Curing the 'King's Evil' with and without a King

It could be ugly, painful, and embarrassing. The lymphnodes around the neck would become infected, causing swollen lumps that sometimes festered, weeping puss, pain, and foul odor. It was called scrofula or the 'King's Evil' - not because kings caused it, but because certain kings were claimed to have the power to heal it. They didn't, of course, but sometimes the disease went into remission or altogether healed naturally, which went to the credit of the king. A king who was believed to have the power to heal was a magical, miraculous, powerful king indeed, seemingly deserving honor, glory, respect, and fear.

By the 17th century, the royal touch of British nobility had already been happening for hundreds of years. It had become part of the ceremony for the king to touch the infected patient after which the recipient of the touching would be given a coin or token as a parting gift, sort of the royal equivalent of a sacred relic blessed by clergy. The touch-piece usually had a hole in it for a ribbon to be strung through so it could be worn around the sick person's infected neck. The touch-pieces were made of gold, silver, copper, brass, or base metal, but what was supposed to be most important were the miraculous healing properties conveyed to it by the king.

A royal touch-coin for the King's Evil, featuring St. Michael the Archangel defeating the dragon. (Courtesy of The Royal Mint)

"The Royal Gift of Healing," frontispiece of "Adenochoiradelogia, or An anatomick-chirurgical treatise of glandules & strumaes, or Kings-Evil-swellings : Together with the royal gift of healing, or cure thereof by contact or imposition of hands, performed for above 640 years by our Kings of England, continued with their admirable effects, and miraculous events; and concluded with many wonderful examples of cures by their sacred touch," by John Browne, 1684

In the dramatic scene above, the sufferer submissively kneels before the king who lays hands on the afflicted. The royal pomposity of the scene is completed by the clergy gathered on one side to observe the miracles performed by their king. His doting court hovered nearby on his other side, better dressed for a ball than the sickroom scene playing out before them; and his armed guards stood vigilantly in two rows in front of him, keeping control over the throngs of his sick subjects, young and old, who awaited their turn for his royal curing touch. Note also the king's dark-clothed assistant, immediately to his right, holding a touch-piece with its ribbon hanging down from it, ready to give it to the afflicted man once he had received the king's touch.

Scrofula came to the American colonies, but the king did not. So what did colonists stricken with scrofula do in his absence? The best they could.

Ann Edmonds helped her husband run their tavern (called an ordinary) in Lynn, Massachusetts. It was a full-scale business of its type, providing lodging, food, and alcoholic drinks to travelers. Goodwife Edmonds also had developed the reputation of being "a doctor woman" and the ordinary was therefore also a destination for the thirsty, hungry, tired, and sick.

In February 1657 she was doctoring a young girl named Mary Greene, who was suffering from what Goodwife Edmonds diagnosed as the King's Evil in one of the girl's shins. Even if the girl was back in England, she had become sick at a time that England didn't have a king, so the Greene's sought a cure from Ann Edmonds.

The Greene’s daughter first stayed with a doctor named Thomas Starr in Charlestown, but despite his healing efforts, the open wound continued to fester, so the Greenes brought her to the Edmonds ordinary to see if the woman doctor in Lynn could be any more successful. Other women who assisted Goodwife Edmonds reported the girl's leg was “in a verry bad condition, both running and raw with corruption, swelling and looking eager and red” and that the flesh was “all rotten about the sore and stinked.” The Edmonds’ seventeen-year-old son Joseph agreed that the wound looked “rotten and it Stunke.” The squeamish teenager also recalled that while he “did daily see a great care and diligence and paines” taken by his stepmother “about dressing the sore with much tenderness,” the stench was so bad “that he was not able to indure it.”

Mary stayed at the tavern as Ann Edmonds’ patient for about eleven months, during which time the doctress removed a five-inch piece of decaying bone from Mary’s shin, applied healing agents to the wound, and administered a special diet to the girl. Ann made sure her young patient had the benefits of fresh meat and greens, even during times of the year when they were “difficult to ataine.” Family and neighbors testified to the girl’s steady improvement, but when Thomas Starr was told about the child’s gradual recovery, the jealous doctor harrumphed that “he would eat a firebrand if she cured it.” The crestfallen Starr was not pleased or satisfied with reports that under the care of a competitor (and a woman at that) the leg of his former patient had come to have “very little soreness or pain” and that the girl “could leap about very lively.”

Twenty-one years later, a grown up Mary Greene got married and went on to have four children. Maybe it was Starr who needed the King's touch after swallowing that firebrand.

For more on Ann Edmonds and the King's Evil, see:

PROMISING CURES, Vol.1, Prologue: Poking and Prodding

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

Trademarks: Playing Possum?

It was one of the earliest trademarks registered in the United States - Number 247 - and the very first for a business in Lynn, Massachusetts. It's hard to imagine what inspired 22-year-old George B. Thurston to come up with the design. It was a distinctive symbol, to be sure, but what exactly was it and what was its message?

Maybe that was the whole point: to make the potential buyer be curious and wonder - capture the customer's attention.

Just 15 years old in 1864, George Thurston went down to New Bern, North Carolina, with his father to help sell food, medicine, tobacco, whiskey, and other goods to the Lynn soldiers of the 8th Massachusetts Infantry. During this time, the young teenager caught a young opossum and made him his pet. For the next year, the pet possum was probably a source of curiosity and amusement for the soldiers of the 8th, many of whom weren't much older than George. They needed something to take their mind off the war and help them pass the time.

When the war was over and the Thurstons came back to Lynn, George's pet possum came with them. In 1868, George loaned his "southern critter," as they called it, to Lynn's Post 5 GAR to have the 8th's mascot on exhibition at the veteran's fair, raising funds for the widows and orphans of departed comrades.

George's possum was a local celebrity. It was probably the critter featured on his first medicine trademark three years later.

Starting out in the patent medicine business at just 22 years old, George wanted something striking and memorable to represent the worm syrup he was selling, made from his mother's recipe. The cartoonish drawing could have been a bear cub dancing in a hoop, and I originally thought it was, but now I'm convinced it represented his pet possum. The skull shape is carefully drawn, rounded and sloping down to the nose, with whitish fur and a hint of pointed teeth, a characteristic feature in a possum's wide mouth. The fingers and toes are distinctively long and humanesque, again just like a possum, and grasping the hoop with prehensile ease. The rest of the animal's coat is darker, suggesting a light gray, a frequent contrast to the light-colored head of the North American Opossum. And, if you look really close, you will make out what may be its tail, wrapped along the front of the belly and up to the chest. Perhaps George had kept his pet in a cage designed for a large bird, like a parrot or cockatoo, with a large hoop suspended in the middle, and his possum frequently climbed into it, like in the trademark.

Was George inspired with cause to use his possum as the poster-pet for his worm medicine trademark? Very possibly. Possums do get infested with worms from the foods they scavenge. Maybe young George tried his mom's worm syrup on his pet, making it a sort of guinea-pig-possum. It's even possible that George and his father were selling his mother's worm syrup to the soldiers in camp who might have made some of the same bad food choices while foraging in the North Carolina wilderness that George's possum had made.

Possibly the worm syrup customer was just supposed to feel all warm and fuzzy about the cute, playful animal on the trademark (come on, Sandra Boynton fans, you know that feeling). Maybe the playful possum had been designed for customers to convince themselves that the critter was happy and dancing because it had been cured by the medicine, subliminally prompting them to buy a bottle for their sick and lethargic child back home who was suffering with worms. Or perhaps the unofficial regimental mascot was designed to be a locally patriotic symbol, encouraging all the returned veterans and their families to support their well-known townsmen, much like the Thurstons had been there for them during the war. Buy a bottle of Mrs. Thurston's Celebrated Worm Syrup and help out your friends, the Thurstons.

Whatever the trademark was supposed to convey, it helped the medicine survive for almost four decades, which in patent medicine years is a very, very long time, and in possum years, well, it's almost forever.

While George's possum helped the time pass, Mrs. Thurston's Worm Syrup helped everything else pass, or so George's trademark would lead us to believe.

For more on the career of George Thurston & Mrs. Thurston's Syrup, see:

PROMISING CURES, Vol.3, Chapter 7: Reconstructive Surgery

& Chapter 8: Heroine Addiction

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

Trademarks: Love in a Bottle

As America moved closer to the end of the 19th century, more and more products loaded store shelves and newspaper pages. Competition for consumer dollars consequently became tougher, so manufacturers resorted to branding their products and some got their product designs and names trademarked.

It was the early years of registered trademarks in the U.S. (the first being issued in 1870), so the art and craft of creating an effective brand went in many directions - some became standards that have lasted into our lives today and many more have gone the way of the dodo - but even those have fascinating and sometimes fun stories to share with us today.

Lots of Lynn medicine makers applied for trademarks and I have featured them in Appendix B of Promising Cures. I will drop them in as blog entries from time to time, starting with this amusingly dramatic scene for Parisian Aphro Tonic:

The product name was actually an abbreviation - probably to make it reader-friendly - it was short for Parisian Aphrodisiac Tonic. The man on bended knee is assumed to depict the product's proudly French creator, Charles Francois Julien Petit de Langle (note the enhanced detailing of the man's face compared to the plainer rendering of the woman's face). Although there were proprietary medicines for every human ailment under the sun, the French doctor created one for an issue infrequently discussed: sexual desire.

ARE YOU IMPOTENT?

his newspaper advertisement asked boldly.

The physician and specialist in genitourinary diseases had immigrated from France to the U.S. with his wife, Marie, and settled in Lynn. In 1893 he set up a complete medical facility in Central Square, comprising a waiting room, a laboratory, a dispensary, and an operating room, and Marie advertised her services as a Parisian dressmaker. He also introduced his own medicine in that year – the Parisian Aphro Tonic – an aphrodisiac medicine for the marketplace; in so doing, he had a trademark created that was clearly designed to attract attention.

The trademark depicted a man, presumably de Langle himself, on bended knee before a well-endowed and over-corseted woman, almost certainly Marie in one of her Paris creations, holding a bottle of the Parisian Aphro Tonic. The image makes you wonder: is he proposing marriage, or propositioning her, or just begging for the medicine? The scene implies that he is trying to be amorous, but perhaps he was just pleading for the bottle of tonic so that he could be! Maybe an even better question would be: is the curvaceous, wasp-waisted lady refusing to give it to him?

Something seemed to be working for Charles and Marie; the couple celebrated a “joyous triple ceremony” - their tenth anniversary, a house warming, and the anniversary of the French republic on 14 July 1896, and invited hundreds of guests for the grand event at their new home on the corner of Ocean and Basset streets. The de Langles seemed very happy and very much in love - perhaps there was something to his medicine after all.

For more on the career of Charles F. J. Petit de Langle, see:

PROMISING CURES, Vol.4, Chapter 10: Exposing the Naked Truth

& Appendix B: Lynn, Massachusetts Proprietary Trademarks

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