Medical News from Mars!

So there I was, in a remote antique shop way out in the countryside, months after the last Brimfield extravaganza had people swarming all over it like fire ants on a feeding frenzy. I figured the last thing I was going to find was some precious treasure that the ravenous swarm had missed. … But they did.

It was a magazine from Mars. Yeah, that Mars – the Red Planet.

Ephemera doesn’t get cooler than this!

The Mars Gazette

The publication was called The Mars Gazette, or at least that’s what we were told on the next page; the cover was written in the alien Martian characters (although separating and rotating certain symbols become remarkably like the English equivalent). Emerging from behind the title page is the Red Planet, covered in its many canals, rising in the night sky like the Empire’s Death Star – very mysterious, very foreboding. Turn the page, earthling, if you dare. …

Front cover of the Mars Gazette. (all Mars Gazette images from the author's collection)

Everything about this booklet is strange and unlike any other Victorian ephemera I have seen in forty-plus years of collecting. The illustrations are fabulously imaginative and early examples of science fiction. The pages are rough, uneven, and edged in charred black. We learn inside that it is a translated facsimile of the original Mars Gazette and was partially burned as an earthling’s spaceship returned to Earth, passing “through an electric storm of terrific intensity.” What a lucky break for us that it survived as well as it did!

Most of the publication tells the story of a space traveler from Earth who brought an urgently needed cure to the Martians. While the Martians were enjoying their 936th festival in the Big-Dipper Grove, the picnickers saw a “fearful and wonderful” spacecraft overhead. Some of them fled in fear (whirling away, head-over-heels, was their method of running), but others watched with fascination as “a singular being, God or devil, the inhabitant of another world” emerged from the “oblong phenomenon.” The Mars Gazette shared with fascination his strange looks, noting that he was significantly taller than they, spoke a different language, and “hair grew under his nose as well as upon the top of his head”; plus "he held in his cavernous mouth a large brown stick which was actually on fire, emitting at intervals clouds of dense smoke.”

He was brought to the planet’s leader, “His Most Malignant Martian Majesty, King Flammarion, the Supreme and Mighty Ruler of the Red Planet.” The space traveler introduced himself: “I am a physician from a far-away world. C. B. Hustler, M.D., is my name” and, to ensure the Martians that he was friendly, he told them that after business hours he would introduce them “to the festive Manhattan cocktail, the jovial gin rickey," and other mixed drinks. Yup, a real friendly guy.

But his most important beverage recommendation, and the purpose for his mission, was to provide the Martians with Liquid Peptonoids made by his employer, The Arlington Medicine Company of Yonkers, New York, U.S.A., Earth.

Medical ephemera from outer space? Found by a medical ephemera collector, no less – what are the odds? I felt like I was living a childhood dream: “Andy Rapoza and the Martian Medical Manuscript.” Eat your heart out, Indiana Jones!

Liquid Peptonoids were said to contain “the stimulating and nutritive elements of beef, milk, and wheat, in concentrated, partially digested form.” Bottom line: they gave weak stomachs the nutrition and strength of those ingredients without making the stomach work hard. Good thing he brought a bunch to Mars.

Toad Eyes with Truffles

King Flammarion put a Martian feast before the hungry space traveler: “sea-water soup, toads-eyes with truffles, snails-eggs with bile-water sauce, bee stingers rolled in sawdust and other epicurean delicacies.” The doctor from earth “sighed and sadly shook his head,” then pulled out a bottle of Liquid Peptonoids from his coat pocket. Lucky doctor.

Now it was time for him to see if he could help these poor, sick Martians.

They placed one of their own on an operating table and by means of X-rays they showed him the operations of the Martian digestive system: it revealed that they suffered from malnutrition, pulmonary, gastric, and intestinal disorders (all of which could be cured by Dr. Hustler’s medicine). Looking at how much the Martian's neck extended, the doctor was surprised that sore throat wasn't one of their ailments. Then standing before another X-ray machine revealed the Martian’s pocketbook, jewelry, and spare change – revealing his financial ability to pay for the Liquid Peptonoids cure.

Dr. Hustler was reassuring:

Many years ago, before Liquid Peptonoids were discovered, my people, too, were dyspeptic and ill-nourished, for they were too busy to masticate their food, and lunched on rubber-soled sandwiches and railroad pie. Then the pains of hell got hold of them. All the prescriptions of the doctors were of no avail, and though eating much, they wasted away from lack of nutrition [then Liquid Peptonoids fixed all of that.]

Earth had been cured – now it was Mars’ turn.

The Martians brought their sickest to the doctor from Earth, “those whom rigor mortis had well nigh laid hold upon,” but even they recovered and were able to whirl back to their homes. King Flammarion celebrated with another feast of Martian delicacies, but this time, Liquid Peptonoids was the dessert and antidote; Dr. Hustler, the new planetary hero, was appointed physician to the king and given carte blanche to draw upon the royal treasury at will. Sweeeeet.

The back two pages of the curious publication were covered in classified advertisements like those found in Earth’s newspapers, but obviously with a Martian flavor, like the business notice of Doctor Likonsiko who promised to “administer powdered electricity and the pickled-ozone cure in his glass vaults each day at sunrise during sewer week.” Sorta made Liquid Peptonoids sound better and better.

Thank goodness Dr. Hustler made it back to earth with the charred remains of this incredible, once-in-a-lifetime Mars Gazette.

Back on Earth, Peptonoids were manufactured and sold by several companies at the dawn of the 20th century. Pretty much gone were the backwoods medicines with names like Swamp-Root and Indian Panacea. Proprietary medicines like Liquid Peptonoids tried to blend in with scientific advances rather than the old days of folk medicine mysticism. The promises of predigested proteins still grabbed as many curative promises as the patent medicines of the past, though; in this case including diabetes, cholera infantum, vomiting in pregnancy, all types of digestive and intestinal disorders, and tuberculosis. The Arlington Chemical Company also made their product available to suit all tastes: Liquid Peptonoids was available in powder and liquid forms and with creosote for sore throats, or with cocaine for that wallop of instant energy.

... Maybe you should keep a bottle nearby after eating your Thanksgiving meal this year? (Courtesy of VintageMaineia)

They also had a penchant for wrapping Peptonoid advertising in the style or actual words of popular authors like Charles Dickens and Miguel de Cervantes, and in this case, they were clearly mimicking the science fiction creativity of Jules Verne, H. G. Wells, and without question, the French astronomer and author … wait for it … Camille Flammarion.

Peptonoids in your Potato Chips?

And, boys and girls, lest we feel too modern and superior to be suckered in by late-Victorian concepts of predigested food, we eat them all the time. Today, predigested foods are called “ultra-processed food” (UPF). Just like predigested food, UPFs are those that have been processed to make them easier to digest; everything from noodles, pizza crust, and breakfast cereals, to potato chips, ice cream, and processed meats have had starch, protein and fiber extracted, then replaced with sugar, salt, fat, artificial coloring and flavor to make the final product. They are designed to be convenient and have a long shelf life, but steady consumption of such foods (and almost everybody’s guilty of this) can cause spikes in blood sugar and insulin levels, causing diabetes, obesity, and other health problems.

If the Martians have figured out that Dr. Hustler left them not a cure but a time bomb, I hope they aren’t going to take it out on Earth. ...

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

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

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.

Close-up of the oil scene on a box of Carboline.

 

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.

Bottle of Carboline with contents and packaging, ca.1877.

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.

Carboline Trade Card. Courtesy of Done Fadely's hairraisingstories.com, a great website focusing on hair care products from the 19th and early 20th centuries.

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.

Medicine Revenue stamp featuring the image of R. M. (Robert Monroe) Kennedy. His advertising never claimed he personally needed to use Carboline, so the hair shown was probably all his, right down to the handlebar moustache and Van Dyke-styled soul patch. Courtesy of Randall Chett; see his excellent website, Match and Medicine.com

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.

------------------------------------

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.

Notice the proliferation of oil wells in the image, compared to the early image on the box; this suggests a later design, possibly 1878; it may have been a visual metaphor for the fact that Carboline sales were booming, just like the petroleum industry. Courtesy of the Warshaw Collection of Business Americana, Archives Center, National Museum of American History, Smithsonian Institution.

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

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

Part 1 of 3: THE BEAR

I shave in the dark.

I don’t need to turn the light on because I know where everything is on my face. My nose and lips and ears haven’t changed position since a razor blade first touched the peach fuzz between them almost a lifetime ago.

Besides, I don’t like turning on the lights because there’s always an old man staring back at me in the mirror and, each time I look at him, he has less and less hair on the top of his head. It’s really scary.

Even when I’m not looking, I know he’s still there. After I got home from the Houston24 bottle show, I suddenly realized that the three promising cures I had purchased there shared one thing in common – they had all promised to grow hair on bald heads. The old man mocked me with a wry grin as I uncomfortably realized my Freudian slip.

I turned off the lights but it didn’t help. The face in the mirror had already cursed me with the legacy of my ancestors: male pattern baldness.

A shiver came over me as a flock of goosebumps landed where hair once grew.

But I understand now it was all meant to be. These three baldness cures I had purchased are ancient artifacts that prove many hair-challenged people just like me have fought the good fight to get their hair back. Though none of them will bring back my hair, their stories will help us feel the hope and hear the moans of balding souls from long ago.

1600s – All Creatures of our God and King

In 1653 the renowned British botanist Nicholas Culpeper thought he had it all figured out. He combined his study of plants with the movements of constellations – botany and astrology – and wrote books on medicine in English instead of Latin so that they could be read by commoners rather than just the elite. His medicines also made sense to them: using parts of plants and animals they could get themselves, they could make their own cures – Nature was their pharmacy.

Among these natural wonders were ingredients that seemed to make up for the patient’s pain or illness; for example, ear pain could be cured using grease rendered from a fox, the elusive woodlands creature recognized for its keen hearing. Similarly, Culpeper attributed the power to grow hair to the hairy bear, “Bear’s Grease staies [stops] the falling off of the hair.”

In 1674 John Josselyn explored the colonies in New England and came to the same conclusion that the fat of some wild animals had curative properties: raccoon and wildcat grease were both excellent for bruises and aches, he wrote, and “Bear’s Grease is very good for aches and cold swellings, the Indians anoint themselves therewith from top to toe, which hardens them against the cold weather.”

Bears were covered with fur (not hair, technically) but they were also big and brutishly strong and therefore became the prime target for their fat to be exploited for gaining strength and growing hair. Fur or hair, you’ve never seen a timid or bald bear.

"Dancing Bear" (about 1820-1827). Thomas Rowlandson, CC0, via Wikimedia Commons

1700s – Hair Makes the Man

        The 18th century was not a good time to be a bear. It was the age of powdered wigs, those expensive status symbols of the elite who could afford them, but the periwigs, or wigs for short, also hid the bald patches that were frequently showing up because their wearers had contracted syphilis. Other toiletries, like perfumery and tooth care products, got attention too, but shopkeepers focused on selling what was in greatest demand – hair products. In 1793, William Caton of Annapolis, Maryland, modestly listed his tooth supplies: “Tooth Brushes, Tooth Powder, of all sorts, and Tooth Picks,” but the rest of his advertisement exploded with items for pampering wigs and real hair:

Hair-Pins, Rollers, Pinching, Craping, Curling and Cold Irons; Powder Knives, Hair Scissors, Hair Ribbon, Powder Baggs, Swandown and Silk Puffs, of all kinds; Powder Boxes, Tortoise Shell, Horn and Ivory Combs; and infallible Pomatum, that will nourish the hair, make it grow thick and long, and preserve it to extreme old age [and] a large quantity of BEAR’s GREASE, that will thicken the hair, and hasten the growth thereby, nourish it at the roots, and prevent it from turning gray.

        The best bear’s grease was said to come from brown bears and especially those from Russia (wild and free-range promised stronger, healthier bears, apparently, and therefore more potent, hair-growing, strengthening, beautifying grease). Bear’s grease was also heavily perfumed because a bear’s potent smell (and the stink of its fat that would quickly become rancid) has never been confused with daffodils in the springtime.

        “Genuine” was the key promise in its advertising because the availability of bears was quickly outstripped by the surging purchases of their grease; consequently, pig fat was often sold as bear’s grease, even under the promise of “Genuine.” In 1760 James Cox of London promised that the bear’s grease he sold was “the real Thing” (predating the Coca Cola slogan by a few hundred years). In fairness, it was no less real than the horsehair and yak hair wigs adorning the heads of the wealthy – it was all one great big coverup.

        The sale of bear’s grease increased even more when an expensive tax on hair powder was imposed in 1795, forcing many to abandon their wigs and work on improving their own hair. As they entered the next century, wigs were slowly abandoned (except in British courtrooms), leaving bear’s grease to become the big hope for a good-looking head of dark, thick, strong hair.

 

1800s – Barely Bear

        In the first quarter of the new century, competition for the sale of bear’s grease became thicker than bear’s hair; proprietors frequently made extravagant promises for their brand of bear’s grease and shopkeepers sometimes fought tooth and claw for balding customers to buy at their establishments. The saga of Mr. Macalpine and Mr. Money (yes, their real names) dramatically illustrated the competition as well as the importance of bear’s grease sales. Both hairdressers had shops on London’s Threadneedle Street; its name made it sound like some narrow, forgotten alley, but it was in the heart of London and one of their neighbors was no less than the Bank of England. In 1824, The Morning Chronicle reported that the “rival friseurs” were summoned to appear in court, each for keeping a live bear at their shop, “which were not sufficiently secured to prevent danger of annoyance to the public.”

        Each did so, the article stated, to prove to their customers that their bear’s grease products were “genuine … not scented suet or hog’s lard” or any other adulteration. But the rival hairdressers were not harmless advertisements – they both had real, live, snarling, wild bears in their shops, just a paw swipe away from the gawking public:

Numerous complaints were made to the Lord Mayor of the conduct of these animals, and of their masters, in disturbing the whole street by their noise and contest. The bears attracted multitudes round the doors [of the two hairdresser’s shops], which blocked up the thoroughfare. One of [the bears] could put his leg or arm out to its full extent and seize any [passer-by] with its claws.” One of the bears also filled the area with its “hideous howls … at midnight particularly.”

Author's collection (reproduction).

        The wild beasts of the woods had become dangerous attention-getters in a major London thoroughfare, all to promote their allegedly curative body fat for bald heads and thinning hair.

        Around 1830, bear’s grease began to be uniformly packaged in the same type of shallow, glazed earthenware pots that were being used for other thick, cream-style toiletries and medicines, like toothpaste, cold cream, shaving cream, and eye ointment. The bear’s grease pot lids were illustrated with a wide assortment of ursine quadrupeds, ranging from cartoonish, almost cuddly versions muzzled and chained into submission (although notably the chain’s end was seldom secured) to fierce beasts being

Wellcome M0018240.jpg via CC0 Wikimedia Commons

shot by hunters or attacked by packs of dogs. Some illustrations made it doubtful the artist had ever seen a real bear, but bear’s grease sold very well despite the occasional physiological guesswork.

        Reserves of bear’s grease continued to grow thinner than the balding heads that wanted it, so suspicions and accusations of adulteration became rampant. By 1855 it was being claimed that virtually no real bear’s grease was any longer to be found in those promisingly decorated pots, and that some shopkeepers were going through extraordinary lengths to cover up the big lie about their “bear’s grease”:

        … ninety-nine of every hundred pots of bear’s grease are obtained exclusively from the pig, and have no connection whatever with the bear. … The fact is, that bear’s grease may be described as lard, plus perfume; that is all. … Every now and then, the carcass of a bear was seen hung up at their shop-doors, and the attention of the spectators drawn to it by enormous placards, gorgeous in all the colours of the rainbow.

        But the reader must not be deceived, as were the passers-by, and imagine that the suspended animal was really a bear. No; the hairdresser knows the value of bears too well for that. He therefore keeps a bear-skin on the premises, buys a nice large fat hog, puts it into the bear-skin, advertises – “Another fine bear to be slaughtered at Jones’s tomorrow,” and next day hangs up the pig by his hind legs.

        Bear’s grease fell out of popularity in the last quarter of the century as the competition for consumer dollars continued to grow and new types of hair products were presented as improvements on the old-fashioned notion of bear’s grease, which had become widely suspected of being anything but “the real thing.”  

 

Postscript

          I came home from the show with my prized bear’s grease pot lid (pictured above) – something I had always wanted to add to my collection of health history antiques – but I have since learned that it is a reproduction – like the grease it promised to contain, even my container is not the real thing. That’s okay though – it’s symbolic of a fascinating, promising cure … and I’m glad it doesn’t have any bear’s grease inside – that’s something I definitely would not want to smell after two hundred years.

For more on bear’s grease, see:

        PROMISING CURES,

        Vol.1, Prologue: Poking and Prodding

 

Next week: Part 2 of 3: THE COCONUT

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