.C.," hovering over the back side of her head. It's obviously nothing more than an indication that it is a souvenir from the nation's capitol, but masters of metaphor might imply that the government was sanctioning the ruin of women by allowing the tobacco industry to continue turning cigarettes into the national vice.

Courtesy of the Sonny Jackson Collection.

Lynn Massachusetts history - History of medicine - 19th-Century Health Remedies - Vintage Medical Ephemera - 19th-century medicine

Soule's Eradicator: the Flower or the Worm?

It's so easy for me to imagine the scene in 1885: a young woman of Lynn, Massachusetts, has put in another long, hard day at the dismal factory. She runs a noisy, dangerous machine, repeatedly stitching soles to shoes as part of a large assembly line operation. She leaves the factory late in the afternoon, one of the many drained workers breathing the outside air for the first time since very early in the morning. Tired, achy, and hungry, she walks down the sidewalk, being bumped and jostled constantly by the crowd of people going in all directions, amid the additional confusion of yelling paperboys, peddlers, and sidewalk preachers, and the dizzying animation of horses, wagons, and omnibuses snorting and rumbling through the street. Worn out, she feels anything but pretty. Being noticed was frankly the last thing on her mind - she was anxious to be once again hidden away in the privacy of her home.

While trying to avoid being stepped on or tripped by the stampeding herd of feet all around her, her mind replays the upsetting memories from earlier in the day, when she had noticed spots on the backs of her hands while running shoe parts through her machine at the factory. Then when she walked by a smudged mirror on the factory wall, she had glimpsed in her reflection some more unsightly blemishes on her checks and chin as well. Life seemed to be wearing her out and making her old before her time.

She finds some space between the bodies shuffling along the sidewalk and slips herself into Bergengren's drugstore, hoping there might be some cheap and sure solution for her stained skin - something that would help her feel more feminine and less like just another defeated face in the crowd. Feeling a little overwhelmed and lost among all the bottles, boxes, and signs that glare at her everywhere she turns in Bergengren's shop, her eyes are then tenderly invited to a scene in a tall card on the counter. Rendered in soft colors, it appeals to her feeling of femininity that she had worried might be disappearing.

There was nothing dark and harsh in the picture - nothing at all that dragged her thoughts back to the miserable factory floor where she slaved away each day. The two women in the picture understand her - both of them are her: the woman she is, and the woman she wishes she could be. She doesn't have to analyze the scenes; her heart and mind quickly agree that the product advertised is worth a try. She really, really wants to be the beautiful, poised woman it promises she could be. The two hard-earned quarters in the bottom of her purse shine a little against the dark leather, as if a sign that this purchase is, indeed, the right thing to do.

She walks home with her purchase of Mrs. Soule's Moth-Tan, Freckle & Pimple Eradicator, hopeful about something in her life for the first time in weeks.

There are many pieces of Victorian advertising that have survived their century-and-a-half ephemeral passage through time, and I have seen thousands of them, but the Mrs. Soule's counter card that our young heroine saw is truly special and possibly the only surviving example. There had been a tremendous array of "before-and-after" advertisements for all sorts of products, from anti-fat pills to stove polish, and the creativity and artwork are often exemplary pieces of creativity and design. But the counter card for Mrs. Soule's Moth-Tan, Freckle & Pimple Eradicator, abbreviated on the bottle's embossing to Soule's Eradicator, is something very special and in a class of its own. The greatness of Madison Avenue advertising has never excelled this advertising masterpiece, and this blog post intends to give it the few minutes of reverent admiration that it rightly deserves.

"Subliminal advertising" was just being introduced in the early 1880s. For a century the public had been amused and, well, mesmerized by watching friends and family members become unwitting participants as hypnotists seemed to control the actions and words of their subjects without them being conscious of it. In the middle of the decade, Sigmund Freud began using hypnosis in his work to understand the subconscious and unconscious mind. This counter card had done far more than present an obvious before-and-after metaphor: the designer and artist had created an advertising piece that spoke eloquently without words, playing at depth with the potential customer’s fears and dreams. Our factory worker decided to purchase after just a cursory perusal, but let’s break it down like Dr. Freud might have been inclined to do.

Mrs. Soule’s Moth, Tan, Freckle & Pimple Eradicator. Die-cut counter card, about 1885 (Shown on a black background. Height: 9½ inches) The back side has a cardstock kickstand that can be manually angled to allow the display card to be freestanding on the store counter. (Collection of the author; gift of Barbara Rusch.)

The counter card image depicted two conjoined scenes apparently featuring the same woman. In the “before” scene on the left side, the young woman was still in her peignoir, looking self-consciously in her hand mirror as she tussled hopelessly with her hair, trying to figure out how she was going to overcome her real problem: the skin blemishes spotting all over her face and forearms.

She was shown in an interior part of her home, hiding behind a chair and a wall, not at all ready for the world. The “after” image on the right side shows the same young woman, beautiful and ready for any social event: she doesn't have the slightest spot of skin blemish; her skin is flawless and she confidently shows it off with a sleeveless, bustled gown and a daringly plunging décolletage.

She has traded in her symbol of worry, her mirror, for a fancy, fashionable fan, and her other hand reaches not for her hair but for the drapery, purposely pulling it open to let the sunshine into the room where she had previously hidden herself; she is completely ready for a posh party or social.

Behind her were two healthy, lush green houseplants, one in full bloom with golden-colored flowers, while behind the morose “before” woman there is a vase holding only brown stems, suggesting no life, and a drab framed landscape on the wall, with vegetation also in brown.

And lest the message wasn’t clear enough, the artist superimposed three roses on top of the scene: the one on the “after” side was in perfect bloom, just like the ideal woman below it; the rose on the opposite side drooped towards the miserable woman, heavy with decay on its petals and worms on its stem. The third rose was perfectly positioned over the partition that separated the two scenes; in this neutral zone, it was still a bud, not yet bloomed, but pointing hopefully to the banner above that announced the miracle skin cure: "Soule’s Moth-Tan, Freckle & Pimple Eradicator, L. M. Brock & Co., Sole Proprietors, Lynn, Mass. U.S.A." The counter card sign left no question which woman represented the ideal Victorian lady nor could any doubt remain about which skin care product was going to help her achieve the goal.

I would like to think that my fictional customer would have had her dreams come true when she used her bottle of Soule’s Eradicator, but alas, that would not have happened. The published ingredients had no dermatological benefits but did have something sinisterly bad for the skin and body.

The manufacturer, Lemuel Brock, a very successful medicine maker and major candidate for Lynn mayor, promoted that it contained nothing dangerous:

“A great many people have the idea that all skin preparations contain either Bismuth, Arsenic, or Sugar of Lead, and are afraid to use [skin preparations for that reason]. We pledge ourselves that Mrs. Soule’s Eradicator DOES NOT contain any of the above-named ingredients, and we warrant it not to injure the skin, and that a continuation of its use will restore the same to all its youthful fairness.” [emphasis as in original]

He also assured he had further helped his customers by keeping the cost of Soule’s Eradicator way down through the use of a very simple bottle rather than some overcharged decorative container designed to sit prettily on a lady’s vanity, among her fancy perfumes:

“This preparation is not put up in a cut-glass bottle, or fancy jar or pitcher, and then the price fixed to match the glassware. Say one or two dollars per bottle or jar, as the case may be, - but a common white glass bottle that would not be out of place on any lady’s dressing table, and is for sale by all druggists and fancy good dealers for fifty cents per bottle – one-third the price of any other preparation that comes near containing the virtues of the Eradicator.” [emphasis as in original]

In 1890 Brock was taken to court for selling a bottle that contained 60 grains of corrosive sublimate, a chemical compound of mercury and chlorine that is very toxic to humans. Its toxicity is due not just to the mercury but also its corrosive properties which, according to Wikipedia, can cause ulcers to the stomach, mouth, and throat, and corrosive damage to the intestines. It accumulates in the kidneys and causes acute kidney failure. It can also cause burning in the mouth and throat, stomach pain, abdominal discomfort, lethargy, vomiting of blood, corrosive bronchitis, insomnia, excessive salivation, bleeding gums, tremors, and dental problems – even death may occur in as little as twenty-four hours, or as long as two long and lingering weeks.

Lemuel Brock had sold the mercury-laden medicine to a woman who was an undercover agent for the government. Despite the state chemist’s careful chemical analysis and the female agent’s testimony, the judge took the side of Lemuel Brock, “whom he knew[,] rather than that of the woman,” whom he didn’t know. Brock’s case was discharged and he was exonerated.

The counter card for Mrs. Soule’s Eradicator is the keystone of my collection – the quintessential piece of Victorian proprietary medicine advertising – and it was the gift of a dear friend and fellow time traveler. I never assign or measure the monetary value of pieces in my collection, but if I were asked, the answer would be easy – its priceless to me.

For more on Soule's Eradicator, see:

     PROMISING CURES,

Vol.3, Chapter 9: Heroine Addiction

Vol.4, Chapter 10: Exposing the Naked Truth

Lynn Massachusetts history - History of medicine - 19th-Century Health Remedies - Vintage Medical Ephemera - 19th-century medicine