Hair-Raising Stories: the Bear, the Coconut & the Oil Well

Part 2 of 3: THE COCONUT

I remember my mom taking me to the bear cage at Buttonwood Zoo when I was a little kid. I could smell the bears long before I could see them … the pungent odors of molting fur and beastly wastes combining in the stagnant August heat … To this day, the overpowering stench hangs in the recesses of my memories. Put bear’s grease in my hair? No way.

But coconut?

Absolutely – that’s a happy smell for most of us. There are tons of coconut scented shampoos and conditioners on the market even today. And to make a fine point about that tropical fruit, we eat coconut ice cream, coconut cream pie, and coconut macaroons; maybe it's just me, but toasted coconut sprinkled over anything turns it into instant FABULOUS!

Author's collection.

Joseph Burnett thought coconuts were great as well, even though he lived over 9,000 miles away from where coconut trees grew. Born in 1820, he was a precocious young man, graduating from college at 17 years old as a Doctor of Chemistry. He then went to work for a manufacturing chemist in a Boston apothecary shop. There he could use his education not only to fill doctor’s prescriptions but also to formulate new medicines, toiletries, and other products of his own creation. In less than ten years he was a partner in the firm and forming a strong reputation for excellent products.

In 1846 he made and supplied the first general anesthetic used to knock out a patient before surgery. In 1847 he was the first to produce vanilla extract in the U.S.; it was so popular, he expanded his extract line to over thirty flavors, including lemon, almond, celery, nutmeg, rose, nectarine, and cinnamon (I wonder if he made extract of coconut?). Burnett’s Extracts quickly became a major brand; by 1855 they were being sold all over the eastern half of the continent, fully 15 years before the government began registering trademarks in 1870.

Then came the coconuts

Americans had a long-standing fascination with foreign lands and cultures. Stories that came back from sailors and whalers, missionaries, merchants, and explorers told of strange animals and curious people in distant, exotic locations across the globe. One such account caught Joseph Burnett’s eye; it gave a vivid description of the people of Sumatra, reporting “Their hair is strong, and of a shining black, the improvement of both which qualities it probably owes in great measure to the constant use of Cocoanut Oil.” Burnett’s advertisement repeated only part of the author's sentence, which originally read, “it probably owes in great measure to the early and constant use of coconut oil ... .”

Burnett determined that he would invent a coconut-based hair oil that would produce the same effects – strong and shining – on a wide scale. He had purposely removed the word “early” from his advertising copy because he wanted his customers to feel confident that they would derive the benefits as soon as they started using his coconut oil. Including "early" might sway them not to purchase the hair dressing because they hadn’t been using it all their lives, like the Sumatrans.

His advertising also promised that his formulation had removed “the peculiar odor” and made it “the blandest” preparation for hair ever offered to the public. Interesting that the coconut fragrance so widely enjoyed by us today in our hair products was off-putting to Americans in the mid-nineteenth century – or at least to Joseph Burnett.

Then he made another decision with this product that has caught 21st century bottle collectors by surprise, confusing a whole bunch of them in the process. He named his new coconut-infused hair product “Burnett’s Cocoaine.”

Author's collection.

Not Cocaine – Coc-O-aine

Chemically formulating his new hair dressing might have been easier than formulating the product’s name. The “Coco” part of “Cocoaine” was obviously for its principal ingredient – coconut – but the reason for the ending is not as clear; “aine” is the pharmaceutical suffix for a local anesthetic (such as cocaine, lidocaine, novocaine, etc.). Maybe Burnett classified the coconut hair oil as an anesthetic because of its promised benefit of soothing an irritated scalp.

In 1857 Joseph Burnett introduced Burnett’s Cocoaine to America, following the same advertising blitz strategy that he was using successfully with Burnett’s Extracts – whatever success it was going to have would be totally dependent on its association with coconuts because America had not yet heard of the South American drug, cocaine; in fact, a method to extract cocaine powder from the coca plant wouldn’t be accomplished for another two years. Only after this had happened could cocaine be put into medicines and human bodies (unless people just started chewing the leaves).

Burnett's Floral Hand-Book & Ladies Calendar, back cover (1870). Author's collection.

Joseph Burnett focused his attention on differentiating his new hair oil from its old-world competition, bear’s grease. “The inventors of Cocoaine, knowing that animal oils – Bear’s Grease, Pomades, &c. – induce heat rather than alleviate it, turned their attention and pharmaceutical science towards Vegetable Oils as the basis of a medicament to promote the growth and preserve the beauty of the hair.” Burnett’s promotional copy continued, “Burnett’s Cocoaine is superior to all animal oils,” explaining it was a cooling vegetable oil, while animal oils were heating (19th century consumers reading this could easily imagine that the furry hide of a bear was far hotter than a coconut hanging under its swaying palm leaves). He then explained that coconut oil does not become rancid like animal oils do (that’s not true, but it sounded good). He concluded his pitch with the promise that he had “permanently deodorized” his Cocaine product of that “objectionable” coconut odor. Whatever.

Burnett’s Cocoaine was an immediate success which consequently drew a quick succession of competitors. In 1859 an imitation hair oil made in New York City with a copycat name (“Cocoine”) and bottle shape, was taken to task by the Boston Post: “This is a poor subterfuge, and should not be suffered to be practiced to the injury of the very respectable and responsible

Wikimedia Commons. National Library of Medicine.

gentlemen who have devoted as much time, care and capital to inventing and making known the genuine article." The knock-off hair oil was also taken to court and the judge found that, “The conclusion is irresistible that [the defendant] was aware of the advertisements for Cocoaine and that he intentionally adopted ‘Cocoine’ as a close imitator of 'Cocoaine,’ and for the purpose of deriving profit from the simulated trade-mark [the name].” A permanent injunction was ordered against the New Yorkers. In 1862 a Chicago druggist began offering their “Cocoaine Soap” for chapped hands, made of “Glycerine Honey and Cocoa Nut Oil.” Not a pretender to Burnett’s hair oil business, but more of a camp follower, trying to cash in on the intensifying interest in Cocoaine as well as cocaine. By this point, medicine makers were starting to sell products containing the actual drug cocaine from the coca plant, like Dr. Tibbles’ Compound Essence of Cocaine in England and America’s Cocaine Toothache Drops.

Creative Commons. McClure's Magazine, 1896.

Cocoaine - a valuable property

For the remainder of the century, there was less care being taken by typesetters (and perhaps the Burnett company and its advertising agency) to correctly identify Burnett’s Cocoaine. In 1870 The Times-Picayune of New Orleans twice incorrectly called the hair dressing Cocaine within the body of the Burnett’s Cocoaine ad; in contrast, an 1880 Australia’s Sydney Morning Herald.  listed Bennett’s Cocaine along with the other products of the Burnett line, all of which were properly identified as Burnett’s. As Burnett himself knew from all those who tried to horn in on some of his sales, imitation was the sincerest form of flattery. Perhaps they felt that the occasional “slip” of the “o” from Cocoaine might be worth the confusion, since the drug cocaine was unregulated and addictively popular. The inconsistency and infrequency of the mistakes, however, would suggest they were unintentional mistakes. Burnett’s Cocaine was doing just fine and didn’t need cheap tricks to sell well. As one of their ads in 1883 powerfully stated, “The name “Cocoaine” has become a valuable property.”

Somehow, amid all of his empire building with extracts, toiletries, and Cocoaine, he had also managed to buy and build the large Deerfoot Farm in Southborough, Massachusetts. Deerfoot became one of the earliest dairies to package their milk products in glass bottles. Joseph Burnett also developed a recipe for sausage that made that product popular as well. From vanilla extract to coconut hair dressing to pork sausage, the Boston manufacturing druggist seemed to have the Midas touch; more likely, he was truly a skilled chemist and businessman.

The Burnett Mansion (ca.1890). Collection of the Southborough Historical Society

In 1894 Joseph Burnett died at 74 years old as a result of a carriage accident. The Boston Druggist Association and the Massachusetts College of Pharmacy both sent delegations to his funeral as a tribute to his years of service and influence in both groups. His great stone mansion in Southborough, Massachusetts still stands and is being actively preserved.

For more on cocaine, see:

PROMISING CURES

Vol.3: Ashen Complexion

Next week: Part 3 of 3: THE OIL WELL

Courtesy of the Barbara Rusch Collection

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

Doorways to Time Travel

I should be packing for my trip right now. My daughter, Gwen, and I will soon be departing for the ultimate daddy-daughter date to the other side of the world: South Korea. We will leave through the doorway of our house, go through doorways to the flight terminal, the intrusive security portal, and into the jet, then over seventeen hours later, we'll begin to explore through unfamiliar doorways in an exotic land 7,000 miles away - what an incredible journey.

But what would it be like if, instead of just going through different doorways of space, we could pass through different doorways of time? Jules Verne helped us do it with his wonderful book, The Time Machine, but we have also done it many times when going through doorways at places like Plimoth Patuxet Museums in Massachusetts and restored historical buildings all over the continent. There is something about ancient doorways that call to me, urging me to go through, and for a few moments at least, to try imagining what it was like to be there centuries ago.

That's what I offer you today: some very special doors to the past. This photograph contains doorways to the house and the early laboratory of the Pinkham family of Lynn, Massachusetts, probably in about the year 1880.

The original, sepia-toned photograph is from a stereopticon view: two identical images pasted next to each other on the same piece of cardstock; when viewed through a pair of lenses called a stereopticon viewer. An optical illusion is created whereby the two copies of the same photograph visually merge, making the subjects they contain appear three-dimensional. I submit to you, though, that a stereopticon viewer is not essential to enjoy a multi-dimensional perspective on the subject. While our eyes can perceive three dimensions, our imaginations can enjoy many more, if we let them. Let's work wiith this old sepia-tone photo and see what we have missed at first glance — with or without the stereopticon viewer.

My son, Nick, has done another great job using computer graphics to bring the sepia image into our world by adding color (see my 25 November 2023 blog post, "Their World Wasn't Sepia") and in doing so, some parts of the picture come to life in a way that my eye just missed before. Maybe the biggest surprise was to see a dog lying across the tops of two barrels on the left side of the photograph! So we have not only the Pinkham family and the Pinkham company workers, but the Pinkham pooch!

Something else that also stands out much better after the colorization are the stacks of Pinkham packing crates, either ready for packing or already packed and ready for shipping. The stack on the far left may be showing the ends of the crates (stacked by the narrow side so as not to block the door to the right), while the stacks to the left of the big entrance to the laboratory building are visible from the long side of the crates. I have also added a photograph here of two Pinkham shipping cases in my collection, showing them from the long and short sides; if you look closely enough at the photo, you can see the arch of type on some of the boxes and sometimes even a blob of black under the arch that was actually Lydia Pinkham's face, just like on my examples here.

Who the people are, specifically, is harder to determine. From the existing photos of Lydia's husband, Isaac, and their three sons: Charles, Dan, and Will, it is very difficult to determine who's who; relying exlusively on facial hair, it is possible that the man behind the dog was Charles, their oldest son, who later in life sported a bushy walrus moustache. If the photo was taken in 1880 as I believe, then sons Dan and Will were still living, although Dan may have already been showing signs of his terminal affliction with tuberculosis, then known as consumption for its propensity to make advanced victims look emaciated; perhaps the gaunt-looking fellow to the left of the dog is Dan, based on what look like hollow cheeks.

The Pinkhams had only one daughter, Aroline. I suspect she is in the photo, too, because this type of late-19th century photography is typical of a proprietor's photo, intentionally taken to include all the owners, family, and workers, set in front of the business to show it off and use it as a promotional piece. Given this purpose, I'm sure Aroline is one of the three young women (I'll take a wild stab and say the one at the base of the stairs, depicted in light blue, in front of her mother) and the other two were employees who helped Lydia in responding to her correspondence. The only person I am certain of in the entire picture is the matronly image of Lydia E. Pinkham herself, standing all in black in her doorway. Blown up and slightly colorized, she looks almost spectral — appropriately so for a woman who died over 140 years ago.

I invite you to walk up to these Pinkham doorways — maybe even go through them, if your imagination will take you there. Can you hear the inside of the laboratory building echo with the sound of men's and boy's voices, talking and sometimes punctuating with laughter, and hard-soled shoes scuffing along the floorboards? Does the sound of glass bottles clinking together in wooden crates echo their music as hay is stuffed around each one to quietly protect them? Do the pungent odors from the barrels of herbs waft through the air under your nose, constantly reminding the senses that this is not just another storehouse or barn?

And when you are invited through the front door of the Pinkham home, is it a quiet domestic sanctuary? Listen carefully, though, and you can hear the voices of a few young women respectfully seeking guidance from Lydia herself about how to answer the next letter sent by a desperate woman from some distant place who is hoping for a solution to her private discomforts from the lady renowned for her knowledge and wisdom.

     It should also be pointed out that that narrow, gravelly dirt cartway in front of all of them is what became the very wide, busy, fast-paced thoroughfare called Western Avenue and Route 107.

Hopefully this picture will transport you, even for just a few minutes, to a different place and time, bringing you great enjoyment at the very nominal expense of a little imagination, while Gwen and I travel through other doors in an exotic land far away, seeking memorable adventures, just like you. Bon voyage!

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