Updated: Jan 15
Long, long before Iron Man's Arc Reactor, R. P. Hall's Galvano-Electric Plaster was made to recharge worn-out bodies
It doesn’t happen often.
After 40 years of collecting Victorian advertising, it has to be something really special to catch my eye; something so different that it makes me do a double-take, causes my finger to slip off the mouse button, my head to lean forward so my face gets really close to the screen, and my eyes to go into microscopic-focus mode to make sure I’m not seeing things. My brain goes into overdrive, checking the virtual collection in my mind to make sure I don’t already have one; it studies the subject for possible subliminal messages, cultural vividness, and historical significance; it soaks in the richness of the colors, the allure of the graphics, the brilliance of the design. On those rare occasions that the image before me exceeds my wildest expectations, the little boy in me pronounces the official response of my experienced, high-level analysis:
“Cooooool!”
Click. Somewhere out there, I’ve made a seller happy. Okay, calm down, adrenaline, it’s mine.
I recently had such an experience and I’d like to share it with you. It actually happened about a month ago, when I saw the Hall’s Galvano-Electric Plaster trade card for the first time ever. I’ve spent so much time examining this card and researching the backstory of the product and its advertising, it has taken me until now to be ready to report my findings. In fact, I found out far more about the product and the man behind it than I had expected to learn, so I’ve been in a quandary about how to present it in a blog post. I’ve decided to do it a different way: this post will be exclusively about this one advertising trade card, but the next post will be the whole story – the inventor of this product, his life story, how he came to make this particular medical item, and what happened to both of them – the man and his invention.

So for today, let’s focus on the curious medical device that bamboozled the patient and the inventor alike: Hall’s Galvano-Electric Plaster.
Mustard and Frogs’ Legs
The inventor of this device was Reuben P. Hall, a former peddler with no formal medical education, but what he lacked in knowledge he made up for with a vivid imagination, meticulous ingenuity, and keen perception. He saw two medical treatments – ancient plasters and modern electricity – being used for the same aches, pains, and diseases, and in 1874 he figured out a way for the two methods to be brought together into one new and improved solution.
For centuries, wives and mothers were making a home remedy called plasters from ingredients they had in the house. Mustard plasters were the most common form, made by mixing mustard powder, flour, and water into a paste, then spreading the gloopy mess on one side of a piece of fabric and applying it wherever on the body it was needed, such as on the chest for colds and congestion or on the back for arthritis, muscle pain, and backache. The mixture gave a penetrating warmth to the area beneath. Today’s more modern-sounding and medicinally improved “pain relief patches” are the evolved descendants of this time-honored practice.
In 1874 electricity was still more mystery than science when Reuben claimed he had harnessed the stuff in his plaster. Almost a century earlier, the Italian physician Luigi Galvani applied an electrical spark to a dead frog causing its legs to twitch with animation. That result was widely interpreted by lay people to mean that if electricity could bring life to part of a dead frog, then it could help revive and restore humans’ pained and diseased bodies. Hence, all sorts of medical devices promising to rejuvenate an anxious public were created on the basis of shock-producing electricity; it was usually referred to as magnetic or galvanic electricity. People bought hand-cranked magneto-electric units to cure ailing family members at home, sometimes combining low-voltage shocks with steam cabinets and baths; others bought belts lined with various configurations of metal discs or cylinders to be worn under their clothing, next to the skin, to generate an electric current through the body; often men’s belts included a scrotal sack feature hanging below to bring some zip-a-dee back to the doo-dah.
Patented Magic
In his patent application, Reuben Hall provided a detailed review of the ever-expanding array of electrical appliances being foisted on the public and also pointed out their shortcomings, the worst of which was the lack of traditional medicine being passed into the body; unlike the age-old mustard plasters, electricity was the only medicine being served up by the new medical shock equipment:
Electric currents have long been used by the medical profession in the treatment of many diseases. They have been applied in many ways. Currents from batteries, induction apparatus, or frictional apparatus have been used, by means of wires and electrodes placed on designated parts of the body. In other cases, they have been applied through the medium of baths, and in still other[s], by Voltaic belts, to be worn upon the body, the current being there both generated and applied. Their use has not been as extensive as it might have been, for the reason that while they were used the ordinary exterior local applications of medicine could not be used, as was often desirable.
In electric baths, this has been remedied to some extent by inclosing the bath, and supplying medicated air or vapor to the patient while under treatment. This involves a cumbersome and expensive apparatus, and can be used only for limited periods, and at intervals. [emphases added]
Reuben then presented the patent examiners with his alternative – a unique invention in the medical electricity marketplace: a medicinal plaster with electrical components embedded in the fabric. On his detailed illustration below, two “electrically-dissimilar galvanic elements” (like copper and zinc), labeled “P” and “N,” were heart-shaped metal plates, connected to each other by a wire underneath. Human perspiration then completed the electrical circuit started by the two hearts and wire, producing a current. The latent electrical energy in the human body was thus triggered into action much like the frog legs.

Figures 1 and 2 were the standard plaster; Figures 3 and 4 were alternative forms that inventor Hall proposed, with two three multiples metallic disks. Figure 5 was another variation that allowed for charges to be set on opposite sides of the body, like wrapping over the shoulder.
The key difference between Reuben’s invention and all the other electrical devices then in existence was the combination of electricity generation and simultaneous medicinal application; yet ironically, his patent drawing downplayed what medicine should be used:
E is any suitable base or fabric, upon which is spread any suitable medical compound, A. To the composition of this compound I make no claim as it may be varied to suit various conditions or diagnoses. [emphasis added]
Customers or their pharmacists could apply whatever medication to the plaster they chose. It wasn’t so much that Reuben was ambivalent about the medicine, but he wasn’t trying to create a new old-fashioned plaster – he was focused on developing the next generation of electrical medicine. That, apparently, was where the real money was.

Miracle Born in the Storm Clouds
I’ve only seen this one advertising trade card for his product – I doubt there were any more. This trade card design captured the curative magic of Hall’s Galvano-Electric Plasters, showing the dramatic transformation from sickness to health. Under decorative arches, the archetypal before-and-after combination of a sick man and his healthy counterpart clearly displayed the benefit of the plasters. There could be nothing better than the visual of a man tossing his crutches and doing a jig to demonstrate the miracle of Hall’s plaster. Before-and-after visuals were a popular and often-used convention for medical advertising; Parker’s Ginger Tonic and Buckingham’s Dye for Whiskers were two such products with several equally effective variations on the theme. Tossing one’s crutches and doing a silly dance was a powerful way of showing off the cure’s effectiveness and the joy it brought.
To keep the customer focused on the product even longer, a poem followed the illustration. Written in contrived quatrains of butchered iambic pentameter, the point was not to present a timeless sonnet but to amuse and vividly praise Hall’s plaster for capturing the power of the gods: lightning –
Deep in the storm cloud’s womb I have my birth,
Thence flashed by Angel’s wings from Heaven to Earth,
Under the magic of my touch, old Pain
Wages his fiercest warfare all in vain
What Heaven-borne power slays disease’s demons in an hour?
… the mighty master –
… Hall’s Galvano-electric plaster!
The card displayed first-rate creativity but second-rate execution. The artwork was nice but not refined, the color palette was minimal, and the poetry was hackneyed, but the message was crystal clear: Hall’s Galvano-Electric Plaster cured the hopeless and miserable. An 1878 advertisement in the Boston Globe said in words what the trade card said in pictures: “STOP PAIN AS IF BY MAGIC. THEY REALLY PERFORM MIRACLES.”
The trade card’s reverse side has a few variants. The version shown here is the trademark registered in January 1877 (see evolution of the trademark design further below). The advertisement describes the “Galvanic Battery” embedded in the plaster that produces “a constant but mild current of Electricity, which is most exhilarating” when the electrical circuit is completed by being put in contact with the body. Twenty-five medical miseries, ranging from weak eyes and constipation to lung and heart disease would be speedily cured by the electricity, “those subtle and mysterious elements of nature,” produced by Hall’s plaster. The last promotional line summarizes the benefits illustrated on the card front, once again promising nothing short of miracles: “They cause the Lame to leap with joy and the Halt to take up their beds and walk,” subliminally reminding the reader of the same miracle performed by none other than Jesus himself. (John 5:8-9; also see Isaiah 35:6)


Professor of Nothing
It wasn’t just lightning that was in the clouds; doom was in the air as well.
Hall’s plaster advertising ran across nine states in 1874, but the number of states kept diminishing each year thereafter. Just a few short years into the sales of Hall’s Galvano Electric Plaster, a lightning storm of new-fangled electrical medical devices made their appearance across the land – and on people’s upper chests.
They were also described as galvano-electrical batteries but without any medicinal plaster component. These were distinctly designed to be stylish, even fashionable jewelry-like medical devices: small and shiny, suspended most often by a silk band, worn at the top of the cleavage, even though the instructions generally recommended they be worn “as close to the heart as possible.” They were pretty items, with a pleasing arrangement of disks of different metals, like bronze, copper, nickel, and zinc, arranged in a circular pattern around a central object, which could be a flower, hexagon, cross, heart, or other design, each the creation of a different manufacturer. Most were enclosed in a circular band of bronze or white metal; one was edged in a horseshoe pattern, and the Scott’s Galvanic Generator was extra-fancy, with a sculpted winged cherub holding bundles of lightning bolts on one side while the reverse side had a zinc fist similarly clutching lightning bolts all embedded in a copper shield. Hall’s Galvanic-Electric Plaster was expected to be hidden under the clothing; Boyd’s Battery, Scott's Galvanic Generator, and the rest of the batteries put out from 1878-1886 were designed to be the center of attention and in the public eye.

London Galvanic Generator, Pall Mall Electric Association, ca. 1881. (left) front side - winged cherub sculpted in Lionite, holding bunches of lightning bolts; (right) reverse side - copper plate with embedded zinc in the shape of a fist holding lightning bolts. (collection of author.)
While their public exposure surely increased their popularity, it also brought them into condemnation by critics who insisted they weren’t giving any medical benefit at all. Calling electric batteries “toys”, the faultfinders guffawed that “a wooden button worn upon the breast would be quite as effective as the so-called ‘batteries’ which have hitherto been sold as curative to an over credulous public”; wearing a slice from an ear of corn would do as much good (and look pretty much like) as one of the batteries. To the critics, the popular belief in the curative power of electric batteries fell into the same realm of superstition as those “otherwise intelligent persons [who] believe that carrying a Horse Chestnut in the pocket will keep off rheumatism.”
The detractors also came after the “before-and-after” illustrations that Hall’s plaster and other electric battery companies used to promise amazing results. The critic’s sarcasm was as vicious as it was humorous:
There is a picture of a man without any battery, labelled “Before Using,” and another picture of a man with a battery, and this is labelled “After Using.” Now if these pictures are accurate representations of the man before and after, we protest against its use. One has only to wear one of these things, and his own mother would not know him. A rogue has hereafter no need to go to Canada to escape justice. All he has to do is to wear one of these batteries, and if these pictures are true, he becomes another man altogether. [emphases added]
Electrical batteries like Hall’s and all the rest were facing stiff headwinds at the same time as they were being warmly received by the public. They didn’t last long, probably from a combination of significant critical opinion as well as the fact that they just didn’t work.
There is no more development of electrical action between these bits of metal than there is between the coins in one’s pocket – and we pronounce the thing to be an UTTER BARE-FACED FRAUD.
People still suffered from weak eyes, constipation, and heart disease even though electrical batteries dangled from their neck or Hall’s Galvano-Electric Plaster stuck to their backs. If there was any improvement, it was more likely the result of time and nature providing their own remedy or, in the case of constipation, time and nature might be aided by a heaping plate of beans.
During an intense courtroom cross-examination in 1882, one of the leading electric battery manufacturers, Professor John C. Boyd, was asked, “Professor of what? Responding under oath, his telling reply was, “Professor of nothing.” His credential, like his product, was a ruse, good for nothing. The only thing shocking about Hall’s plaster and the subsequent wearable electrical batteries was that they didn’t work; they didn’t generate electricity and they didn’t cure or remedy disease. They do make great patent medicine antiques though!
Just like Iron Man's Arc Reactor, Hall's Galvano-Electric Plaster and all the small body batteries that followed should have stayed in the world of fiction; maybe they can be included in the next Iron Man movie!

(left) Lowder's Magneto-Electric Battery (center design: two circles within a hexagon), ~1886 (courtesy of the Wellcome Collection; public domain); (right) Richardson's Magneto-Galvanic Battery (center design: heart), Journal and Courier (Lafayette, IN, 25 MAR 1881).


(left) J. R. Flanigan Medal Battery, 1880; (center) John M. Lewis, 1880; (right) Boyd's Battery, 1878. (from patent drawings and other public domain files)
Lynn Massachusetts history - History of medicine - 19th-Century Health Remedies - Vintage Medical Ephemera - 19th-century medicine
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
Updated: Jan 15
Fighting Witches & Demons with bottles and other things ever since the 1600s
The year is 1644. You left your home in a bustling town in England and now find yourself living in a small house – not much more than a cabin – in the woods of the Massachusetts Bay Colony not far from Salem. All you can see beyond the land you’ve cleared is woods – on all sides. Your nearest European neighbor is a quarter mile away, but you and your family catch glimpses of the people you call Indians in the shadows of the trees, or even brazenly coming out in the open, walking up to one of your farm animals, or looking in a window, or even an open door. You sometimes refer to them as “savages” because their clothes, language, homes, and lifestyles are so different from yours; your minister has preached that they are servants of the Devil.
There’s much more to fear in the wilds of original Lynn, like bears, cougars, bobcats, moose, rattlesnakes, and wolves. Any day can become a nightmare. But nighttime makes it still worse.
Your house provides some safety from the wild animals and Indians at night, but evil can still find its way inside. In spirit form, witches and their familiars (animals like cats, rats, squirrels, and mice) can get into the house through the smallest openings: under the door, a hole in the wall, or even the keyhole, and most easily, down the chimney (Figure 1). Then nothing can stop them from cursing your child or spouse with sickness, pain, and even death.
The Bible Told Me So
Colonists had no doubt that witches and the devil were real because the Bible told them so. Exodus 22:18 reads, “Thou shalt not suffer a witch to live.” It was a clear statement that witches existed. And the Bible also stated many times that the Devil was very real and dangerous: “Be sober; be vigilant, because your adversary the devil walketh about like a roaring lion, seeking whom he may devour.” 1 Peter 5:8
When a sickness seemed unusual or didn’t yield to available medicines, it was called “unnatural” and suspected to have been caused by a witch’s curse. The doctor who authored this book (Figure 2) had no doubt about the source of several unusual and uncommon sicknesses and diseases; they couldn’t be explained or cured and thus, he stated without any doubt, they were the work of witchcraft.

The fear of witchcraft was not simply a phenomenon of 1692 – it was widespread throughout New England and the limited existing records document over 200 cases starting as early as 1647 and there are 33 known executions (of which Salem accounts for only 19). The records for the fate of 69 others have not yet been found, so those put to death could be a higher number. 59 confessed to being witches, largely the result of fear, interrogation techniques, and the miseries of incarceration.
Their ministers preached that faith, obedience, and prayer were the proper defense against witchcraft, but terrible, unexplainable things were still happening to the faithful and some felt the need to do more than just pray. You might pray that a fox wouldn’t attack your chickens, but you were still going to get your gun and shoot, if it tried. So how could they better defend their loved ones? And how could they protect their families at bedtime, When the candles were all blown out?
One option was turn to the Bible for God’s clues for protection. The Bible was considered to be full of symbolic messages like the power of certain numbers:
For example: 3 for the Holy Trinity (the Father, Son, and Holy Ghost), 5 for the wounds of Christ, 12 for the apostles, and more.
Bushes of mountain ash were often planted around the outside of the house because the 5-pointed pentagram pattern on each berry was believed to be a sign that God would protect the house against evil.
A braid of 12 garlic bulbs hung behind an outside door was hoped to ward off witches and thieves.
Colonists also turned to the secret practices of family and friends. Some used methods of ritualized protection to keep their family and farm animals safe. When they had lived in Great Britain, they and their relatives and friends had folklore traditions for generations – of carving or drawing special protection symbols and hiding ritual objects in their homes and barns – all to keep their families and animals safe from witches. The protective marks and objects were designed to either trap or repel evil spirits.
But ministers like Increase and Cotton Mather called it counter-magic and white magic. They warned that using white magic to fight a witch’s black magic was playing into the Devil’s hands because ALL magic was of the Devil … but the fearful were desperate.

Ritual Protection Marks
The hexafoil is just one example of protective marks that have been found in homes still standing in what was Massachusetts Bay Colony (Figure 3). Also known as the “daisy wheel,” it is a solar symbol that has been traced back to Roman antiquity (the petals representing the sun's rays) [Hexafoil stems from the German word hexen, which means witches.]
Protective marks like the hexafoil were placed near doors, windows, and around fireplaces, the openings where evil could easily enter the home. Protective objects were hidden behind walls and under floors, the fireplace hearth, or the threshold of doors.
Protecting one’s home or barn from witches required no expense or special skills. The marks were easily made with the sharp point of a knife, scissors, compass, or nail, and ritual objects were items around the house and barn that were being repurposed instead of discarded. It was believed that these simple marks and ordinary objects magically transformed in the spirit world into weapons and traps to catch, repel, and even kill witches.
The early colonists believed broken items in this world were whole in the spirit world; weak things became strong; what was dark here was light there; “dead” (or nonfunctioning) here became “alive” in the world of spirits, just like the crucified Jesus Christ was resurrected from death and became alive again. Thus, a hexafoil solar symbol carved into the wall around your fireplace was glowing like the sun in the spirit world, keeping witches and other demons (Satan’s minions loved darkness but hated light) away from the house and your family.
The protective marks are rarely dated but the protective objects often can be. Many ritual protection marks been found in the few 17th century New England homes still standing, but objects have been found in them that date as late as the 1890s. Other New England homes built after the 1720s have also been found to have ritual protection marks and objects. After 1692, the church and the law backed away from accusing and convicting suspected witches. Without the church and the courts protecting them, some people continued to protect themselves from evil and “bad luck” throughout the 1700s and 1800s, and even into the early 20th century. Here are a few examples.
In 1846 the Salem Register described supernatural events occurring in the 1600s very near the Corning family’s home in Beverly.
One story was of a large number of black cats that tormented a man with their caterwauling “for some deed of darkness he had done”; he was only able to pacify them by psalm singing. When the man died, “these supposed agents of the other world … completely covered his coffin; and upon being disturbed, all made their exit up the chimney, bearing, as was supposed, the spirit of their victim with them” [an example of evil using the chimney as an entrance and exit from the house].
Another “eccentric” individual on the same street was also described; he practiced “witchcraft and superstition .… Among other things, he kept by him the hand taken from the corpse of a first-born male child, in which he contended he could place a light of the most brilliant character and carry it anywhere, unperceived by anyone except himself” [another example of light in the dark spirit world.]
Ritual Protection Objects: Weaponized Bottles
Bottles had a key role in ritual protection from witches and evil. The first bottles the colonists used were the ones they carried with them from Europe – sturdy salt-glazed stoneware that contained beer or wine, or sometimes mercury. Once empty, the bottles were repurposed, just like the colonist's other few possessions in this new world.


These old bottles were called Bartmann (meaning “bearded man”) in the area of Cologne, Germany, where they were made, and Bellarmine in Great Britain and the colonies, where over 100,000 were used. Bartmann’s were anthropomorphic, with its face on the neck and bulbous belly, and there was something else that made them perfect for the task: those produced in the mid-17th century most often had either an angry or fearful expression. I believe the sinister facial expressions were a graphic reflection of the public’s terror during the intensive persecution and eradication of suspected witches from among family members and friends during those decades (over 2,000 were burned at the stake as witches in the area of Cologne, which had a population of just 40,000; so about 5 of every 100 people were executed for witchcraft), as well as showing anger towards their enemies whom they suspected were witches. The early Bartmanns (made in the 1500s) were crafted with faces that were jolly and smiling or no expression at all; but by the mid-1600s, during the witchcraft persecutions, the expression had changed to angry (Figure 4) or fearful (Figure 5).
A household in the American colonies that was troubled by witchcraft would repurpose the bottle by adding the urine of the sick person and sometimes their hair, nail clippings, and a piece of fabric cut into the shape of a heart. The bottle thus filled with body parts and fluids of the family member who was believed to be bewitched with some unnatural illness was designed to trick the spirit of the witch into attacking the decoy bottle instead of the actual person. The iron nails and pins (usually in multiples of three) it contained would then impale the witch’s spirit that had dove into the bottle, causing the actual witch pain, either killing her or getting her to stop her bewitchment of the sick family member. X-rays have shown such bottles found that have been with contents that included nails, hair, and pins floating in liquid that was subsequently analyzed to be urine (Figures 6 & 7).

Continued Use of Witch Bottles: 19th-21st Centuries
The idea of putting counter-curses or charms in bottles has continued ever since the days when people had intense fear of witches and their demons. They’re still being found buried and hidden in old buildings and washing up on beaches. Just a few examples are included here from Virginia, Louisiana, and Texas.
Figure 8 shows an aqua squat soda embossed CHAS GROVE / COLA PA that was found near an old brick hearth at the site of an old fort ("Redoubt 9") in York County, Virginia. Archeologists have dated the find to 1862-1863 and the bottle was "full of broken nails"; its contents and location near the old hearth made them speculate that it was used to repel evil - a possible Civil War era witch bottle.
Suspected of being an instrument of voodoo, the bottle in Figure 9 may have been constructed to fight evil or to cast a spell. It was found in a house site dated to the mid-1800s at Algiers Point in New Orleans, Louisiana. A news report explained, "[It] may have beenused as a protection spell for the property. It also may have been used in voodoo to cast a different spell. ... [It was] said to have been found in an area formerly populated by a Catholic church, Afro-caribbean voodoo practies, and 'witchy-type fortune teller people.' " Its contents included an unknown (and not yet analyzed) liquid, hair, a tooth, and an earwig. Public reaction to the possible voodoo find has been to put the unsettling bottle back where it was found, apparently to avoid the possibility of bad mojo. (Are we really so different from our superstitious colonial ancestors?)
The final witch bottle shown in this article was found rolling in with the waves onto a Texas beach (Figure 10). It is a mid- to late 20th century light aqua whiskey bottle covered in barnacles and mollusks that have attached to the surface, but inside is a lot of unidentified plant matter and liquid, deliberately placed and sealed. Multiple bottles have been found on beaches from North Padre Island to Matagorda Island. The Harte Research Institute for Gulf of Mexico Studies at Texas A&M University at Corpus Christi believe these bottles that have been washing ashore likely originated in the Caribbean or South America. The plant matter and liquids have not yet been analyzed by the university. A mysterious message from another place.
WHAT DID YOU FIND??
I would like to document all possible finds of witch bottles in the United States and my bottle hunting friends are in the best position to find such bottles. If you find a bottle with any combination of liquid, nails, pins, hair, teeth, bones, thorns, hear shapes, and finger or toenail clippings inside, please let me know about your find! What was found, where, by whom, and when. Was it found behind a wall or under where a fireplace, door, or window was located? Maybe YOU have found America’s next “witch bottle”!! I will post all finds here on promisingcures.com!
Write to me at promising.cures@gmail.com and send me pictures of your possible witch bottle find!
One final point of interest: the first U.S. souvenir spoon ever made was the Salem spoon in 1891. It features a witch with just her broom – no cat, crescent moon, or bats – She seems agitated, aggressively pointing either to the name Salem or further down the stem to three round-headed pins. 2 centuries had passed since the Salem Witch Trials, but those who designed the spoon still remembered that the pins were put in bottles to fight witches – perhaps it was a little reminder, just in case Salem had another witch scare!

