A Yankee Peddler of Bitters & Baseballs

A rare little record reveals a forgotten profession.

     Frank Albert Kidder didn’t know he was making history. He thought he was just leaving an order with the printer to create a low-cost advertising card he could give to his customers or whoever would take a gander at it.

     Today, as I hold Frank’s card in my hand, I see not a small piece of quaint advertising, but an amazing window into the life of a country peddler in the late 19th century. Let’s look through it together and enjoy the view into a forgotten past.

     Frank Kidder drove his horse-drawn wagon chock-full of small goods and notions through the New England countryside; his range almost certainly covered the many farmlands north and west of Boston and probably into New Hampshire. Farmers were his target audience; they were very busy taking care of their livestock and crops every day, so traveling to cities to shop was an unwise  extravagance of time and money. The visit of a peddler with his wagonful of goods was a practical solution. 

Advertising Trade Card for Frank Kidder’s Grocery Wagon, ca.1876-1880. (Front). Rapoza collection.

Eye-Catching Messages

Frank had his business card made sometime between 1876-1880. Collecting what were called advertising trade cards was becoming a national obsession; children and women pasted them in large scrapbooks and even the smallest, one-man business like Frank Kidder could afford to have some basic trade cards printed. The least expensive cards were called stock cards, displaying preprinted images with a blank area reserved for the customized message of the advertiser; Frank’s card was one of this type.

  The card front that Frank Kidder selected was defined by a single-color illustration of an attractive young woman, fashionably dressed but revealing a low neckline and a bared shoulder. In rural New England, far from the salacious temptations of large cities, it was a rare, provocative image that probably found its way onto the walls of some barns, outhouses, and tool sheds or perhaps secreted away in a workbench drawer.

     The sultry beauty casually leans on an ivy-bordered signboard, the center of which was left blank by the designer so that advertisers like Frank could have the printer fill it in with their own message. Frank maximized the tiny space with as many pithy messages as could be fit:

BUY YOUR GOODS FROM FRANK KIDDER’S Grocery Wagon.

     As peddlers, traders, hucksters, and other traveling salesmen roamed the countryside selling their wares, Frank wanted to make sure that  people waited for his return for an honest deal on quality goods.

William Ayres Hurlbut, peddler, stands before his well-stocked wagon of goods for sale. Image taken in DeKalb, NY, ca.1870-1880. De Kalb Historian Bryan Thompson points out that Hurlbut [Thompson’s 3rd great uncle] was holding eggs in his hand, with a bowl of eggs next to him as well, “It was commonplace for peddlers to sell their wares for eggs while they were traveling, then bring the eggs back to town” and sell them for cash or more goods for their wagon. [Courtesy of Bryan Thompson and The Historian’s Office, Town of De Kalb, NY.]

“The Farmers’ Friend”

     Back then, this phrase was oft-repeated and full of connotation, from natural to political. Many things were called the farmer’s friend, from harvesting equipment and a newspaper to earthworms, rat snakes, and barn owls. Farming fed the country and farmers were a significant portion of the nation’s population; businesses large and small, like Frank’s, beat hasty paths to the farms, wanting to be favored with their business.

None but first-class GOODS. Everything Warranted.

     Itinerant peddlers and salesmen, here today and gone tomorrow, were distrusted as a class of business, so Frank Kidder’s promise of nothing but the best goods was his attempt to separate his grocery wagon from his competitors. He also warranted everything he sold with a bold promise – if the customer didn’t like it, he would take it back and refund the purchase price.

“Redwood Peddler on the Calaboga Road.” Image taken in Hammond, NY, ca.1900. [Courtesy of Donna Demick, Hammond Historian.]

The first in the Field; always Reliable.

     The first part of this phrase may have meant Kidder was the first to bring new goods to the farms or that he was claiming to be the best of peddlers in terms of quality and reputation, but either way it was read, he was setting himself up as the best of the bunch; then he ended the sentence with the reassurance that his customers would have no regrets – how could you if he’s always reliable?

     Between the strategic promises and the Victorian vixen displaying them and herself, the inexpensive advertising card was a powerful and enticing message being placed in the farmer’s hand as cows mooed nearby, chickens clucked underfoot, and the air stank from the unseen pigpen on the other side of the barn. Frank Kidder had their attention; taking a few minutes to look over all the stuff in his wagon became more of a break than a chore. It was a welcomed visiting store on wheels – a combination of convenience store and curiosity shop. 

The Punctilious Peddler

Advertising Trade Card for Frank Kidder’s Grocery Wagon, ca.1876-1880 (Reverse side). Rapoza collection.

     The text on the back is the historian’s heaven. Frank Kidder supplied a richly detailed inventory of his wagon, giving a very clear picture of what he was selling to the farmers and country folk to make his living. 

     Everything was small: he chose not to carry the brooms, shovels, scythes, dresses, fabrics, or jewelry often stocked by other peddlers, and certainly no fruits, vegetables, or meats – not for fear of spoilage but because farms were the source of such things.

     Instead, Frank Kidder loaded his wagon with small and less accessible ingredients for cooking, other necessities that couldn’t be conviently made at home, and a long list of medicines. Oh, and “Base Balls” (it didn’t become standardized as one word, “baseball,” until about 1884) for playing the game that was yet another passion sweeping the nation.

     Most of the food items, like coffee, tea, sugar, lemons, cinnamon, and coconut were not native New England crops but they packed and traveled well in the wagon. Lamp chimneys and bases, shirt collars, stationery, blank books for journaling and record keeping, pocket knives, hair pins, combs, and pencils were some of the practical and helpful whatnots that filled needs in almost every home. But by far, Frank Kidder packed more medicines into his wagon than anything else. He was most likely able to carry such a wide selection of remedies and sundries in small quantities and consistently enough to have them regularly stocked on his wagon and listed on his trade card because he was being supplied from the regular stock of a drugstore, grocer, or wholesaler. But make no mistake about it, he was no employee or underling for someone else's store back in Boston; Frank Kidder was an entrepreneur, proudly running and promoting his own business: “Frank Kidder’s Grocery Wagon.”

     The list of medicines on the back of his trade card was anything but a random jumble of remedies; it reveals a carefully planned stocking strategy. Looked at closely, it can be seen that the medicines were carefully selected to cover a broad range of illnesses and body complaints, and they were for everyone – not just for family members but for the whole farm.

     The extensive medicine list was deliberately started with two prominent selections from the bitters category. Walker’s Vinegar Bitters and Drake’s Plantation Bitters were brands with national reputations, an accomplishment that was happening among patent medicines moreso than any other category of consumer goods. Bitters were usually promoted for disorders associated with digestion, from weakness and indigestion to constipation and diarrhea. The Vinegar Bitters appealed to those committed to temperance, as it promised (falsely) that it was alcohol-free. The Plantation Bitters was well-known for its log cabin bottle, a distinctive shape with contents that were more than a third rum – a powerful punch for those who preferred alcohol in their bitters.

Goods from Frank Kidder's Grocery Wagon. A representative recreation of items he listed on his trade card inventory (left to right): lamp chimney and base; essence of peppermint; lemons; pocket books; flavoring extracts (essence of wintergreen in the foreground); elixir of paregoric, and a bottle of Drake's Plantation Bitters (Houston24 commemorative bottle). Rapoza collection.

     Kidder also carried Rush’s Medicines and Kennedy’s Medicines, two more widely popular lines, especially for their flagship cures like Rush’s Pills, a laxative so powerful that they had early on gained the nickname, “thunderbolts.” Then came the balsams and Dr. Pierce’s "Golden Medical Discovery,” all of which were primarily for lung diseases like consumption and colds. While the balsams worked on the lungs, the salves were for inflamed, sensitive skin, like piles and sunburn. The oil group – Wizard Oil, arnica oil, and Gargling Oil, were liniments for sore muscles and painful joints and some, like Merchant’s Gargling Oil, advertised themselves as being for “Man or Beast.” It’s not just a coincidence then, that “Condition Powders” were listed next to the Gargling Oil; they were medicinal supplements to be added to livestock food to make weak and sick animals strong, primarily horses, cattle, poultry, and swine. Frank Kidder was trying hard to prove he was “The Farmers’ Friend” in every way. Even more than a ratsnake.

     Kidder concluded his medicinal inventory with perhaps the most important category to farmers – pain killers. If such a medicine could make the pain go away, farmers could keep working. Most of the painkillers were effective but dangerous because it was the opium or morphine they contained that killed the pain. Many babies and teething toddlers died from the application Mrs. Winslow’s Soothing Syrup to their painful gums because of the morphine it contained. Babies crying from colic were often given opium-laden paregoric to calm them down.

     The entire list, from the powdered foodstuffs to the painkillers, was a Victorian shorthand that any New Englander could review quickly and recognize subconsciously the product categories it contained. The only thing that remained unclear was the assurance that there was much more, “&c., &c., &c., &c.,” – it was, I suspect, more hyperbole than reality; there probably wasn't much room left on the wagon – but it promised his customers there was more and the occasional new item, encouraging them to go look at Frank Kidder's wagon once again, even though they saw it just a month or two back.

Frank Kidder’s road to becoming a Yankee Peddler

     Frank Kidder became a Yankee peddler because life hadn’t prepared him for much else. He was born into a family that was falling apart from the start and never recovered. His parents were Dwight and Mary Kidder who had two boys in two years: Charles was born in 1849 and on 8 September 1850, 22-year-old Mary Kidder gave birth to baby Francis at her parents’ house in Dummerston, Vermont, while her husband, Dwight, 21, was boarding and working as a tailor in neighboring New Hampshire. The apparently fecund potential of their wedded bliss then abruptly stopped. There were no more children and surviving records struggle to find Dwight and Mary under the same roof. In 1855 when Francis (now called Franklin) was 5, the family had moved to Fitchburg, Massachusetts; it was a pattern of frequent movement by Dwight, a tailor and fabric cutter who went wherever there was opportunity to make some money.

     In 1860 Dwight was boarding and working on the southeast side of bustling Boston while Mary and 10-year-old Frank were back at her parents and 11-year-old Charles was put up at another family in Dummerston, about twenty houses away from his mother and Frank. The Kidders were biologically but not geographically a family – and the strained bonds of family would soon break altogether. In 1863 Dwight had taken work in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, 500 miles away, leaving his wife and two boys at his in-laws in Dummerston. In 1864 he was adulterously and possibly bigamously starting a second family, having a son named after him by a woman named Catherine who was just 8 years older than his son Charles. Three years later in 1867, Mary Kidder died of consumption in Dummerston. At 17 years old, Frank Kidder had become an orphan for all intents and purposes. His mother was dead and his father was gone, building his second family. Frank had to follow his own path.

     In 1870, after three more years had passed, the remnants of the original Kidder family were spread in all directions: father Dwight had moved yet again, bringing Catharine and 6-year-old Dwight with him to New London, Connecticut; Charles, now 21, was a clerk in a Boston dry goods store, and Frank, 20, was boarding in Mont Vernon, New Hampshire, working in a box-making shop. On 17 December 1873, at age 23, Frank finally found some stability, marrying Clara I. Howe in Somerville, Massachusetts. Their marriage record lists him as a trader, which in his case probably meant a peddler who accepted the farmer’s goods in exchange for his merchandise, like William Ayres Hurlbut who accepted eggs in payment then sold them in the city.

For the next 24 years, from 1874 until 1898, business directories listed him as a traveling salesman with his home base at his in-laws’ house in Somerville, just over the Charles River on the north side of Boston. From there he traveled to northern Massachusetts and New Hampshire, peddling his goods from his horse-drawn wagon.

The distinctions between peddlers, traveling salesman, hucksters, hawkers, and traders were blurred back in the 19th century and are almost invisible today, since those professions have either metamorphosized into something else or disappeared altogether. But Frank Kidder, the traveling salesman, was practicing the trade of generations of Yankee peddlers who had preceded him. He roamed the landscape selling bitters, baseballs, and much more, while trying to build up his clientele, planning his inventory, and getting cards printed to promote his business.

Game box cover, “Ye Peculiar Game of Ye Yankee Peddler,” produced by Geo. S. Parker & Co., Publishers, Salem, MA, ca.1888. Country peddlers and their wares were such a colorful, ubiquitous oddity in the countryside, game makers sought to exploit the popular interest in the curious traders by making them the subject of a parlor game. Note the peddler’s wagon to the right, jam-packed with his wares. (Courtesy Rachel T. Van)

His career mimicked the peregrinations of his father in some significant respects, traveling afar wherever there was opportunity to make some money, while his wife stayed at home with her parents. The only life lessons he seemed to have inherited from his father was the legacy of his absence. Frank and Clara had no children.

     By 1880 father Dwight had moved his second family to Springfield, Massachusetts, where he would die in 1881 of a lingering illness, a month after his son Dwight, then 17, murdered his half-brother, Charles, 32, in the same city. Frank and his wife were better off living in Somerville on the other side of the state; besides, his father, mother, and brother were now all gone. Frank’s solitary wanderings in his grocery wagon probably helped prepare him emotionally to be the solitary survivor of his biological family.

President Kidder and Dr Daniels’ Horse Medicines

     Back in 1870, when Frank Kidder was working in Mont Vernon, New Hampshire, he may have bumped into or even rubbed shoulders with another Vermonter, Albert Chester Daniels, a farmer who lived in Keene, a little over 30 miles from Frank. Albert shared Frank’s entrepreneurial spirit; had begun making and selling something he called the Excelsior Plant Protector, “for the protection of Squash, Melon and Cumber Vines from Hens, Bugs, Worms and Frosts.” He advertised his contraption and for “a few energetic young men” looking for “steady employment and large wages by acting as sub-agents, soliciting orders for an article that sells at sight.” Frank just might have added one of Albert’s plant protectors to his wagon and taken orders from interested farmers while selling them his medicines and sundries. If so, it was the extent of their relationship; Albert went on to become a coal dealer upstate in Lebanon, New Hampshire, then in 1884 he auctioned off everything – his farming tools, coal wagon, and household furniture – and moved to Boston, “having changed my business” once again.

By 1886 Albert showed up as a traveling salesman out of Boston, selling his own line of “horse medicines” and he had styled himself, “Dr. A. C. Daniels.” He didn’t really have a veterinary degree but perhaps he felt qualified by what he had learned from having livestock on his farm. His product line for cattle and horses included Dr. Daniels’ Colic Cure and Fever Drops, a Horse Renovator and Cattle Invigorator, Hoof Grower and Flyene, “to protect horses from being tormented by flies,” and the Wonder Worker, which name carried all the bravado of the boldest patent medicines for people. Frank Kidder’s trade card was produced long before Dr. Daniels started selling his animal medicines; maybe they became part of Frank’s “&c., &c.,” in later years.

Dr. Daniels passed away in 1897 at about 50 years old, but his business was continued by investors. Probably road-worn and wearied by 25 years of living the nomadic lifestyle of a traveling salesman, the 49-year-old Frank Kidder ended his itinerant wagon driver days, trying instead to invest in some businesses that kept him in the Boston area, close to home and Clara in Somerville. In 1915 he became one of three investors in Dr. A. C. Daniels, Inc., and in 1923 he became president of the company. Dr. Daniels was alive only in the continued use of his name and facial image on the products and it was also time for President Kidder to join him in death. Frank Kidder passed in his 73rd year, just a few months after he had become the president of Dr. A. C. Daniels, Inc.

Whether or not Frank Albert Kidder and Albert Chester Daniels had done some business together in their younger days, the journeys of the two traveling salesmen, classic Yankee peddlers, had crossed at the end of life.

Dr. Daniel’s Veterinary Medicines cabinet with an embossed tin inset panel and an assortment of the company’s products arranged in the foreground, ca.1920-1930. (Courtesy of Bryan Ashley)

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

The Unwelcomed Success of Dr. Curtis

He proudly specialized in upsetting the apple cart.

John Lackland Curtis lived just 50 years, from 1830 to 1880; exactly half of those years were spent as a doctor. During his abbreviated career, he attracted a devoted base of patients and a bitter group of enemies among his fellow physicians. Today, the scant evidence of his career could just as easily be interpreted to expose him as a dangerous quack or to shine on him as a valiant physician. Either way he is a fascinating actor on the Victorian stage of sickness and health – Shhh! The play is about to begin!

SCENE 1: (painted on the backdrop) – The Eagle Hotel

The three-story brick hotel was a hive of commotion, abuzz with activity. Workers and drones from near and far came to the Eagle Hotel and its watering hole, the Eagle Tavern. It was a landmark in the village of Batavia, New York, half way between Buffalo and Rochester; the village was building up quickly now that the Civil War was over, and the Eagle Hotel lorded over the bustle.

“Opposite the Eagle” was the key direction in advertisements of businesses that stood on the other side of Main Street, in the shadow of the hotel. The local news stand, the incongruously paired Oyster, Fish, and Fruit Depot, and the furniture store carrying chairs, coffins, and picture frames, all told their customers to find the hotel first in order to find their stores. The Eagle was also namedropped to help customers find the Sunbeam Gallery, a photographic studio in its second-floor perch on Main Street. Nearby businesses thrived on the existence of the Eagle.

The Eagle Hotel as it appeared in 1868. Corner of Main and Court Streets, Batavia, NY. "EAGLE TA" (for EAGLE TAVERN) is visible on the side of the building above the second-floor windows. Batavia is approximately 36 miles from Buffalo and 33 miles from Rochester. (image from Facebook: Memories of Batavia, Ny)

The Eagle provided free omnibus transportation to and from the trains and it had large barns and an attentive hostler to take care of the carriage and wagon teams of those who came by horse. The Eagle also had its own tavern “furnished with the best brands of Wines, Liquors, and Cegars,” as its 1866 advertisement promised. The Eagle’s telegraph connection had also given it some national attention back on 15 April 1861 when President Lincoln’s call for 75,000 volunteers was read at the hotel and immediately responded to with what a congressional investigation later confirmed was the Union’s first volunteer. In 1869 an ambitious salesman was allowed to set up his American brand sewing machines in the hotel’s drawing room (parlor). The Eagle also served as a wedding venue in 1867 for a groom from Battle Creek, Michigan, and his bride from the nearby village of Pavilion. From hotel and tavern to wedding venue, salesroom, and local landmark, the Eagle was a gathering point for everyone and none relied on it more than traveling doctors.

A well-located, affordable hotel provided traveling doctors everything they needed: a place to sleep, set up a temporary office, receive patients, and leave quickly when it was prudent. Temporary doctor’s offices in hotels happened so frequently and in so many of the nation’s hotels, those needing medical care often accepted such a location as a standard part of the medical landscape during the mid and late 19th century.

The doctors’ hotel accommodations served as clinics, examining rooms, and operating rooms, when necessary. In July 1866 a local farmer injured in a carriage accident had his leg amputated at the Eagle Hotel and he was reportedly recovering favorably “under the circumstances." Four years later he was still lame but for the balance of his life he was able to resume his career as a farmer.  

The public were nonetheless generally leery of traveling doctors – the very term smacked of quackery and those claiming special skills made them even more suspect – but there were those whose advertisements were well written with tones of supreme medical knowledge, accompanied by testimonials of astounding success and, well, they just sounded so doggone believable. People who were sick enough and already disillusioned by the ineffectiveness of their regular, local doctor were ready to try something new because maybe, just maybe, that new doctor at the Eagle Hotel had the cure. So the desperate and hopeful went down to the hotel quickly because the traveling doctor was usually there just a day or so before he had disappeared in the morning haze or the dusk of twilight.

The Eagle Hotel was that kind of hotel, a favorite stopover for traveling doctors. Dr. Bort, the “Celebrated European Eye, Ear and Lung Physician,” was an eclectic doctor, meaning he tried a little bit of everything in his healing. Dr. Williams assured Batavia he was “no impostor or quack” but a “master of his profession,” thoroughly educated at a university, and Dr. Liston from the Albany Eye and Ear Infirmary would operate on your eyes there in his hotel room. Dr. Crumb promoted himself as an “Oculist and Aurist” who could also remove cancers without pain or use of the knife, and  Dr. Vescelius, Magnetic Physician, had “performed such wonderful cures in this village recently.” In 1867 the Batavia newspaper wrote admiringly of its prompt-paying customer, Dr. White, an Analytical Physician:

We do not count the doctor as a "travelling physician," since his appointments are so regularly kept. … we have always found him …  a good example to the many jugglers who wander the country over, calling themselves "physicians"! Dr. White must not be confounded with these. The Doctor will be at the Eagle Hotel on Monday, Oct 21st.

Even the Genesee County Medical Society held meetings at the Eagle Hotel, probably while protesting that quacks were allowed to nest under the same roof for the day. It was bad enough that the Batavia newspapers were filled with ads for quack medicines, like Cherokee Pills, Dr. Wright’s Rejuvenating Elixir, and Dr. T. B. Talbot’s Medicated Pineapple Cider, all designed to thwart the use of medical society doctors; and J. W. Poland’s Humour Doctor – a veritable doctor-in-a-bottle – but in the eyes of the medical society, the Eagle Hotel had become a den of iniquity, a seedy shelter for pay-by-the-day medical scoundrels. On 25 May 1867, Dr. John L. Curtis, “Physician, Surgeon and Obstetrician” was the newest of those non-medical society doctors to set up in the hotel for a one-day stay. He had already been selling his medicines out of Batavia from June through August 1866 and was the only doctor advertising surgical services during that time, so he might have been the one who performed the farmer’s amputation in July. It was getting crowded at the Eagle; feathers were going to fly.

SCENE 2: (enter) – The Villain

By their way of thinking, there was a lot for the Genesee County Medical Society to dislike and disapprove of about Dr. J. L. Curtis; to them, he was the poster boy for quackery. He made and advertised his own medicines, the principal one being Curtis’ Cholera King. He also promoted himself in Batavia’s The Spirit of the Times newspaper from 1867 to 1868, touting his specialization in cancer, consumption (tuberculosis), and “Obscure Diseases of the BRAIN and MIND.” He duplicated the wording from his newspaper ad on an eye-catching advertising trade card that also let people know he would be at the Eagle Hotel each Wednesday afternoon.

Photographic Trade Card, ca. 1867 (front; card reverse below). Albumen print and letterpress. The content details are identical to the newspaper advertisement copy appearing in "The Spirit of the Times" (Batavia, NY), running from 25 MAY 1867 - 18 JAN 1868 (Collection of the author)

I believe Dr. Curtis's choice of card style was a significant reflection of his personality. He was innovative in his medical methods and not afraid to explore options for the optimal solution to a problem. This card style, developed during the closing years of the Civil War, was a little-used choice among advertising trade cards at the time he selected it, being overshadowed by designs transitioning from the century-long use of ornate copperplate engraving to the arrival of color lithography, often with illustrations of flowers, animals, and children. Instead, Dr. Curtis chose this avant-garde technological advance that blended together a piece of albumen print photography glued on to a card printed in letterpress. His card focused not on the intense detailing of copperplate, nor the attraction of color or appealing florals or animal designs, but on himself and his business – and given the description of his practice, which stated that he was a physician and surgeon specializing in such difficult and usually hopeless diseases as cancer and consumption and, more radically, “Obscure Diseases of the BRAIN and MIND,” his card was quite unusual and distinctive in the public’s hands. They knew exactly who he was and what he said he could do, as well as where he would be doing it.

In the medical society court of opinion, however, Dr. Curtis was a medical heretic. An ugly, painful wart on the backside of the medical profession. They were convinced he was just another quack, no more creditable than Dr. Vescelius, the magnetic healer; just another nostrum maker who bottled and sold his fraudulent cure to a gullible public, using newspapers, these “private cards,” and handbills to attract their business. They were right about one thing – he was not one of them.

The medical journey of John Lackland Curtis started long before he came onto Life’s stage. His father, Newman Curtis, the son of a farmer, engaged in a personal migration in search of his own farm. He traveled from his home in the hills of western Massachusetts, across upstate New York, and settled on the fertile black muckland of the Genesee Valley. The land treated him well, providing bounteous harvests of wheat, corn, and potatoes, and feeding his many sheep, swine, horses, and cows. There, on a farm in Shelby, Orleans County, one mile south of Millville, he and his wife, Mariah, raised their eight sons and six daughters in a way few parents equaled – all fourteen survived their childhood and became adults.

In the process of guiding them through their young lives, all of the children were enrolled in Millville Academy, where their father Newman served as president of the academy’s board of trustees for at least a year. The Curtis farm was 120 acres; it was larger and more profitable than a majority of the 200 farms in the county. The Curtis farm and family were both doing well; five sons continued the family legacy of farming while the other three continued their education, two becoming lawyers and one, John, becoming a physician.

In 1855 new opportunity called John’s parents to Iowa. They sold their 120-acre Shelby farm and purchased 250 acres of prime farmland in Iowa. Ten of their children moved west as well, of which six continued their father’s farming legacy with their spouses. The three daughters and one son remaining in New York were adults; two of the daughters were already married and settled down, and the third may have been engaged, since she married shortly after her parents’ move. The only son remaining in New York was 25-year-old John L. Curtis; in 1855 he had gotten married and graduated from medical school, the culmination of ten years of medical education. The Iowa soil did not call out to him; New York was the young doctor’s past, present, and future.  

SCENE 3: (backstage) – The Medical School Marathon

John started down a medical path early in life when he had developed a passion for  reading and study. After his graduation from Millville Academy, his parents sent 15-year-old John 53 miles away to Genesee Wesleyan Seminary in Lima, NY, to engage in more advanced studies, ranging from chemistry and electricity to trigonometry and zoology. A year later in 1846, the 16-year-old was able to begin his medical apprenticeship, training for the next five years under Dr. Azotus M. Frost, physician, druggist, and county coroner in Medina, NY (next to Millville), then with Dr. Almon V. Belding (a physician in Shelby who later became a dentist), and finally with a Dr. Benjamin.

In 1852 the 22-year-old John went off to Geneva Medical College, a school noted for producing the nation’s first female physician, Elizabeth Blackwell in 1849, and the Native American physician, Wa-o-wa-wa-na-onk of the Cayuga tribe in 1844. While there, John was advised and influenced by the school’s chair of surgery to attend the Philadelphia College of Medicine to get specialized training in treating obscure diseases of the brain and mind and chronic diseases considered incurable. The highly motivated medical student took his mentor’s advice.

Philadelphia College of Medicine, pamphlet cover. The 5-story building contained two lecture rooms, an anatomical theater, a dissecting room, classrooms, and a pharmacy department.

For the next two years, John prepared for his matriculation at the Philadelphia Medical College by first attending the Philadelphia School of Anatomy where he specialized in microscopic anatomy, specifically cell structure. He then entered the Philadelphia Medical College, a five-story building with two lecture rooms, an anatomical theater, a dissecting room, classrooms, and a pharmacy department to instruct advanced students. He took two semesters of courses from its vigorous medical curriculum, which included such subjects as chemistry, obstetrics, toxicology, surgery, and pathology. The courseload involved five or six lectures daily, except for  Wednesdays and Saturdays, when those mornings were devoted to attendance at hospitals and the college clinic, where patients were “exhibited, operations publicly performed, and lectures delivered.”

There were six requirements for graduation; the student must have: (1) been at least 21 and have spent three or more years acquiring knowledge of medicine; (2) studied two or more years as a pupil of a regular and reputable physician; (3) taken two full courses of lectures; (4) completed a thesis upon some medical subject; (5) presented a letter of recognition from a preceptor; and (6) successfully passed an examination before the faculty. John Lackland Curtis, age 25, had passed through all the hoops of the medical gauntlet and he excelled as he did so, having been named the college’s prosector for several terms (the student appointed by the college’s surgical chair to have the privilege of dissecting the corpses during anatomical demonstration). He was one of nineteen in his graduating class, receiving his medical degree on 7 July 1855. His parents probably missed his graduation – two months earlier they were almost a thousand miles away, purchasing their new farm in Iowa. Then two months after becoming a medical doctor, he married Lucy Cram back in New York. Babies followed shortly thereafter, as babies usually do.

SCENE 4: (stage right) – The New Physician Breaks the Mold (with brief cameos by his children)

Marriage and career can both be demanding masters, which can make their co-existence a challenge. The newly minted Dr. Curtis was now juggling both, dividing his time between providing for his family and succeeding in his new career. The year following his graduation and marriage, he returned to Philadelphia and studied at Dr. Warrington’s Obstetric Institute; only graduated physicians were invited to attend. The post-graduate study of the diseases of women and children was a professional choice, but preparing for his own family may also have been on his mind. After ten years of almost continuous medical study, he was ready for the practice of medicine, settling his new family in the village of Elba in the Genesee Valley, close by the old family farm of his youth. And then the children made their appearances, some in brief cameo roles.

In 1858 Bellanora “Bell” Curtis was born, but she died after just a little more than two months of life. It was a bitter reality for 19th-century families, but perhaps a little more bitter when a doctoring father couldn’t save his own baby. The next year Lucy gave birth to their second daughter, Cora Belle Curtis, and she was able to slip past the lethal accidents and diseases of youth. Then in 1862 John and Lucy were blessed with their first son, Franklin H. Curtis, but in another ten months, he too had passed away; today the graves of Bellanora and Franklin share a single white marble headstone with two weather-worn carved lambs resting peacefully on the top. Three months after Franklin’s death, Lucy gave birth to their last child, John L. Curtis, their only surviving son, named after his proud father. 

The medicine bottles of Dr. J. L. Curtis were unembossed; far more 19th century medicine bottles were unembossed than those that were. The absence of a label makes it impossible to tell their story, but the beauty of the glass allows us to appreciate them nonetheless. (author's collection)

During the Civil War, Dr. Curtis was busy trying to create his family and establishing an income. He took up manufacturing goods for market, starting with grape wine; he was taxed on 160 gallons in 1865. He then began advertising his own medicines in 1866. He undertook making and selling conventional medical products of the day, like a croup balsam, a blood and liver corrector, and medicated plasters, all of which were put up in bottles and boxes that simply had glued-on labels. None of his medicine bottles were embossed; the glass was probably aqua tinted and riddled with bubbles, but all sides were smooth and slick. The majority of embossed bottles on store shelves were nostrums competing for attention and full of empty promises – perhaps young Dr. Curtis was trying to distance his product from those his newspaper advertisement called “Life Elixirs, Quack Cures, and Pain Eradicators, &c. &c.” Even his principal product with the high-toned name, Curtis’ Cholera King, came in plain, labeled bottles. The price of his medicines were also not exorbitant like so many patent medicines that cost a dollar or more; his were fifty cents per bottle and twenty-five cents per plaster.

Dr. Curtis had focused on making medicines that he said benefited the entire family; he called them “FAMILY MEDICINES.” He vividly described what he saw when his oldest and youngest patients (perhaps even his own children) were attacked by Asiatic cholera, “when scorched by fever, frantic with pain, writhing in colic cramps, or seemingly torn in flesh and broken in bone by convulsive spasms.” He again wrote with the first-hand knowledge of a doctor and perhaps, also as a father, when he called his croup balsam “a Heaven-sent harbinger of good to the family during Fall and Spring,” when lung diseases hit, “decimating the ranks of childhood, dangl[ing] the pall of death over every hearthstone.” Selling his own medicines was an excellent way of generating some cash in the post-war economy and it was a practice he had seen his medical predecessors engage in while he was under their tutelage. Dr. Frost, for example, ran his own pharmacy and had been actively promoting the sale of Vaughn’s Vegetable Lithontriptic Mixture for kidney stones and James McClintock, M.D., the founder of John’s alma mater, the Philadelphia Medical College, also sold an entire line of his own proprietaries, including Dr. McClintock’s Diarrhea Cordial and Cholera Preventive; Dr. McClintock’s Dyspepsia Elixir, and Dr. McClintock’s Vegetable Purgative Pills.

In 1866 Dr. John L. Curtis advertised his medicines in the Batavia newspaper. Unlike the flashy, brassy claims and promises other medicine companies splashed around in the same newspaper, his ad copy read more like a treatise for medical students; in fact, his erudite writing style probably made it too difficult for some of the less-educated readers to follow:

Cholera King is a therapeutical agent of acknowledged pre-eminent merit. Thoroughly scientific in its chemical combination, while it possesses mildness, safety, and marvelous potency of remedial action, combined with an extended range of application in domestic practice.

While he understood a memorable product name was important, it seemed as though he had no idea or just wasn’t concerned that it was equally important to keep the message simple; or perhaps he just lacked the requisite skills for effective marketing and compelling copywriting.

After just three months (from June to August 1866) of advertising his medicines in Batavia’s The Spirit of the Times, the advertisements disappeared from the newspapers – even his trade card in 1867 didn’t mention his medicines; his focus, first and foremost, was on being a successful physician.

John Curtis did well as a doctor and provider for his family. In 1860 he was recognized by the census taker as a “Phisisian & Surgeon” with an estate valued at $1,850; by 1870 it had increased to $10,000 ($71,281 in 1860 vs $239,325 in 1870, when inflation-adjusted into 2024 USD). His increasing affluence allowed him to contribute $25 ($503 today) to a fund-raising campaign for purchasing a site for a blind asylum in Batavia in 1866. His prosperity also seemed to be a measure of his popularity. He was repeatedly elected to be one of the county coroners, like his early apprenticeship master, Dr. Frost had been. He was an active Methodist and was chosen by its members to represent them at several conferences.

Depending on who was looking, Doctor Curtis might have seemed like other shady traveling physicians who practiced strange, unorthodox, and even dangerous methods out of a hotel room and were gone by the next day’s light. But neither his travels or his methods were borne out of devious design – right or wrong, he did what he did because his believed his education and self-confidence elevated his ability above the standard, orthodox practice of medicine in his day. His travel was not a shady itineracy but a well-publicized travel triangle with a scheduled pattern of stops in Buffalo, Batavia and Rochester, each on the same day or days each week, at the same hotels. He was recognized for using many non-standard medical tools and methods in his practice that reflected his medical education in electricity, chemistry, and microscopy. He used electricity and magnetism “for those multitudinous diseases of the nerve and brain which are so alarming on the increase”; for lung congestion and consumption he used electro-atomic pulmonary baths (whatever those were); and his treatment of cancer involved hypodermic medication of the parts, accompanied by electrolysis with the galvanic battery – hypodermics were a new technology that had only become available for general use after the Civil War. His allies and apologists in the newspapers said his unusual methods were all a reflection of his approach to medicine,

(1874): His method of treating disease varies according to the requirements of the case. He will not be tied down to any one straight-jacket theory or practice but is a reformer in every sense of the word; and yet he adheres strictly to the use of only approved remedies and remedial agencies.

(1875): Dr. Curtis is a specialist in the ranks of the old school of practice.

(1876): While adhering, as a basis, to the old school of practice, he has had the independence to seize upon and apply every discovery of modern thought and science, from whatever source it came, that promised any valuable aid in the art of healing. … his mission is to … break down all merely arbitrary barriers, and extend all such limits … [emphases added]

The rather awkward high-brow advertising copy for his medicines were a reflection of who he had become: a well-educated, innovative, non-conforming doctor.  Depending on who was speaking, he was called a medical reformer, pioneer, or an outright quack. Wounded and angered that Dr. Curtis was being hoisted on a pedestal at the expense of their reputations and “old school” orthodox practices, the Genesee County Medical Society publicly excoriated him, it being centuries too late to stone him.

SCENE 5: (stage left) – The Bull in the China Shop (cacophonous crescendo)

The Genesee County Medical Society loathed everything about Dr. John L. Curtis; every diagnosis he made, every treatment he advised, and every medicine he sold was an abomination. To them he was an iconoclast, a revolutionary disrespectfully breaking every rule they lived by – he was the proverbial bull in their China shop. When he applied to join their medical society they refused his application. Their list of his violations to the rigid code of conduct for a member of the medical society ranged from major and minor infractions to ones that were totally fabricated. Their list of 13 sweeping objections can categorically be synthesized town to a half dozen:

• He practiced “irregular” medicine (practicing outside of the codified medical society standards). (major violation that was true)

• He was unschooled in medicine (he didn’t attend medical society-approved schools). (major violation that was false)

• He bought his medical diploma. (major violation that was false)

• He filled out the medical society membership application incorrectly. (minor violation; the truth is unknown)

• He advertised his medical services. (major violation that was true)

• He made, advertised, and sold his own medicines. (major violation that was  true)

The newspapers analyzed the medical society’s objections differently:

… he incurred the hostility of certain members of the county medical society because he sometimes differed with them as to the proper mode of treating certain cases or forms of disease. [He preferred practicing] medicine in his own way, rather than to be hindered or interfered with by any society. This so irritated the members … that they began to [spread rumors that he] was a mere quack and medical swindler; that he had no diploma; that he couldn’t become a member of the society. (Jamestown [NY] Daily Republican; emphasis added)

Dr. Curtis took the Genesee Medical Society to court – the New York Supreme Court – and won his case. The court ordered the medical society to admit him as a member and said that, once a member, if he didn’t abide by the by-laws, “the question of expulsion will arise.” The society received him as a member in January 1872, “under protest.” Like a stern parent, the court had laid down the law between two squabbling children, but neither side was willing to play nice. Nothing had been resolved.

SCENE 6: The Expulsion and Life Beyond (trumpet flourish)

The court’s opinion proved prophetic – Dr. Curtis was expelled from the Genesee County Medical Society slightly more than two years later, on 9 April 1874, for “gross violation of the Code of Medical Ethics.” Yet Dr. Curtis’s career didn’t skip a beat – if anything he became more successful. The newspapers in all three corners of his travel circuit supported and praised the doctor and consistent advertiser. At each destination he had established his own staffed pharmacy (called “one of the most elaborate and extensive in the country”) and medical office, where “he did a large business both in the sale of his medicines and by his practice.” In 1877 the editors of a Buffalo newspaper proclaimed,

Dr. John Lackland Curtis, about 46 years old (Combination Atlas Map of Genesee County, New York 1876)

Dr. Curtis is a Physician whom we can endorse from personal knowledge, and we venture to assert that no man in the United States has, during the past three years, treated the same number of difficult cases, of all sorts of diseases, with anything like the average success that Dr. Curtis has met with. … if you are suffering from any obstinate or malignant disease, seize upon the first opportunity of consulting Dr. Curtis.

In 1878 the Buffalo and Batavia newspapers published a three-part guest lecture by Dr. Curtis on the subject of diphtheria, a highly contagious and often-lethal disease, especially of children that ultimately ended in their suffocation by formation of a greyish membrane that blocked the entrance of air into their lungs. The well-meaning doctor declared that a clean body, inside and out, were the best means of removing blood poison that he believed caused diphtheria to end fatally. He emphatically concluded,

… any legalized practitioner of medicine who ignorantly or wantonly allows his patient to pass on day after day with skin unbathed and bowels constipated, should have his diploma nullified and his action held answerable to the charge of malpractice.

He sounded, at least, like the local expert on diphtheria.

SCENE 7: The Double Finale (curtain closes)

In March 1879, three months after the diphtheria series concluded, Johnny, the only remaining son of Dr. John L. Curtis, just a little over 15 years old, died at his parents’ residence – of diphtheria.

The disease which caused his death was diphtheria, contracted while tenderly caring for his father’s patients. He was a bright, manly little fellow, loved by all who knew him. To have him taken away at this time when he was just on the threshold of manhood was a cruel blow to father, mother and sister …Johnnie’s most marked virtue was his devotion to his father and mother …The sports which are so dear to others of his age, he freely gave up that he might render assistance to his father in his visits to the sick, with whom he often stayed all night to administer the remedies which his father prescribed. … He was taken sick on Wednesday, and the Lord received his released spirit on the following Sunday.

A few months before Johnny’s death, the Daily Morning News of Batavia had found it newsworthy to mention that Dr. Curtis had managed to walk up two flights of stairs to their office, “This was the first time the Doctor had ascended alone to such an elevation since he was injured a year ago last September, and his many friends will congratulate him upon this evidence of increased strength.” The injury had taken a lot out of him, but it wasn’t due to his age – he was only 48. There was apparently something else wrong with his constitution and it was probably in evidence at his death.

Despite his personal health problems, he tried to keep busy after his injury and the loss of his beloved son. In October 1879, he was summoned by telegraph to Medina to serve as a medical expert in a murder trial, to give his opinion about the sanity or insanity of the accused. Less than a week later he was attending a Methodist conference in Buffalo at the request of his church; they were confident in his ability to represent their interests, “He will do his work well, for whatever he becomes interested in he pushes with zeal that knows no defeat.” (emphasis added) It was a fitting summary of his character throughout his life’s labors. In March of 1880 another telegram summoned him to Fredonia, NY, to visit a bank president from Pennsylvania who had sought him out because of his reputation in curing cancer.

On the 15th of June, after a restless night of not feeling well, he took some of his medicine and decided to go outside for some fresh air. “He walked out into the yard, where he was suddenly seized with faintness, and when his friends reached him – which they did in a few seconds – they found his mouth filled with blood and he was unable to speak.” He passed away quickly, before medical aid could arrive. He was just 50 years old. The immediate cause of his death was a ruptured blood vessel, which caused faintness and suffocation. “It is thought that the loss of his only son, a few months ago, wore upon the doctor. He also suffered from injuries received by the recent overturning of his carriage.”

Months after his decease, a Batavia newspaper complimented their deceased and admired friend one more time, “We knew Dr. Curtis from his boyhood and never had a doubt of his being an upright man and a Christian gentleman, and multitudes of our best citizens will testify to the excellence of his character.” As late as 1894, fourteen years later, Dr. Curtis’ Cholera King was still being advertized as a first-class medicine and was kept on hand at a pharmacy in Batavia that promised, “We have all of Dr. Curtis’ Receipts and can put up any of his remedies that are called for.” His reputation and his medicines lived on after him and now, his story lives on as well.

 

AUTHOR’S PERSONAL NOTE: In 1867 Dr. Curtis represented one of the few hopes for people suffering from mental illnesses – dementia, retardation, depression, senility, and so much more. As my dear wife struggles with the onset of a dementia-related disease in her brain, the trade card of Dr. Curtis called out to me, telling me that if we lived back in 1867, in my anxious pursuit to help the love of my life, we very well might have searched out Dr. Curtis because of that phrase on his avant-garde, sophisticated, photographic trade card. I have no reason today to believe he had any valid knowledge or skills in dealing with “Obscure Diseases of the Brain and Mind” but I do understand how worried, despairing people could cling onto that hope, hold on to that card like it was gold, and search out that doctor, whether or not he was a member of a medical society.

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

The Last Gasp Miracle

Starkey & Palen sold air to the terminally ill – it was Alsina Richards’ last hope.

She was desperate and scared.

Each breath she took felt like it was stolen, scraping up nothing but bloody phlegm from an empty chest with nothing left to give. Cough pains sizzled across her lungs that long ago had filled softly and emptied effortlessly.

With every passing day, she became weaker. The once vibrant woman who did housework, helped her husband, visited friends, and went shopping had dissolved into a fragile, feeble weakling for whom each movement took far more out of her than any benefit she got back.

As the disease set in more aggressively, it seemed to be consuming her from the inside – she was becoming emaciated and skeleton-like, the type that people across the street pointed at, whispered about, and walked away from, quickly.

Her skin became paler, as if the very lifeblood was being drained from her body. In a way, it really was: when she coughed, there was blood spatter in her handkerchief. There was nothing left about her that suggested life, certainly not a future.

Weaker, paler, thinner, sicker. She knew she was dying.

Mrs. Alsina Richards was 33 years old and terminally sick with tuberculosis.

In her day, 1880, the disease was most often called “consumption” because of the hallmark symptom of emaciation. It was, far and away, the leading killer in the 19th century and unlike most diseases that attacked children and old people, it most often struck young adults, like Alsina.

  

Infection

Alsina Richards was just about as unassuming as any other young Victorian woman in rural America. Her most distinctive feature may have been her name – no one seemed to know how to spell it – she appears in records as Elzina, Alcina, Alsina, and Alsona. She lived with her parents at their small farm until she was married. In 1877, at 30 years old, she married Alphronso Richards, three years her junior. Like her parents, he was of modest means, pouring concrete for a living. A scant four months after their wedding, Alsina gave birth to a stillborn daughter; it was the only pregnancy she would ever have.

On 16 June 1880, Alphronso and Alsina were enumerated together for the first time in their own home in East Pepperell, northern Massachusetts; Nashua, New Hampshire was just over the border. Although some neighbors were found to be afflicted with such troubles as rheumatism, measles, and dyspepsia, Alsina was not among those listed as “sick or temporarily disabled” – but she knew there was something very, very wrong with her. About six months before the census she was trying to find a cure for sickness that had come over her so quickly, out of nowhere. It wasn’t a casual concern; it was a deep-seated fear of what was taking over deep in her lungs.

 

Stamped Starkey & Palen advertising envelope, cancelled PHILADELPHIA, PA, 17 DEC [1881], 2AM; addressed to Mrs. A. [Alsina] S. Richards, East Pepperell, Mass. (author's collection)

Consolation

Alsina wrote to several women whom she had read about in promotional materials for a lung remedy. She was curious and guardedly hopeful that the women really existed and whether they truly benefited from the remedy. These questions were the common concerns shared by other sick women all over America; even the manufacturer acknowledged that many cautiously wondered about the testimonials, just like Alsina: 

… they write to know if there really is any such person ... or is it only an advertising dodge? … the simple truth about [the remedy] would be the best credentials it could have; hence we were not tempted to invent testimonials, nor to steal genuine ones, nor to romance on any.

Alsina didn’t have money or time to waste on a bogus medicine, so she was determined to find out if she could really believe the testimonials that appeared for Starkey & Palen’s Compound Oxygen, an unusual product that was grabbing a lot of attention and gaining popularity. To protect the writers’ privacy, the manufacturer rarely included their names, but told readers that “Any one, upon application, will be furnished with the exact address of any … of these cases.” So Alsina had to write to the manufacturer to get the testimonial writers’ addresses, wait for the reply, then write and send letters to the testimonial writers and wait again, hoping they would reply … all while she got sicker and weaker.

The women’s responses to Alsina, dated from 15 February 1880 to 20 November 1881, assured her that they had, indeed, written them and were not distorted or rewritten by the medicine maker. Mrs. A. G. Fourquereau of San Marcos, Texas, began her postcard response to Alsina, “I take pleasure in stating that the testimonial … with my name attached, is genuine, and was sent to [the manufacturer] without solicitation from them.” In her postcard response, Julia Barnes of Carmel, New York, wrote, “Yes, my letters … are just as I write them” and Mrs. E. L. Miller of Beecher City, Illinois, also told Alsina that her statements in the publication were true.

The correspondence of five postcards and two letters saved by Mrs. Alsina S. Richards; their dates range from 15 FEB 1880 - 20 NOV 1881. Their retention as a group implies that Alsina Richards valued them, used them as reference for her reply correspondence, and retained them for the last several years of her life due to the relationships built, even though the remedy was unsuccessful in bringing about her recovery, or perhaps she stuffed them away and forgot about them in the face of the increasingly difficult symptoms of consumption that were overwhelming her. (author's collection)

Each response Alsina received was handwritten, further making them seem very much like personal notes from good friends and all of them asked their new friend Alsina to write back. Sallie R. Fisher of Irvington, Illinois, wrote to Alsina like a dear friend and fellow sufferer, full of empathy:

Your card was received last night. I hasten to reply, I know just how you feel in regard to hearing of others being cured. I thought if I could know of one [who] had benefited as low as I was … it would revive my spirits, [emphasis added]

Sallie had written to another testimonial giver, just like Alsina had done with her; and so the correspondence read like chain mail, the women who were writing to reassure Alsina had once upon a time been in Alsina’s situation, writing to someone else who suffered from a lung disease. Alsina valued the correspondence, keeping five postcards and two letters from the women who responded to her pleas for help. The personal notes validated the printed testimonials, allowing Alsina to trust the promotional stories of the ladies’ harrowing ordeals, use of the remedy, and consequent restoration of health. Several personal descriptions of women who were suffering from consumption must have resonated with Alsina – they really did know just how she felt:

Julia Barnes told her, “I used to think last Winter, oh, if I could only stop coughing one day.” Vienna Douglas of Huntsville, Alabama, knew she had consumption; her testimonial in one of the promotional booklets must have been what triggered Alsina to write to her to verify her existence and her story:

I … was hollow-chested, with deep-seated pain in my lungs and great difficulty breathing. That dread disease, consumption, had been coming on me for more than fifteen years. [I] was so reduced [in strength] that I was unable to attend to my household duties – hardly able to go from room to room – with the expectation of myself and family and friends that I would not live many months. [emphasis in original]

Similarly, another consumption testimonial by the apparently wealthy Texan, Mrs. Anna Givhan Fourquereau, (described as the wife of a “gentleman of elegant nature” in the 1880 census), was the likely reason that Alsina wrote to her,

She had been coughing for two years, with occasional hemorrhage. .. having fever all the time, expectorating profusely, so much so that she could not sleep at night, having night sweats, and reduced so in flesh and strength that she could barely leave her bed. [emphasis in original]

What Alsina did not know was that despite endorsing Starkey & Palen’s Compound Oxygen as “the most wonderful remedy in the world for sick lungs,” Mrs. Fourquereau died at 37, just a little more than a year after responding to her. Consumption was no respecter of wealth or social status. The only protection from the disease would have to be a medical miracle.

Sensation

Alsina Richards had learned about these ladies from the promotional materials of the Starkey & Palen Company of Philadelphia, the makers of Compound Oxygen, the product that all the women she heard back from were swearing performed miracles on their medical miseries. Despite the fact that naysayers from the medical fraternity called magnetized oxygen compounds “the quintessence of bosh,” the fairly new product was in high demand by the time Alsina Richardson was in desperate need of a miracle.

Emaciated by the consumption, Sallie Fisher and Julia Barnes happily regained weight after using Compound Oxygen; Sallie went up to 172 pounds and Julia to 150; plus, she noted, the pain in her lower left lung left her after just a half hour after her first treatment with the Oxygen, “and I have not felt it since.” Vienna Douglass called the stuff her “life preserver.” By using it regularly, she was once again able to walk to and from town “and is in a great many respects vastly superior to a dead woman.” [emphasis added. Although this phrase was clearly meant to be tongue-in-cheek, it reads as one of the strangest endorsements in my forty-plus years of research on 19th century medicines!]

As was the case with many patent medicine success stories, Compound Oxygen was not the invention of those who made it a big seller. It was invented by a Dr. Harrison J. Hartwell of Philadelphia in 1867, but he transferred his entire interest in the business to George R. Starkey, A.M., M.D., in 1870. By that time, others in New York City, Chicago, and Omaha were advertising their own therapeutic products also named Compound Oxygen, but only the version sold by Dr. Starkey was successfully promoted and sold across the country.

Prior to building their oxygen empire, Starkey and Palen had been non-practicing physicians. George Rogers Starkey had been teaching in a homeopathic medicine school until poor health forced him to stop, and Gilbert Ezekiel Palen worked as a chemist in a tannery before the two men became partners in the Compound Oxygen venture. The principles of using air medicinally fit perfectly into Dr. Starkey’s homeopathic mindset; homeopathy favored only the smallest, most diluted doses of medicine until it seemed to many like there was nothing there – just like air.

Dr. Starkey considered it strategically critical for the public to believe his remedy was just full of air; even the trademark he registered adamantly insisted in big, bold letters: “NOT A DRUG”. It was only oxygen and nitrogen infused in water, he explained, “the two elements which make up common or atmospheric air, in such proportion as to render it much richer in the vital or life-giving element”; then he somehow magnetized the air then infused it in water and bottled it. When inhaled, the Compound Oxygen supposedly stimulated the nerves, “giving energy to the body.” This magnetized air was said to be so energizing that a certain clairvoyant was unable to slip into a clairvoyant trance because she was too stimulated. Like coffee and cocaine, Compound Oxygen kept its users invigorated and all aflutter.

Trademark for Starkey & Palen's Compound Oxygen and Inhaler, No. 10,449; registered 17 JUL 1883

“The cases of consumption – confirmed phthisis – which the Compound Oxygen has cured can be counted by scores,“ Starkey & Palen’s literature promised, and Alsina’s postcard friends urged her to join their pilgrimage of converts to the miraculous compound:

“I hope you will not delay …” – Sallie R. Fisher

“Hoping you will give it a fair trial” – Grace Davis

“I hope you will get it and take it.” – Julia Barnes

“I do hope you will feel safe in using it as it is the onley [sic] thing that will restore the Lungs.” – Vienna T. Douglass

Every day was getting incrementally worse than the previous day for Alsina. As she exchanged letters and postcards about Starkey & Palen’s Compound Oxygen  and studied its literature, she was trying to make the wisest, most conscientious decision possible, but like so many others in her situation, she really just hoped for a miracle.

Decision

Dr. Starkey knew there were many, like Alsina, in poor health, desperate for a miracle in his bottles, so he tried to temper their wild-eyed expectations and even admitted that sometimes his product would not work:

Do not expect a miracle to be wrought in your case. Although some cases here reported are marvelous in the rapidity with which they have marched health-ward; still many of the most satisfactory and even brilliant cases have been slower paced.

… more than eighty percent of these victims could have been well people to-day had they made TIMELY USE of the Compound Oxygen. Note the emphasis laid upon the phrase, timely use. … Not in all cases would we recommend it, with the idea of holding out a promise of cure. [emphases added]

Dr. Starkey’s pragmatism and cautious confession about his remedy’s limitations might have been the sign of an honest medicine maker, but it also gave him plausible deniability if things didn’t work for a customer, even to the point of death.

Alsina was very sick but her postcard friends urged her to try the Compound Oxygen. It’s also possible that her own doctors had told her she had a chance if she took their own prescriptions to cure consumption, but she took the leap of faith and chose Starkey & Palen’s Oxygen Compound. It was her last gasp of hope.

Sick of sickness and scared of dying, Alsina Richards made the hefty $15 investment in a two-month supply of Compound Oxygen home treatment and hoped for her own miracle, despite Dr. Starkey’s public disclaimer.

Invention

At first Dr. Starkey made the oxygen treatment available for those visiting his Philadelphia office, but soon after buying out Dr. Hartwell's business, he realized the Compound Oxygen could go national if he also sold it as a kit for home treatment.

Compound Oxygen bottle (label missing). Embossed: STARKEY & PALEN / PHILADELPHIA, PA. (courtesy of b-toast online auction; see link)

Unlike most other medicine makers, his whole business focused on lung disease and his medicinal repertoire consisted only of his two lung remedies, Compound Oxygen and Oxygenaqua (a liquid form of the magnetized oxygen compound that could be swallowed rather than inhaled). Sure, he threw in claims that the magnetized oxygen products cured other parts of the body of other things – dyspepsia (indigestion), diabetes, headaches, sometimes paralysis, rheumatism, and kidney disease, and perhaps most obscurely, spermatorrhea (involuntarily ejaculation). “We have proved that a number of diseases which … have been assigned to the category of ‘incurables’ no longer belong there,” the Starkey & Palen literature crowed, but virtually all of their advertising focused on the benefits of the magnetized oxygen for diseased lungs.

Paper-covered wooden box that held one Oxygen Compound (cobalt blue glass) and one Oxygenaqua bottle (clear glass). About 1890. (Photo courtesy of Morphy Auctions, morphyauctions.com)

Dr. Starkey saw a nation full of potential customers with corset-constricted lungs and inescapable sickness forming in the stagnant, smoky air of factories and homes. He told the consumptives, asthmatics, and victims of pneumonia, bronchitis, or other lung diseases his Compound Oxygen was a three-pronged remedy that: (1) increased oxygen in the lungs; (2) purified the blood of poisons that collected there from disease and pollution; and (3) energized the nerves and nerve centers (he liked to compare the nervous system to a galvanic battery with electricity sparking through it), bringing vitality to the person.

When someone at home received their two-month supply, they received two boxes: a larger one containing a cobalt blue bottle of Compound Oxygen and a clear glass bottle (Dr. Starkey referred to it as “the white bottle”) with Oxygenaqua. A paper cover, illustrated with the two medicine bottles and either images of Drs. Starkey and Palen or a woman using the inhaler, was glued to the wooden box. The box was hinged for the bottles’ storage and reuse.

The smaller box was constructed in the same way and contained what looked like a little laboratory. There was a clear glass inhaler bottle with a rubber stopper and two rubber corks in the top, and a set of attachments: two glass elbow straws, two nasal tubes, a tiny bottle, a vial, and a few other glass fittings. The whole lot must have made the user feel something like a pharmacist, preparing the medicine for their own cure. The label covering the box showed the inhaler bottle sitting in a tin cup filled with hot water, per the directions – tin cup not included – the customer had to get their own. This inhaler kit only needed to be purchased once since it could be used over and over, so the Compound Oxygen was sold separately.

Starkey & Palen Inhaler kit; paper label over wood; hinged cover with locking mechanism on the front. Side panels: instructions for use of the inhaler. Back panel: nasal spray instructions; top panel: nasal tube instructions. (about 1880; author's collection)

The instructions for use were pretty basic but important to be followed exactly since any misstep by the junior pharmacist could mean their own demise. Water was to be poured into the inhaler bottle up to the line embossed on the glass, then the measured dose of Compound Oxygen was added, the chosen breathing attachments inserted into the rubber stopper, and the whole unit immersed in the tin cup full of hot water “as hot as a cook can bear her finger in it”. Then the pharmacist became the patient and inhaled the vapors created by the heated mixture of water, magnetized oxygen, and nitrogen - it operated on the same principle as a hookah pipe. Inhalation treatments were done twice a day and increased in one-minute increments every other day from a starting treatment of two minutes to a maximum of six minutes after several days. Each subsequent dose would be stronger because more Compound Oxygen would be poured in to replace the liquid that had been inhaled and otherwise evaporated.

Alsina followed every step precisely and she inhaled.

Over and over.

 

Starkey & Palen Inhaler kit. The clear glass bottle sits in a tin cup (not included with the kit) per the instructions and the box illustration. During actual use, the tin cup would contain very hot water into which the bottle (partially filled with the Compound Oxygen) would be immersed. The glass of the bottle is spattered with chemical residue, indicating extensive use of the inhaler at some point in time. Embossed around the bottle's shoulder: STARKEY & PALEN / PHILADELPHIA PA. The bottle also has an embossed line around the circumference, about half way down the bottle, above which reads: WATER LINE. The kit also contains 7 attachments: 2 glass nasal tubes (in box and on table foreground with white rubber tube attached); 2 glass elbow straws (in box and in bottle); 1 straight tube, corked (in box); 1 measuring tube (in foreground); 1 small vial (in foreground); about 1880. (author's collection)

Devastation

It wasn’t working – she continued to spiral towards her death and she knew it. Panicked, she wrote to Starkey and Palen. She told them how sick she was with consumption and apparently pleaded for

Letter Starkey & Palen to Mrs. A. S. Richards, East Pepperell, Mass., 13 DEC 1881. (author's collection.)

hope – perhaps there was something she was doing wrong or something else she could do. What she received in return, twelve days before Christmas, was the hardest letter she had ever had to read:

 

Philadelphia, Pa. 12 Mo 13 1881

Mrs A. S. Richards

Dear Madam,

Yours of 12-9 is received and its contents are carefully noted. We are sorry to be obliged to say that we cannot recommend the Compound Oxygen as being able to do anything more than to make you comfortable. You have indeed been a victim to wicked charlatanry. The disease has made too great progress to be checked.

We remain

Very Respectfully,

     Starkey & Palen

 

Starkey & Palen confirmed her worst fear – she was doomed – their medicine would not cure her. What “wicked charlatanry” she had been subjected to is not clear without seeing what Alsina had written to them. Perhaps she had explained that local doctors had wasted valuable time earlier in her illness, prescribing other medicines or instructions of no remedial value. Possibly, but unlikely, the phrase might have been referring to the zealous testimonial writers she corresponded with who overpromised a cure from the Compound Oxygen that never came. The somber letter was accompanied by two gratuitous pamphlets containing more information and advice that would never help her.

There is one more piece of correspondence in the Alsina Richards collection. One year after the heartbreaking response from Starkey & Palen, she received another letter  from them in response to her request for their charity. She apparently told them that she and her husband were financially on hard times and could not afford their medicine, which she had apparently continued to take because it provided some measure of relief even as the disease continued its destruction. Starkey & Palen responded, “From your representations of pecuniary disability we will send you a 2 [month] Home Treatment for the Ten Dollars.” [emphasis added; it implies that she requested they discount the cost to ten dollars and they were agreeing to her terms. Saving five bucks may not seem like a lot today, but $15 in 1882 would be $461 in 2024 USD and $10 back then would be $307 now; when’s the last time your pharmacist agreed to a $154 discount on your medicine?] Ironically, it came with another booklet, “Unsolicited Testimonials,” but the time for striking up a correspondence with them was past.

Small, envelope-sized pamphlets included in the Starkey & Palen correspondence to Mrs. A. S. Richards; "Unsolicited Testimonials" (left) was included with the 1881 letter; the other two (center & right) were included with the 1882 letter. (author's collection)

Alsina S. Richards died 22 January 1884 of pulmonary tuberculosis (the death certificate called it phthisis); she was buried in the Pepperell Cemetery and her husband joined her in death 22 years later – he also died of “pulmonary phthisis” after being afflicted with it for just eight months.

 

Conclusion

Alsina and other users of Starkey & Palen’s Compound Oxygen died sad, shortened lives despite their desperate hopes for recovery, but ironically, the medicine enjoyed healthy sales, growth in distribution, energetic advertising, and four more decades of life.  A few years after Alsina’s death, Starkey & Palen put out a series of four trade cards featuring four people from very different corners of life with Compound Oxygen the one ingredient that tied them together. There was one card of an accomplished businessman, apparently a railroad tycoon, who was taking a break during his busy day to take his inhalation treatment of the Compound Oxygen; a second card showed an old woman relaxing at home, happily taking her Compound Oxygen treatment as well, while her cat played with a ball of yarn on the floor; both of these older people were healthy, at ease, and capably managing their health by using the Starkey & Palen products. In contrast, the third card was a close-up of an athletic, muscular young man sailing his boat while holding up a bottle of Starkey & Palen’s Oxygenaqua, implying that just a sip of the stuff was easy treatment for a man on the ocean.

The last card would likely have been the one Alsina would have stared at the longest, comparing her own decrepit health to the subject of this fourth card: the young, wasp-waisted woman was promoting the Compound Oxygen along with the inhaler bottle on the table, ready for use. She was stunningly attractive, vivaciously healthy and self-assured, dressed in daring clothing, reclining seductively, and smiling coyly – it was the perfect “painted lady” portrait, worthy of hanging over the back bar of any saloon. The unquestionably healthy young lady seemed to be taunting consumption, tightly corseted and looking like she would be more comfortable in a dance hall than a sanatorium for consumptives. Oh, to be young, healthy, and full of life – but Alsina Richards was only able to dream of such things before she died at 37 years old, miserably sick for at least her last four years, robbed of life and joy. She never had a chance; there was no miracle for Alsina.

Adverising Trade Card for Starkey & Palen's Compound Oxygen (author's collection)

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