The Big Green Bottle, Full of Miracles & Tragedy

In the early 1880s, Jacob Welch had accomplished having the biggest furniture store in Lynn, Massachusetts, and he felt he could achieve the same success running a medicine business, just like his friend Charles Pinkham was doing. Brimming with money, Welch just needed to find some medicine in which to invest.

For many decades, Robert W. Lougee, alias Dr. Lougee, had been making and selling his three medicines: Dr. Lougee’s Vitalizing Compound, the Juniper Kidney Cure, and Clover Cure “for female weakness,” and he was happy to share an enthralling backstory of how they came to be.

He told his tale of being a “bright and active boy” of thirteen, “unusually intelligent and observing for his years,” and having been the assistant of an Indian doctor “in the wilds of the Granite State” (New Hampshire), tasked with gathering roots and herbs for his medicines, “the potent arcana of the forest that formed his dwelling-place.” But at 70 years old, after a long career of making and selling the medicines on his own, he was ready to sell his secret recipes and his name. In Jacob Welch he had found the prize – an enthusiastic investor. Welch sold his share of the furniture business for $25,000 in 1885, and with those funds, started the Lougee Medicine Company in Lynn.

The formulas that Lougee turned over to Welch were full of the botanical ingredients he had learned about as a youthful assistant to that Indian doctor; they ranged from pumpkin seeds in the Clover Cure to juniper berries in the kidney cure. The Vitalizing Compound was an especially involved mixture of ten ingredients steeped in whiskey: one pound each of wormwood, mandrake, and burdock root; two pounds each of wintergreen, buchu, sarsaparilla, black cherry bark, blood root, and Peruvian bark; and one quart of burnt sugar, all to stand in a barrel of whiskey for about ten days. Now the furniture mogul and the old backwoods healer would work together at making this medicine business a success, just like the Pinkhams had been doing less than a mile away.

Welch took what Lougee had started and redesigned it around a compelling new Lynn testimonial that he hoped would be symbolic of his medicines’ efficacy and profitability:

Lynn, Mass., April 12, 1887. Eight years ago our daughter, Lena, then eight years of age, had a severe attack of Diphtheria, resulting in blood-poisoning, which developed into Scrofula. A malignant ulcer appeared upon her throat, eating away the flesh, and exposing the cords and muscles of the neck, till there was danger of some of the arteries being severed, and she would bleed to death. Another equally virulent ulcer attacked the right leg at the knee, seriously affecting the entire limb. The flesh under the knee was completely eaten away, laying bare the cords and tendons, presenting as did also the throat, a most repulsive and sickening sight. She was completely prostrated; her sufferings were most intense, and her condition in every sense was truly pitiable. … Five years ago last March an experienced and skillful Lynn physician was called, and by his advice she was taken to the country. There she received treatment for three months, after which time, unimproved, she was brought back to Lynn. Another skilled physician of this city then took the case, and at the expiration of two weeks advised her removal to the Massachusetts General Hospital, with the remark, “It is a critical case.”

Five doctors at the hospital told the family to just make Lena as comfortable as possible because that was all that could be done for her at that point. The most recent Lynn physician they had consulted was a Boston surgeon specializing in scrofula, but his efforts didn’t help either, so the parents then took their daughter to a lady physician who treated her for 15 months. While she relieved Lena’s suffering somewhat, no cure was accomplished.

Then we resorted to patent medicines. She took nearly two hundred bottles of one remedy in fifteen months, and followed this with forty bottles of another. As she continued to fail … Dr. R. W. Lougee was sent to us. … Upon taking Dr. Lougee’s Vitalizing Compound she began at once to improve, and our pardonable skepticism as to its great virtues was speedily removed. Soon the ulcers began to heal and the cavities to fill with new and healthy tissue, built up by this truly wonderful remedy. To-day nothing remains to indicate the frightful condition of which we have spoken … Her recovery is looked upon … as little short of a miracle, and our gratitude to Dr. Lougee for his agency in that blessed consummation is unspeakable. We hope the knowledge of his great specific, rightly named the Vitalizing Compound, may be spread far and wide. … Our residence is 677 Boston street. We will be pleased to answer all inquiries.

                                                              Mr. R. C. Judkins.

                                                              Mrs. R. C. Judkins.

Label on the bottle's back side.

To keep this miracle in the minds of every shopper, the big green bottle of Vitalizing Compound was adorned with an equally large label featuring a striking image of a healthy, vibrant Lena Judkins preparing to place a floral crown on the head of the venerable, seated doctor. In equally dramatic and varied Victorian type styles the message surrounding the trademarked image read,

Dr. Lougee Your Vitalizing Compound Saved My Life.

Lena’s parents had twice suffered the devastating loss of their other two children within the first two years of life; they were frantic to keep their teenage daughter Lena alive, and by their observations, it seemed that Lougee's Vitalizing Compound succeeded where all others had failed – Lena had healed! Their glowing testimonial of gratitude concluded with the final praise, “Is it not eminently fitting that our daughter, whose life he has thus saved, should crown the aged physician with an immortal wreath of honor?” Lena and Dr. Lougee would live on forever in the drawing on the label.

Unfortunately, from the outset, the Welch’s new medicine business sputtered, despite the miracles it performed upon Lena. Sales and cures came in fits and spurts, while expenses, especially from advertising, oozed steadily like a festering wound. There were occasional customers that said they received some benefit from the medicines, but more letters came in  from those who did not and were looking for their money back. The money was returned to a semi-literate man from Ossippee, New Hampshire, who had written,

I baut this bottle full of your Medicine and they gave me one trial bottle down to rochester on the fair ground[. I] carred it home and took it acording to Derections the man that sold it to me Booked my name and residence and all and thare was a soap man with him[.] they both told me to take it and if it did not do me any good they would return the money if I sent them the bottle to Dr Lougee Lynn Mass. I took both bottles and I want [wasn’t] so well as I ws when I begun to take … .

Similarly, another dissatisfied customer from Claremont, New Hampshire, wrote, “Sins [since] your Medicine has no effect on me I shall expect the dollar by return mail. the medicine does not help me at all.”  Like the others who bought with hope, a man from Concord, New Hampshire, wrote to “Dr Lougee” as submissively as a patient consulting in person with his doctor, even though he was very worried about his situation:

I comence to take your Medicine having Been troble with Schofler [probably scrofula] for a Number of years very Bad. Having a Soure [sore] on my side that had not been heald for 8 years. I have taken 2 Bot[tles] of your Vitalizing Compond and the out side of my Bodie came out all coverd with humor and it Itched all the time. Please Inform me if this is the way the Medicin work on Schofler [scrofula] it is almost a week Since it came out so. I can not see any thing that done it But the Medicin. … .

Label on the bottle's front side.

By August 1888, Welch had used up all $25,000 of his money to build up the business but had poor results – only about $7,000 in sales. He spent far more than he should have on advertising, not to mention his contractual obligation to bankroll old doctor Lougee twelve dollars weekly. There were also the medicine production costs and the expenses and salaries of his traveling salesmen that all kept cutting into dwindling capital. His medicine company had quickly become an open wound, hemorrhaging money. Panicking, he then made matters even worse for himself, trying to staunch the bleeding by lending the business his own money - what he had saved to take care of himself and his family.

Disillusioned and despondent, Welch arranged with Charles Pinkham to take over the manufacture of his medicines at the Pinkham laboratory. The Lougee Company formulas and business records were turned over to Charles and all of its stock and fixtures were loaded into the Pinkham laboratory; then Welch went to New Hampshire where a few weeks later, in a final act of utter desperation, he committed suicide by cutting his throat. He had left his wife and two children with almost nothing on which to live; their future lay in Charles Pinkham’s hands and stacked up on his laboratory floor.

In honor of his friend’s memory and for the sake of Welch’s wife and children, Charles tried to make the Lougee products work, but he was careful not to invest Pinkham company money in the risky Lougee business and aggressive advertising. At Charles’ recommendation, Welch’s family turned over the company to the advertising agency in less than two years. Pinkham’s medicine business soared into history but Lougee’s disappeared into oblivion.

The only known memorial to Dr. Lougee or Jacob Welch are the scarce bottles of Dr. Lougee’s Vitalizing Compound. It is an unusually large and heavy medicine bottle; standing at nine inches tall and weighing in at a chunky 1 lb 8-plus ounces (without liquid contents), it was a commanding presence on store shelves and in a shopper’s hands. It just wasn’t good enough to cure customers or to keep Jacob Welch alive. 

For more on Dr. Lougee and Jacob Welch, see:

PROMISING CURES, Vol.3,

Chapter 9: Heroine Addiction

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

A Tribute to Dreaming Under a Bridge

No one was more driven than Dan Pinkham, even when the world was crashing in on all sides. His once affluent family lost everything during the years of economic depression that had started with the Panic of 1873.  In desperation, they hoped to dig themselves out of their sudden poverty by selling bottles of their mother’s homemade medicine. It was a Victorian version of the fairy tale where a handful of magic beans was the solution to a family’s woes – but this time it was a bottle full of herbs.

It may have seemed like a fool’s errand to people who looked over their shoulders and down their noses at the Pinkhams, but the gossip and ridicule of critics and naysayers didn’t get to this family. The success of their medicine business was the absolute, resolute commitment of every member of the family to do their part. The family divided up duties to make the plan work. Mother Lydia stayed at home

making batches of her vegetable compound and brother Will ordered supplies, kept track of the finances, and tried to find drugstores and wholesalers who would take some bottles. Brother Charles and sister Aroline worked other jobs and brought home their pay to help the family’s fledgling business get off the ground, and brother Dan went to New York to whip up interest for their mother’s medicine in the biggest city in the country.

He was just one Pinkham in the massive city of well over a million people, but he had the heart of a lion tamer. Alone in the enormous city, he pushed himself every day to distribute flyers about the medicine to apartment doors throughout Brooklyn and talking up the drugstore owners and drug wholesalers, trying to make them believe that women were clamoring for Lydia E. Pinkham’s Vegetable Compound. He bought a map of Brooklyn, studied it to lay out the routes he would take through neighborhoods of Irish, Dutch, and others, then distributed pamphlets with a speed and thoroughness that would have made Johnny Appleseed jealous. His letters to Will back in Lynn resounded with repeated determination that New York was the place and the means for them to succeed or fail, “I think we had better continue to advertise in this locality [Brooklyn] till we either get it general, get rich or bust. … When [the medicine] becomes general in NY our fortune is made.”

Focusing all of his thoughts and energies on growing the business, Dan dreamed up some big ideas to improve sales and he peppered his letters to the family back home with his frequent brainstorms, like writing notes on small cards, as if from a satisfied customer, and leave them in parks and cemeteries (noting, “there all such frauds as that”); adding “kidney complaints,” to the list of problems the medicine would cure; having the Pinkham trademark picture include some New England scenery “with a humble cottage”; lowering the price, and several more. As he explained to the family back home, they had to approach this business venture with boldness, “There is no use doing business unless we do a devil of a business.” The equivalent phrase in today's parlance would be: “Go big or go home.”

photo courtesy: The Barbara Rusch Collection

In a way, Dan’s vision for the family’s medicine business was like the bridge he watched getting built over the East river from Brooklyn to Manhattan – both were grand, the stuff dreams were made of – colossal ventures that seemed impossible to everyone but those building the dream. When his busy schedule allowed, he caught glimpses of the project that was slowly becoming a bridge. By the time he had first arrived in Brooklyn, the two towers were already fixed the river like giant stone sentries that had been standing guard for a few years. Long cables were being draped between the towers and to the land beyond, and the bridge’s roadway was creeping along as well, looking from a distance like an absurdly long pirate ship plank. But it was a man-made wonder unlike anything the world had ever seen before – it would become the longest suspension bridge in the world. It was also a triumph mixed with tragedy, as at least 27 men died during its construction, falling from its terrible heights and being crushed by the pressure of its terrible depths below the river’s surface. Great achievements often come at the cost of tragic sacrifice. Dan Pinkham understood this all too well.

His letters home were fueled by drive, creativity, and poverty; in Brooklyn he lived with an abundance of all three.  Pushing himself to sell and drive sales, he gave little thought to his own needs, living on scraps. He bought cheap meals and walked and walked until his shoes wore through. He stitched them up and kept on walking until it was almost impossible to keep them on his feet. He wrote his letters at the post office because the pen and ink were available there for free. Eventually, he worried about going to see key accounts he was trying to cultivate because he was “beginning to look  so confounded seedy”; at one point he even suggested that he and one of his brothers should go for a trip into the country to put up posters and distribute circulars because he looked too ragged to be approaching people. He reached crisis points several times during his first two stays in Brooklyn when he was absolutely empty-plate, filthy-clothes, tattered-shoes, overdue-rent broke, leaving him hungry, embarrassed, and unable to do the work he was there to do.

photo courtesy of Cardeology

While in Brooklyn during late 1879, pushing himself hard for the sake of the business, Dan Pinkham’s health was deteriorating. Despite his mother’s instructions to take her liver pills and a tea of pleurisy root and marshmallow, his health continued to sink rapidly. He came home in late December with what Lydia thought was pneumonia. What turned out to be the dreaded consumption had fastened to his lungs and, though periods of remission sparked hope of recovery, his health continued to evaporate. Consumption finally pulled him into the grave just as it had done to so many others during the century. The Pinkham family’s indefatigable 33-year-old salesman and human dynamo died on 12 October 1881. A year and a half later, the Brooklyn Bridge completed the end of its journey as well.

Companies hustled to capitalize on the crush of human interest in the technological marvel of 1883 by producing trade cards of their own design. The Royal Baking Powder Company produced a very detailed rendering of the bridge and waterfront, but the company building projected like a  colossus looming over the landscape, dwarfing all the buildings, boats, and trains below; even the grand bridge was cast to the side of the picture like a feeble decoration to frame the great Royal building. Fahys' Coin Pocket Watch Cases also offered its version of commemorative bridge card, but it strangely cast the scene at night, with the bridge becoming part of the shadowy darkness against the night sky; a Fahys’ pocket watch hovers in the center, rotated to look something like a hot air balloon, but casting its own illumination from its anthropomorphic face, as if it was the moon itself. Yet another was a trade card put out by Willimantic thread manufacturers, who showed great creativity, dramatically transforming The Great East River Bridge into “The Great Willimantic Bridge,” with towers made of thread boxes and cables stringing together spools of thread. Sails and paddle-wheelers advertised the thread company and a distant factory belched out smoke that wrote the Willimantic message in sooty puffs across the clouds. The company’s factory surreally floated high in the sky over the whole frenetically busy scene.

The Pinkham company joined the fray with its own card version of The Great East River Suspension Bridge. Although it was as guilty as the other manufacturers of using the bridge as an advertising device, the Pinkham’s trade card was also a tribute to the dream of their brother Dan who had told them how grand it would be to have a banner suspended from the  Brooklyn Bridge advertising Lydia E. Pinkham’s Vegetable Compound. The card’s image was based on the Currier and Ives chromolithograph, “The Great East River Suspension Bridge.” Done in black and white, the trade card looked like a clipping from a newspaper story; while Charles had neither the money nor the permission to actually hang a banner from the bridge when it was completed in 1883, the card made it look to customers and collectors everywhere like it had really happened – and perception was reality. Trade cards were one of the least-expensive forms of advertising available and had the additional advantage that, by often being collected, they lasted longer and continued to convey their message every time they were seen.

This one magic bean of Dan’s spread further than the fabled beanstalk that stretched to the clouds. Millions of Lydia Pinkham’s Brooklyn Bridge trade cards were printed and circulated all over North America within a few weeks of their printing. People from Miami to Milwaukee and from Cincinnati to San Francisco had never seen the world’s biggest bridge, but they were seeing it on a card in their hands and, waving equally triumphant under its long span was the banner for Lydia E. Pinkham’s Vegetable Compound. The image that documented the completion of the greatest new wonder of the world was also documenting, or at least inferring, the equally triumphant medicine from a once-impoverished family in Lynn, Massachusetts, who just needed a little magic to emerge from of their determination and dreams – and the magic happened. Lydia E. Pinkham’s Vegetable Compound became one of the most successful patent medicines in the 19th century. And while various authors have pointed alternately to the medicinal qualities, the business plan, the advertising saturation, and to the mystique of Lydia herself as possible reasons for the Pinkham family’s redemption from obscurity and poverty to fame and fortune, perhaps magic is the most correct explanation of all. 

For more on the Pinkham's Brooklyn Bridge trade card, see:

PROMISING CURES, Vol. 3, Chapter 9: Heroine Addiction

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

A Cure for Monsters

Please gaze at the image above and ponder it for a few moments. What kind of animal do you see – perhaps a poisonous reptile, an angered dragon, or some other monster drawn by an overactive imagination? And what does it have to do with the message, “DISEASE CURED”? Covered in red spots all over its green skin, with blood-filled eyes, a fanged growl, and sharp, extended claws, is it the personification of disease, poised to attack our health, or something more sinister that threatens our very souls?

Why did the advertiser menace with a mysterious creature instead of some well-known terror of the mid-19th century, like a rabid dog snarling through frothing teeth or a rattlesnake poised for a venomous strike? Why use some fantastical thing that had only recently been discovered and barely understood?

The cardboard sign was printed in 1864 in New York, just past mid-century, a pivotal time for Americans, when their familiar world was being torn apart and an unclear future was forcefully dawning, whether they were ready or not. The Civil War was still raging, challenging the very existence of the country as they knew it. The Industrial Revolution was propelling forward, with more inventions and increasingly faster production output; homemade was being replaced by storebought. The power of trains and guns, and the discovery of oil were all positioning the country to become a superpower. And knowledge was shredding its centuries-old cocoon of superstitions and folktales, emerging into the fact-driven flight of science. “DISEASE CURED” was a bold promise consistent with the expectations of the time, but the odd beast below those words made a curious and unsettling contrast to the certainty above it. As it turns out, that red-spotted nightmare was more than just a metaphor for disease; the previously unknown lifeform was a subliminal reminder of all the world-shaking uncertainty that was bothering the minds of Americans at that precise moment in time. Its very presence on the sign was challenging their core beliefs: did God really exist and was he in control of their world?

Footprints of Dragons instead of Angels

Discoveries in geology and paleontology challenged Earth’s timeline and the history of life upon it. Fossilized plants and birdlike footprints embedded in deep layers of stone and sediment suggested epochs of life and adaptation far different from seven days of divine creation.

The discovery of fossils – teeth, femurs, ribs, and other bones – most often enormous – told stories of ancient creatures in a distant past that had once clearly dominated the earth one giant footprint at a time. Such giants had long been called dragons, but in 1842 a British scientist introduced the term dinosauria, meaning “terrible lizards.” Scaly, cold-blooded, large-toothed giant reptiles that the Bible described only loosely or allegorically, if at all. Every dinosaur bone that was discovered threatened the biblical world of the faithful.

THE UNHOLY ARK. The workshop where concrete statues of dinosaurs were being sculpted for London's 1854 Crystal Palace Exhibition.

But the scientifically-minded public was captivated. Giant, nightmarish beasts that once filled the earth were now filling their imaginations. Even one of the era’s biggest celebrities, Charles Dickens, dreamed of dinosaurs. He was the first to write about them; the first paragraph of his new 1853 book, Bleak House read:

“… Implacable November weather. As much mud in the streets, as if waters had not newly retired from the face of the earth, and it would not be [surprising] to meet a Megalosaurus, forty feet long or so, waddling like an elephantine lizard up Holborn-hill. …”

In 1854 the vaunted Crystal Palace Exhibition in London displayed the first-ever dinosaur sculptures: concrete full-size replicas of prehistoric reptiles. Attached is an illustration of the sculptures under construction in 1853. (The "DISEASE CURED" dinosaur bears some resemblance to the model in the lower left. The sculptures in this famous exhibition were almost certainly the inspiration for the creature illustrated on our sign, making it a very early interpretation of what the extinct animals looked like in that ancient time when the excavated bones had been covered in beastly flesh.) In 1855, the year following the London exhibition, the first dinosaur remains (teeth) were discovered in North America (Montana) and in 1858, the continent’s first complete skeleton was found in New Jersey. Dinosaur fever was starting to infect an enthusiastic American public; pictures of the prehistoric creatures like the one in the Herrick’s sign were sure to fascinate.

The Ungodly Origin of Man

Dinosaurs weren’t the only revelations that seemed to be trampling on deep-rooted religious beliefs; religionists hotly challenged the theories of the evolutionists, especially those of Charles Darwin, whose magnum opus, The Origin of Species, was published in 1859. Although the book made no assertion about man’s evolution from apes, his work clearly outlined the principle of natural selection, which many interpreted as a clear departure from man’s divine origin in the Garden of Eden. The next year, one of many critical reviews took aim at disparaging Darwin and his theories:

THE NEW THEORY OF CREATION

      On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection by Charles Darwin, M.A. … Man himself is not, we are told, an emanation from the Divine mind, the culmination of the grand scheme of organized life … but an accumulation of accidental results, descended from some monster swimming in the ocean of the early world!

      The common instinct of humanity revolts at the idea. …

Such rebuke didn’t slow down the roll of scientists and their convinced followers; in 1863, Thomas Henry Huxley published Evidence as to Man’s Place in Nature, which unequivocally argued that humans had evolved from apes. Then, in 1864, William Murphy, the printer at 438 Canal Street, New York, printed the store sign for Herrick’s Pills and Plasters. It boldly promised “DISEASE CURED” by using Herrick’s products, but no traditional illustrations of before-and-after, sick and cured versions of the same person were used; they had been  replaced by an odd but striking image of the unique, green scary thing.

Standing out even more than the large red letters forming the brash claim was the hairy, hungry, sawbacked monster. The mythical dragon had evolved into a flesh-and-bones dinosaur, but it was also portrayed as the incarnation of evil, living among other slimy denizens of the fetid primeval ooze from which it had emerged, covered with disease spots and propelled by relentless animal instinct to attack and kill with fevered viciousness.

The public had been conditioned decades earlier to consider the concept of the dead coming back to life. Early-century horror stories, like Frankenstein and The Vampyre, had enticed a frightened but thrilled public to form terrifying creatures in their imagination, like Frankenstein’s monster and blood-sucking revenants. Herrick’s monster was now coaxing them to expand their minds to see a world before the Flood, where behemoths foraged through a primordial Eden that was devoid of Adam and Eve but full of apes. Under the “DISEASE CURED” banner, the excavated symbol of scriptural revision had been reanimated by the artist to represent mankind’s worst nightmare: although apparently susceptible to the advertised medicines, its kind had tried to kill God.

Stop this evolving monster, the banner’s subliminal message promised, and you may save not just a sick life, but Heaven itself.

 

For more on the Herrick’s medicine sign, see:

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

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