Updated: Jan 15
THE PROSPECTORS:
Dr. Edgar Mason & Dr. Abiathar Pollard **
Once upon a time, these two star-crossed doctors left their homes in Missouri and New York to find their fortunes in the great California Gold Rush. In their hometowns, their medical professions had raised their value and brought them respect. But among a swarm of other men in the wilderness equally infected by gold fever, they were just two more miners in a mind-swirling, body-aching race for gold.
The gold hunters came from Europe, Central and South America, China, and all over the United States. Tinker, tailor, soldier, sailor; rich man poor man, beggar man, thief – they all collided along quiet stream beds, river shores, and pond edges to pan and sluice for gold. But few of the gold bugs found a rich vein; sometimes it seemed like the only ones having success finding veins were mosquitoes.
For Drs. Mason and Pollard, fortune apparently stayed in the river, so they fell back on their medical skills to make some money, perhaps to recoup some of their expenses. The two doctors stumbled upon each other in Marysville, California, the first sign of significant civilization when they emerged from the disappointing wilderness after their gold hunting misadventures in 1852.
Marysville was named after Mary Murphy, one of the few survivors of the ill-fated Donner Party which became synonymous with the insatiable human hunger for survival. Two years later and not far from Donner Pass, the rugged wilderness at the base of California’s Sierra Nevada mountain range to the east continued to make survival more difficult than finding gold.
At first a trading post in the wilderness, Marysville had become a major miners’ supply depot during the gold rush. Early in 1850, its population grew from 300 to 1,500 in less than a month; for a brief time in 1852, it was California’s third largest city, behind only San Francisco and Sacramento. Thousands of men swarmed through it to get to the gold fields to the east; it was the last city before those stream beds, shorelines, and caves allegedly teeming with gold and the first city when they came out. It was a beehive of commotion.
The singular evidence of the two doctors’ collaboration was a medicine product that bore both of their names, Mason & Pollard’s Anti-Malaria Pills; it was first advertised in 1854 and in those early days, the few newspapers that listed it seemed to be getting mixed messages from its owners, sometimes listing the pills as “Mason & Pollard’s” and other times “Pollard’s & Mason’s.” What the two doctors agreed on was the region’s medical need for such a medicine – malaria was on a rampage; at certain times of year as many as twenty people a day in California’s gold region were dying from the disease. The earliest newspaper mention of the medicine reported,
“These gentlemen have been practicing their profession for several years in Marysville, and from a long familiarity with those diseases most prevalent in the Sacramento and Feather River Valleys, have been enabled, after numerous experiments, to present to the public a pill peculiarly efficacious in those diseases resulting from the malaria universally prevailing in all the lowlands of California.”
But from the outset, the malaria pills, by any name, did not become their next attempt to stake a new claim for gold – a Marysville medicine distributor took over making and selling the medicine, while Drs. Mason and Pollard, like a disgruntled couple, went their separate ways. Five years after they had sold off their medicine to the local distributor, the Marysville newspaper was still trying to remind Dr. Pollard that he had letters at the post office that needed to be picked up.
Dr. Mason had moved on to the northwestern corner of California in Crescent City, where he spent the rest of his life with his family. Dr. Pollard stayed for a while longer in the gold region east of Marysville, listed once again as a doctor instead of a miner in 1857 and then as a doctor and surgeon surrounded by goldminers in the 1860 U.S. census. In the same census year back in Mooers, New York (the northeast corner of the state, next to the Canadian border), his wife and two children waited for his return; by 1863 he was back on the New York tax rolls and he was listed with his wife and children in the next (1870) federal census; he then stayed in New York for the rest of his life. In 1881 and for the next several years, his enthusiastic testimonial for what was Dr. J. A. Sherman’s Rupture Curative Mixture ran in the immensely influential New York Times, but only small, unimpressive efforts were being made to advertise Mason & Pollard’s Anti-Malaria Pills in papers like the Yonkers Statesman and the Poughkeepsie Eagle News. That medicine affair from the old days was probably as much of a distant, unpleasant memory for Dr. Pollard as it was for Dr. Mason. Their medical tryst in Marysville had given birth to a single offspring that carried both their names, occasionally popping up as if to haunt them for the remainder of their lives.
FOOL'S GOLD
Seven generations of medicine distributors over a span of 30 years had handled the manufacture, advertising, and selling of Mason & Pollard’s Anti-Malaria Pills, but none of their hearts – or wallets – seemed to be in it. Most of the distributors had made little to no effort to promote the medicine. The Reddington Company of San Francisco had been its sole agent for the longest period, from 1869 until all advertising ceased in1884, but during those last 15 years, their efforts to advertise it were lackluster at best: while promotion of the pills was fairly strong in California, it appeared in Oregon, New York, and New Jersey newspapers less frequently than a gold nugget in a miner’s pan.
Back in 1862, an earlier distributor had tried to draw attention to the anti-malaria pills by claiming its new packaging was “to guard against Counterfeits”; the pills were
“now put up in a new and permanent style, in oval wooden boxes secured by a strap, printed in red type so as to read continuously, the directions folded around and the whole in a wrapper of Enameled paper, with the name of the Pills in red type on the top, and the names 'Mason & Pollard,' one on either end of the package.”
Eight years after the two doctors had parted ways over the medicine, they were still as far apart as possible; not only were they living at opposite ends of the country, but their individual names even appeared on opposite ends of the box.
As the years passed and patent medicine advertising tried to evolve alongside scientific advancements and promotional sophistication, new promises were added on to the same old Mason & Pollard Anti-Malaria Pills. In 1871 the public was assured that the pills were “exclusively vegetable,” meaning there was no mercury or other minerals or chemicals in them; they assisted digestion and “add flesh and muscle to the frame”; and they were also promised to be good for all ages and both sexes. Ten years later, advertising for the pills dropped the promises of muscle mass and weight gain, focusing instead on their laxative properties and their usefulness to families: “As a Family Medicine in a bilious climate, they cure in three-fourths of the diseases incidental to a family … They may be given to the youngest child.”
Broadening the medicine’s promised curative properties seemed to be a conscious attempt to make it be thought of in the public’s mind as more than just a medicine for those suffering with malaria, which though a terrible and dangerous illness, was largely limited to hot, wet, humid areas of the country, like the gold fields of California. The entire Gulf Coast region, from Texas to Georgia, renowned for heat and humidity, would therefore also have been a great area in which to advertise, but they never did (unless it was done by local drugstores and businesses that carried the product and promoted it on their own). Mason & Pollard’s Anti-Malaria Pills were test-advertised in California by its several timid owner-distributors and when the Redington Company added a partner named Coffin in New York City, the advertisements for the pills cropped up occasionally in New York. The anti-malaria medicine was promoted almost entirely in California and New York, where it’s distribution outlets were based and, ironically, where its two creators, Drs. Mason and Pollard, resided; the doctors and their medicine were living out the remainder of their days alienated but together.
NERVOUS LAUGHTER
Truth be told, as I always try to do, Mason & Pollard’s Anti-Malaria Pills are little more than a footnote in the history of 19th century patent medicines and a dreary, uninspiring footnote at that. This whole story may never have come to be, if not for three bursts of color that were brought in at its end of days, perhaps as a long-shot effort to bring the dying brand back to life. Three advertising trade cards were commissioned by the Reddington Company to tell the story of Mason & Pollard’s Anti-Malaria Pills with pictures in a way that words alone just could not do.
The stories these three cards tell are stunning and fascinating, brightening up the brand in such colorful ways that, if the pill product had any pulse left, its boxes on drugstore shelves should have revived and danced a jig. From a mishandled, under-promoted, blandly advertised medicine product that failed to attract a large customer base during the dying days of the California Gold Rush, these three pieces of advertising are some of the finest, most brilliantly designed examples of medicine advertising trade cards to emerge among 19th century patent medicines. They share three timeless stories that reveal ancient fears and faith still being held onto by our ancestors in the late 19th century … and perhaps by us today.
The prominent New York chromolithographer, Mayer, Merkel & Ottmann, was chosen to design three advertising trade cards to convince customers that Mason & Pollard’s Anti-Malaria Pills was more than just another medicine – it was the very picture of supreme power and vitality. One look at the product package pictured on each card easily explains why the chromolithographers decided on very colorful cards and action scenes. The earlier oval brown boxes wrapped in red-printed enamel paper had devolved into a plain and somber gray box bereft of ornamentation – it was as lifeless as could be – looking very much like the pills were entombed in wet cardboard. Color and commotion on the card could do nothing but help distract the consumer from the lifeless box they were being encouraged to buy.
The first card below depicts the personification of miasma: creatures of the swamp – gaseous entities that floated over the dank, rotting vegetation of the wetlands. Malaria holds up a snake, another creature of the wetlands; Biliousness holds up his club, threatening another brutal blow to the stomach, and Chills wafts past some swamp water. The foreboding woods in the background have lost most of their vegetation, just like trees do on their way to ruin in swampy regions.
The men throw objects at the evil entities from behind the protection of a box of Mason & Pollards Anti-Malaria Pills. A close look at the weapons they’ve piled in front of them and are throwing at the fleeing fiends prove to be not black or brown stones, but the only thing that would really set disease on the run: the white projectiles they’re using are the anti-malaria pills. It’s interesting that the most surreal player on this stage is the stoic Stonehenge-like monolith, larger than the men and obviously larger than life.
A generation or two before the Victorians who were taking in the subliminal messages of the miasma card, their Colonial grandparents would have easily comprehended the scene on the next Mason & Pollard’s trade card.
As I’ve shown you in a previous post (4 May 2024: “Devils, Demons & Disease”) the belief that witches, demons, and devils cursed people with sickness was a very serious and pervasive fear. The scene on this card brings us into the recesses of Hell itself, with a hint of fire and darkness in the background, bats and an owl (both creatures of the night) overhead, a human skull and bones on some type of table, along with empty bottles of failed medicines that contributed to disease victims becoming just skeletal remains.
But the grim world of “the Enemies of Mankind” is being upended by the prize fighter. Hell knows no fury like a box of Mason & Pollard’s. Powerful enough to beat devils but gentle enough for children.
Both cards were designed to send a light-hearted and reassuring message about the anti-malaria pills. Children and adults could safely look and laugh at the scenes unfolding and subconsciously feel a little peace that the medicine defeats the notions of illness that had been handed down in their families for many generations. They provoked a nervous laughter – they were funny if they were right.
The last of these dramatic trade cards takes the viewer away from swamp gas fiends and hell spawn to a tiny-winged, chubby-cheeked cherub (yeah, those cheeks too), about to administer a box of Mason & Pollard’s pills to the malaria sufferer below. The artwork is an excellent example of trompe l’oeil (“deceive the eye”) design that was quite popular at the time: the cherub appears three dimensional, hovering in front of the door, innocent in its nakedness with a ponderously long red sash, symbolic of its heaven-sent mission among mankind.
The despondent, sick young man is in shirt sleeves, neckerchief, and knee-high boots, sitting at a scuffed-up table in his spartan and somewhat rundown home; he seems designed to portray the quintessential goldminer suffering from malaria. It seems to be up to the viewer to decide whether the cherub is compassionately delivering the box of relief or impishly about to bonk the sufferer with it.
The overarching message of all three creative cards was that Mason & Pollard’s Anti-Malaria Pills was the answer to disease – the promising cure. How could I not love these cards?
Alas, these grand cards were not enough to resurrect the dying product. By the century’s last decade, the true cause of malaria had been determined and revealed. Health department instructions on preventive measures to eliminate mosquito breeding areas and to further protect exposed skin combined with the already long tradition of using quinine to treat malarial infections. Mason & Pollard’s Anti-Malaria Pills had become an anachronism unsupported by a feeble pedigree of manufacturing distributors and long-forgotten by its creators. But on the merits of these three small paper cards alone, the reputation of the pills is ephemerally lifted to help us glimpse the medicine as a dominant force among 19th century patent medicines that it never was.
I for one will be forever grateful for this last-ditch effort to put Mason & Pollard’s Anti-Malaria Pills into the spotlight; for me, it’s still there.
** AUTHOR’S NOTE:
All of my blog posts are the result of intensive research, but this is a blog, not a book, so to keep each post relatively brief, I do not include the sources for each fact. Nonetheless, I am always happy to share my sources if you reach out to me through my Contact page.
The life details of Dr. Edgar Mason of Missouri and Dr. Abiathar Pollard of New York marry perfectly with the facts and timeline I established for Drs. Mason and Pollard in Marysville and other locations nearby in the gold districts of northern California. If you find any facts that contradict or add to my findings, please share them with me so that we can correct and improve this or any blog post I write. Corrections and updates to historical data only improve the two most important results: historical accuracy and a better understanding of our past.
Lynn Massachusetts history - History of medicine - 19th-Century Health Remedies - Vintage Medical Ephemera - 19th-century medicine
Part 3 of 3: THE OIL WELL
"Kennedy knew as much about medicine as a horse does about astronomy"
(- Kennedy's friend and chemist, 1882)
I’ve only lived down here in East Texas for the most recent few decades of my life, but there has never been a question about where I was. We have Arizona’s heat and the Amazon’s humidity. Some of our bugs are the size of a hand … with eight hairy fingers. Alligators lurk in some rivers and ponds like leftover dinosaurs silently waiting for their next victim. Then there are the big metal pumpjacks, or “thirsty bird” pumps, bobbing up and down in one spot, silently sucking the ground below. I’m not sure which creature unnerves me more – the alligators or the giant thirsty birds.
Finally there are the oil derricks, usually surrounded at their base by a sizeable number of life forms scurrying about in brightly colored hard hats. At nighttime glowing spotlights illuminate them – from miles away through the vast darkness of the Texas countryside, the brightness looks like a star has crashed into the earth; get closer and the derrick scene at night looks like an alien invasion. Texas is, first and foremost, Oil Country USA.
Carboline looks Texan: in a close-up of the design on its 1877 box, oil wells can be seen standing in an oilfield, with busy workers doing all the things that oil workers did. A large drum labeled “CARBOLINE” is at the center, with the derrick’s pipe shooting oil right into the drum, ready to make the next big batch of Carboline. The scene screamed Texas, but it wasn’t. Not even close.
DIFFERENT PLACE, DIFFERENT TIME
Texas wouldn’t have its day for a while yet – the great Texas Oil Boom wouldn’t begin until Spindletop gushed all over about its black gold in 1901. Pennsylvania was the country’s big oil play in the 1870s, not Texas.
Oil wasn’t as important in 1877 as it was in 1901. It was mostly being used in the form of kerosene to light lamps because it was a cleaner, cheaper lamp fuel than the oil from slaughtered sperm whales. Oil wells were starting to be found more easily than the constantly moving leviathans of the deep in their rapidly thinning pods.
As lamp wicks across western Pennsylvania started lighting up with the kerosene byproduct of oil, an enterprising Pittsburgher had a flash of brilliance – oil didn’t need to just go up in smoke – he was going to turn it into medicine – to grow hair.
Robert Monroe Kennedy wasn’t a petroleum engineer or a doctor, or even a chemist; he was an entrepreneur whose skills were creativity, vigor, and making money – a great mix for a businessman. In his hands, black, stinky, sticky goo from the ground was just another opportunity waiting to happen.
He got into business as a boy, peddling cheap jewelry. He made enough money at it to expand his business. In 1867, a few years after the Civil War was over, the 24-year-old went by R. Monroe Kennedy and created a network of salesmen far and wide to sell his “Mammoth Prize Stationery Packages,” as well as silverware, photographs, and what he openly called “cheap Jewelry.” The sole qualification he required of his recruits was for each to be a “LIVE man” – full of energy to do a great job – in other words, they needed to follow their leader.
In 1871, after four years in general goods sales, he changed his moniker from R. Monroe Kennedy to simply R. M. Kennedy, and undertook a new venture, proprietorship of a line of remedies he called Dr. Radcliffe’s, headlined by a Dr. Radcliffe’s Seven Seals or Golden Wonder (It was actually the flagship of a whole line he developed under the Dr. Radcliffe's name, including Elixerene or Favorite Panacea, a nervine & blood purifier; Expectoral, a cough and lung balsam; Favorite Pills, for dyspepsia and liver complaints, and Positive Cure for Catarrh, to relieve congestion. But these were all weak stepsisters to Seven Seals and were rarely advertised.). With a completely fabricated backstory as to the origin of Seven Seals, Kennedy promised the medicine had, “in cases of the most intense, excruciating and agonizing pains, aches, cramps, spasms, etc., … absolute power to subdue and extinguish pain almost instantaneously. … IT LITERALLY DEMOLISHES PAIN.”
No surprise; an analysis two years after it was introduced revealed it contained ether and chloroform (two strong and potentially lethal ingredients that were being used to knock people out before surgery) camphor and capsicum (two more pain-killing ingredients), and oil of peppermint (probably for flavor), all in a whopping 90% alcohol. Simply put, it was a powerful and dangerous brew that could “demolish pain” and potentially the patient. Kennedy advertised the Seven Seals robustly across the country for the next half dozen years, in dozens of newspapers and with many trade card designs (which he called show cards); but then he suddenly shifted his advertising to his newest creation, Carboline.
GREASY HANDS & HAIRY HEADS
Kennedy named his product Carboline, apparently by blending “carb-” from carbon, the stuff that makes oil black, and “-oline” the Latin suffix for oil. It seemed effective for 1877 – “carbon oil” was the common term for the black crude that was starting to change America’s financial landscape.
The story Kennedy wove for Carboline was at least as imaginative as his claim that Dr. Radcliffe’s Seven Seals was named after a British physician who was the seventh son of a seventh son (popularly believed to be the sign for having the gift of healing, possibly with psychic skills mixed in). Kennedy’s advertising copy claimed a practical chemist in Pittsburgh had become very interested in a paragraph he read in one of the city newspapers about a government officer in southern Russia who had amazing success when using petroleum on some cattle and horses that had lost their hair as the result of a cattle plague.
He recollected that a former servant of his, prematurely bald, had got the habit, when trimming the lamps, of wiping his oil besmeared hands in the scanty locks which remained [on his head], and the result was a much finer head of black, glossy hair, than he ever had before.
The chemist then experimented on this claim and found that vigorously rubbing the head with a palmful of highly-refined American oil over the space of three days had the same desired results: it invigorated the scalp as well as strengthened the hair and returned it to its original dark color.
Kennedy then claimed all that remained to converting crude oil into the perfect hair-growing medicine was, oddly, the same challenge that Joseph Burnett had with his coconut-based hair oil – getting rid of the strong smell. Thinking back to the last time I put oil into my car, I am convinced that Kennedy’s deodorizing mission must have been more critical than Burnett’s.
Neutral paraffin oil, another distilled version of petroleum, was by far the main ingredient (93%) in the formula for Carboline; among other purposes, it is used today as the basis for baby oil – a very gentle moisturizer to the skin that can be helpful for the relief of dry skin and dandruff. In addition to the pint of paraffin oil, the formula called for four drams of cantharides (“Spanish Fly” or more accurately, soldier beetle, ground up and saturated in alcohol, probably used to stimulate the scalp), 20 grains of euphorbium (resin from a Moroccan cactus-like plant), and oils of rosemary, cassia, and cloves, all likely added for fragrance. Kennedy definitely accomplished his goal of deodorizing the oil, and its color (as shown in the bottle pictured above) is as mild a shade of yellow as a slice of banana cream pie.
Kennedy’s new hair-growing oil seems pretty innocent, especially compared to his earlier venture with Dr. Radcliffe’s Seven Seals. Perhaps complaints about bad results with Seven Seals or Golden Wonder was the reason for R. M. Kennedy’s quick product change to the fairly benign Carboline. The only thing bold about it was the promise, “RESTORES THE HAIR ON BALD HEADS.” From “demolishing” every pain to growing hair on bald heads, there was nothing R. M. Kennedy’s medicine couldn’t do, at least according to R. M. Kennedy. One of his ads promised in 1882,
A CHANCE FOR BALD-HEADS.
Their day of deliverance has dawned. This is the age of wonders: wonders in science, wonders in mechanism, wonders in everything. ...
THE MERCHANT PRINCE OF PITTSBURGH
R. M. Kennedy advertised the heck out Carboline, reaching almost every state in the country once again by using newspaper advertising and show cards. He ran a contest in the New York Times for children to see how many words they could make from the letters in “Carboline” and another contest for adults to write songs praising the healing properties of Carboline.
He came to be known by his friends as “Carboline Kennedy,” and "The Merchant Prince of Pittsburgh." Whether the light-yellow liquid grew hair on bald heads or not, sales were brisk and Kennedy made a lot of money. Then, just as his hair grower sales were peaking, he sold out his rights as sole agent in late 1878 to Geo. W. May & Co. of Staunton, Virginia. He still did some limited promotions of the product in a small number of newspapers over the next few years, but they weren’t the same size or frequency of what he had run in its banner year, 1878. Maybe he detected that sales were weakening, and perhaps he knew this was coinciding with an escalating number of consumer complaints that their bald heads had not, in fact, returned to luxuriant billows and waves of dark, strong hair. Whatever the reason, he suddenly took his earnings and started investing in real estate. He purchased farmland on the outskirts of Pittsburgh and transformed them into beautiful villages, erecting many cottages that he then sold. He laid out the city of Homestead, Pennsylvania, on the northeast side of Pittsburgh (complete with a glass-making factory), and it was said he had made more money in Pittsburgh real estate than any man up to the end of the century.
The prince of Pittsburgh was well-known, wealthy, and popular because he frequently helped out his friends with needed cash. His largesse, mixed with a little naivete, almost got him killed. Not a gambler himself, in 1882 he watched a poker game in a hotel room at the pleading of the friend of a friend, who was soon borrowing small amounts from him – and losing them in the game. Things escalated out of control when Kennedy was asked for $500; saying he would only fund the card player $300 and only if the man signed an IOU for repayment. He was then attacked by the crowd of gamblers and thieves at the game and severely beaten, and “he is now lying at the point of death as a consequence of the injuries inflicted by the scoundrels.”
The 39-year-old Kennedy did recover but more tragedies followed. His young wife died in 1884 of heart disease after she retired early to her room, suffering from a severe headache. Kennedy had moved on from real estate to speculating in oil investments, and made great money again, but while on an extended trip to England he was one of several investors who was convicted of conspiring to manipulate the oil market prices and in so doing he overdrew his account by $66,059 (over $2 million in 2023 USD). His personal effects were sold by the sheriff. But his friends were convinced he would bounce back because he was R. M. Kennedy. He had some bad luck throughout his business career, but then he would “rapidly regain all he had lost,” and his devoted friends were convinced that he picked up another fortune when he returned home from Europe, although they didn’t know what it was.
R. M. Kennedy traveled and lived in both England and Pittsburgh until his death fifteen years later, in 1899. His heavy investment and push of Carboline in 1877-1878 turned out to be little more than a tryst with the hair grower, an affair he ended shortly after it had begun. It would have been heady news if his medicine really did grow hair on bald heads, but it could not and did not. In fact a friend admitted as early as 1886, “Kennedy knew as much about medicine as a horse does about astronomy.” The friend, who was probably also his chemist for the medicines, continued:
He used to get an idea that a medicine for some particular ailment would sell well, and he would come to me to get up something. I’d always do it for him, making up a medicine that would be as harmless as possible. Then Kennedy would go into the most extravagant advertising and tell the world of some remarkable discovery.
The old business associate and friend waxed philosophical in his closing remarks about patent medicines in general, “There is no business so uncertain as the patent medicine business; the shores of time are strewn with their wrecks.” Maybe so; but the patent medicine ships of R. M. Kennedy, when he was their captain, flew like Yankee Clippers, fearless and with great energy. Undaunted by life’s setbacks and the flimflam of his own swindles, he only changed course when he wanted to, and most everyone in Pittsburgh seemed to admire the cut of his jib.
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This is the last of my three-part series on hair-growing products I bought at Houston24. With installments on Bear’s Grease, Cocoaine, and Carboline, we’ve traveled through animal, vegetable, and mineral medicines for growing hair on bald heads, and I for one can now be at peace over losing my hair. It was meant to be and I’m good with the new old me.
Lynn Massachusetts history - History of medicine - 19th-Century Health Remedies - Vintage Medical Ephemera - 19th-century medicine
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!
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.”
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).
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
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.
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.
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
