Updated: 5 hours ago
From the Civil War until the end of the 19th century, he was a mystical clairvoyant healer, performing surgery in the dark or with his eyes closed. Many sought him out to remove cancers and other things that regular doctors couldn’t fix – and it made him lots of money. Looking down our 21st century noses it would be easy to just dismiss him as a scheming fraud and laugh at his patients as ignorant fools. But that’s not history. Come walk in his world and find out what really happened.
This is the story of Orrin Fitzgerald, born in March 1842. His father was a carpenter of modest means and the family lived in the quiet town of Dexter, deep in the woodland interior of central Maine, along the banks of Lake Wassookeag and far from any major town or city – hardly the classic setting for fame and fortune.
News and entertainment took time to reach Dexter in the 1840s and 50s. A slow stream of itinerant preachers, professors, and healers trickled through Maine’s tiny towns and villages like Dexter with their sermons, lectures, and cures, and catch-penny menageries and magicians occasionally stopped by to entertain with their oddities and tricks. Newspapers from Maine’s distant cities revealed the lives and doings of people all over the country and the world whom they had never seen but who were out there, nonetheless. Articles also shared that some scientists claimed their telescopes had found life on the moon and Mars and their microscopes had discovered another whole universe of creatures living in their water, food and bodies.
The newspapers also reported the rising tensions before the war and displayed advertisements of messengers from calmer realms – spiritualists and clairvoyants. The Fox Sisters of Rochester, New York, had begun the modern era of spiritualism in the late 1840s, allegedly communicating with the spirits of the dead, yet another level of life invisible to the naked eye. Fascination with the invisibles had even entered the White House, with the First Lady, Mary Todd Lincoln, conducting seances. Life was so much bigger than the small world of Dexter; so much more complex, exciting, and mystifying. Knowledge was being tested and remeasured every day.
Maine newspapers in the 1850s included ads for a clairvoyant Indian doctress, a husband-and-wife team of clairvoyant healers, one that combined their mystical skill with electricity, and others offering a host of clairvoyant medicines that “produce the most wonderful and cheering effects.” When you’re sick, fevered, and in awful pain, it’s hard to resist the promise of a remedy that’s “wonderful and cheering,” regardless of the science behind it.
One physician employed a clairvoyant woman for her unusual diagnostic ability: she had the power to mentally “enter the interior part of the body, tell the most minute disorder, what and where the complaint is seated, and prescribe a remedy, and where the medicine can be found.” In a similar case, a woman in Falmouth, Maine, gratefully gave her testimonial for a clairvoyant physician who cured her. The sick woman had told disbelieving physicians for years that she felt “as though something was eating me up inside, but they all laughed at the idea of anything of the kind, and said I was nervous.” The clairvoyant, however, confirmed her suspicion; with her sixth sense she could see something brown inside the sick lady, looking “like a caterpillar as much as anything.” The healer then warned the sickly woman that she would be very sick when she took the medicine, and her prediction was as spot-on as her diagnosis, “I vomited for three days, and the third day I threw up something that resembled a lizard, and a horrible looking thing, about three inches long, about as large [a]round as my finger, and I think I owe my life to Mrs. Manchester” [the clairvoyant physician]. One ad estimated that “more than half of the towns and villages of New England” had people who had been cured by clairvoyant healing, “monuments of its mysterious skill.”
Insanity or Clairvoyant Genius?
Like the magicians, spiritualists, and travelling patent medicine showmen, clairvoyants had three audiences: the absolute believers, the equally adamant disbelievers, and the curious – probably the largest group – who balanced their wary skepticism with hope that there might be something to it after all. The Fitzgeralds had the debate thrust into their own home: as a teenager, young Orrin showed signs of “unusual healing power.” It was unnerving for his family who were “embarrassed by him as he walked along and suddenly went into a trance.” On some of these occasions his language became a halting, garbled form of Pidgin English, mixed with Indian words. Maybe it was all just teenage dramatic hijinks or the delusions of a daydreamer, or even a condition now called Dissociative Trance Disorder (DTD). But when it was happening, 150 years ago, it was unnerving and embarrassing and his family didn’t know how to deal with their oddball son. His father, “thinking his son insane,” sent his teenage son six miles away in “the wilds of” Garland to “refine his ability” with the help of a farmer there who also had a reputation for being able to reach into the invisible world. Orrin’s first experiences of applying clairvoyance to doctoring occurred in Garland when he was 17, “and the excitement caused by his cures at that time was most intense.” It was said he felt compelled to walk long distances to visit sick people who hadn’t even sent for him.
By 1860, 18-year-old Orrin was back to living in his father’s home, picking up odd jobs as a day laborer, but things changed quickly over the next few years. Orrin channeled his clairvoyant abilities into healing and had significant success. By 1863, the 21-year-old Orrin was a prime candidate for the wartime draft, but he paid the $300 commutation fee ($7,465 in 2024 USD), buying his way out of military service. His father’s entire real and personal property had amounted to only $900, so it’s unlikely he could pay the bill. In three years, Orrin had ascended from day laborer to clairvoyant physician and avoided the risk of war. For the next three years he paid the additional wartime taxes levied upon his occupation as a physician and in the year after the war was over, his tax payment also covered the piano he had purchased.
In an 1869 newspaper ad he was promoting himself as “THE GREATEST WONDER OF THE NINETEENTH CENTURY!! Acknowledged by all to be the GREATEST LIVING CLAIRVOYANT, PHYSICIAN AND SURGEON.” It was improbable that he could establish a large enough clientele to match his ambition along the backroads of Dexter and the wilds of Garland, so he joined in the traveling life of so many other irregular healers, but his ad spun that negative into a positive: “It was with the greatest reluctance that the Dr. was induced to leave his extensive home practice and travel; knowing that a prejudice exists against traveling Physicians.” By 1870 he had accumulated an estate of $6,000 ($143,595 in 2024 USD); he was, indeed, doing very well.
Orrin’s healing methods were the quintessential repertoire of a clairvoyant physician: he kept his eyes closed when examining patients or preparing medicine and performed surgery in the dark or sometimes when blindfolded; it was even rumored that he picked his medicinal plants at night. Darkness was the clairvoyant’s friend; it was said they could see into bodies, the future, and other mysterious realms – all places where the normal-sighted were hopelessly blind.
Young Dr Fitzgerald had quickly honed his clairvoyant diagnostic skills into a dramatically simple procedure; he could learn all he needed to know with the touch of a finger and a listening ear:
Dr. Fitzgerald always touched the forehead with his finger and a report would be heard that sounded almost like a pistol. (… one touch on the forehead and you could hear the snap of an electric shock all over the room.) Then, placing his ear over the heart, he would locate the trouble in an instant. With this diagnosis he never failed, and although all sorts of traps were placed for him he was never caught.
His reputation for performing wonderful cures followed him in his travels like a king’s royal mantle elegantly shuffling behind in his wake. He had quickly mastered the clairvoyant’s craft and finessed how to convert onlookers into disciples:
… a woman in Nashua [New Hampshire]… was a severe sufferer from some internal trouble. The doctors of that city failed to discover the nature of the disease and then Fitzgerald happened along and was called into consultation. Instantly he declared that she had a hard substance in her lung. Ordering everybody from the room and darkening the windows he performed a surgical operation and drew from the woman’s lung a bone nearly four inches in length. This wonderful operation was performed in the dark and without any assistance or pain to the patient. Although with no training as a surgeon he performed many marvelous operations and always in the dark or with his eyes closed.
In the town of Canaan, Maine, a man had his toe cut off and the doctors threw it away. When it came to Dr. Fitzgerald’s attention the next day, he ordered the discarded toe to be found. He then called for a needle and thread and then instructed to have all the gas lamps extinguished. When they were lit again, “perhaps three minutes later, … the toe was discovered neatly sewed in place, and the doctor was putting on his overcoat ready to depart.”
Appointments with the clairvoyant doctor were executed in rapid-fire succession, taking only moments for him to psychically diagnose and resolve, either by surgery or some of his medicine. In June 1873 he introduced his first bottled medicine, Dr. Fitzgerald’s Life Invigorator (the name appeared on the bottle label and the subtitle, Clairvoyant Discovery was embossed on the glass, along with the doctor’s name and his residence, Dexter, Maine) and his advertisement for the stuff was as enthusiastic as his claims for the medicine itself,
“YOUNG AGAIN. The “LIFE INVIGORATOR” that is now being introduced by me … Gives Youth and Buoyancy to the Body and Mind, Restores your Memory, … Gives Elasticity to the Step, and, in fact, makes the sufferer. HAPPY! COURAGEOUS!! SOUND!!! … I do claim to have discovered the secret of Renewing Health, Cheerfulness and Strength … [emphasis added]
There were certainly those disbelievers who tried to expose him through various acts of trickery, but he could apparently detect chicanery as clearly as cancer. An observer noted that in a village hotel where he was receiving patients for the day, a man came to his office appearing very much like a hopeless cripple. His legs were bandaged and he hobbled in on crutches. “No sooner had he crossed the threshold of the room than the doctor caught him by the neck, whirled him around and kicked him clear into the street …saying, ‘There, damn you, don’t ever attempt any of your tricks on me again!’”
The very next patient who came to the room was just the opposite – the very picture of health and strength. The doctor touched his forehead with a snap of his finger, then placed his ear on the man’s breast and stated somberly: “I am sorry, but it is too late. I can do nothing for you.” The unfortunate man was later reported to have heart disease and died shortly thereafter.
A Dandy Doctor
If he had just settled in on being a clairvoyant physician, Orrin Fitzgerald would have slipped off into history as nothing more than another colorful footnote like the rest – one of the many traveling clairvoyants who made a few dollars at the local village hotel before moving on to the next town. But he was a savvy, multi-dimensional businessman. He had two inventions patented in his career, the first being a wooden capsule to protect the necks of bottles during shipment and handling. He also established two very impressive business ventures in Massachusetts and a third in Waterville, Maine. But what really set him apart in the eyes of the public was his flair for showmanship. Panache, not inventiveness, business acumen, or even clairvoyance, was what set him apart from all the other clairvoyant healers.
Dr. Fitzgerald made every effort to stand out and to be remembered; for example, he dressed ostentatiously, somewhere between a dandy and peacock. When he was called to the governor’s mansion to treat his housekeeper (whom the governor’s own physician had failed to heal), he wore a magnificent sealskin coat, brightly colored silk stockings and patent leather shoes. Governor Coburn was well-known for dressing plainly and made a “subtle but rather caustic comment” about Fitzgerald’s outfit, but the clairvoyant doctor replied with a bill of $1,500 for his visit.
He had the best carriages and horses that money could buy – a stable of 20 horses with impeccable bloodlines, faultless form, and high spirits; one was a prize racehorse that he purchased for $7,000 ($261,000 in 2024 USD). An 1869 visit to a sleigh factory caused a newspaper reporter to froth in envy over the new sleigh being built for Dr. Fitzgerald: it was painted imperial green with white runners and gold and carmine pinstriping and trimmed with brown silk and velvet. The reporter declared it was “rich and elegant in the extreme” and excelled in beauty the famous sleigh that had been exhibited at the state fair. “We feel very sure he will have by all odds, the finest turnout in the Pine Tree State.”
Dr. Fitzgerald usually drove a four-horse team in single file with harnesses that matched their coloring so closely they looked almost unconnected to each other and the carriage: the black horse had a black harness; the spotted horse had a harness with spots that match the horse’s coat perfectly, and so on with the white horse and the chestnut-colored sorrel horse. Other times he had his uniformed Black coachman drove a team of four white or four black horses with gold-embellished harnesses. He also owned a splendid carriage with a calliope installed, making music as the horses moved along, “and such a spectacle was certain to attract the whole community. As an advertising genius the State of Maine has never seen his equal.” In 1871 an advance team for President Ulysees Grant scouted out the best hotels and restaurants to accommodate the nation’s leader when he was scheduled to tour the state and the came to Orrin Fitzgerald to ask for the use of his carriage and horse team. The doctor’s treasured carriage and team were polished and groomed for the president’s arrival. Cannons were fired when President Grant’s train arrived at the Bangor, Maine, train station. In ceremonial fashion, the doctor stepped out of his magnificent carriage as the war hero approached it, walking between rows of uniformed soldiers. A newspaper poignantly observed, “Aesculapius evacuated and Mars occupied. All the time of the Presidential stay did the high official ride in state, [while] the owner of all the elegance, on foot and undisguised, mingled with the common herd.”
People were thrilled when Dr. Fitzgerald arrived in town; word spread quickly. He was an empresario of flash and brass, shining brightest in the spotlight; a one-man traveling sensation. A Belfast, Maine, newspaper reported, “When the doctor drives out in his elegant barouche … all the town is agog with excitement, admiration, and wonder.”
The Face of Success
His advertising was as pretentiously unique and memorable as his clothing and transportation. Several of his newspaper ads were big and bold with his face prominently featured; it was his trademark, for all intents and purposes. One newspaper reporter called him “one of the best-looking men in the State.” He kept his face in the public eye everywhere – in his product packaging, newspaper ads, trade cards, and handbills:
His handbills are scattered as the snowflakes, and his strikingly handsome portraiture which adorns them has thus become as familiar as household words through the paper proclamations which bear healing on their wings. Printing ink has done much for the doctor …
Two of the doctor’s advertising trade cards still exist in quantities that hint at their prolific distribution. An octagonal trade card with his face imprinted in the center was used to promote his arrival in town in about 1892. Surviving examples of the card are always printed on brightly colored stock – yellow or orange. Among the vast array of rectangular cards with bucolic scenes and childlike humor, these octagonal placards were startling and arresting to the public and the army of picture-card collectors. Dr. Fitzgerald was ahead of his time: in the 1920s, brightly colored octagonal road signs stopped travelers in their tracks; just like these cards had been designed to do to potential customers some thirty years earlier.
The other surviving trade card, from 1880, was equally notable and unique in its own way. Its purpose was to announce Dr. Fitzgerald’s Improved Invigorator. It was executed in cartoon format with speech balloons, the front side showing the classic before-and-after images of an emaciated sick man, leaning on his cane, envying the robust, healthy man to his right who is enjoying a stroll with his lovely lady; his walking stick is held as a social marker rather than a crutch. The sick man asks the healthy one how he came to be so healthy, to which the healthy man tells him to go see his friend, Dr. Fitzgerald and get his Improved Invigorator. His lady friend chimes in, telling the reader to turn the card over to find Dr. Fitzgerald. (Ironically, behind the sidewalk banter there is a subliminal scene of a four-horse chaise being ridden by the doctor and driven by his driver, with spectators on the far side erupting in cheers for the vaunted clairvoyant healer.)
The reader is now irresistibly drawn to the other side of the card to find out the rest of Dr. Fitzgerald’s story. Here we see the mustached doctor under a tree, standing next to an emaciated, sickly man who is seated at the edge of his friend’s grave. His own coffin, labeled “WAITING,” lies nearby, but he won’t be needing it because he avoided death by half an hour! His friend died on June 2nd, 1880, at 11:45 PM, but the health of the seated man began to improve just minutes after his friend’s death, on June 3rd, 1880, at 12:15 AM. Seems that the clairvoyant doctor had improved his invigorator in time to save the seated man, but too late for the dead one – even the clairvoyant healer, with all his supernatural skills, couldn’t bring the dead back to life. This specific date and time may mark the actual moment that Orrin Fitzgerald finished improving his invigorator; if so, it may be the most specific record of a product’s creation in patent medicine history.
In an amusing display of gallows humor, the dead man is reanimated, poking his head out of his coffin and saying to the gravedigger, “Say old sexton, I wish Fitzgerald had improved his invigorator half an hour sooner.” The gravedigger, looking tired of digging graves, replies unsympathetically, “Oh! Close the box.”
Once again the background paints a subliminal scene, first of the doctor’s fine carriage, horse team, and driver (without the doctor, who is now under the tree consulting with his patient); then up the hill are his mansion and the stables beyond. It is clearly identified as the “RESIDENCE OF DR. O. FITGERALD, DEXTER, ME.,” but the subliminal message was about the grandeur and success that his estate displays. The foreground scene of the doctor, patient, and cadaver were all about announcing his Improved Invigorator, but the addition of his estate and riding team in the background was all about his greatness. Pure pomposity. And he wasn’t close to done.
Nothing But the Best
When the traveling healers and clairvoyants arrived in town, they took up lodgings they could afford, which often meant seedy rooms in dodgy hotels, but not so for Orrin Fitzgerald. He booked himself in some of the best hotels the host towns offered; not only did he enjoy its creature comforts, but as the rooms he rented served as both his lodging and his place of business while in town, it was important to him that his clientele were suitably impressed that the handsome, popular, well-dressed doctor was staying in the kind of place befitting his public image.
On his frequent visits to Skowhegan, Maine, he stayed at the Hotel Heselton, one of its finest hotels. On his visits to Lynn, Massachusetts, he would be found at its popular Sagamore House, and in Bangor, he frequented the Bangor House where President Grant stayed during his visit. When in Boston he was a guest at the landmark Revere House, where the cream of society floated, like author Charles Dickens, poet Walt Whitman, singer Jenny Lind, four U.S. Presidents, the king of England, the emperor of Brazil, and the grand duke of Russia. And he was so enamored of the Elmwood Hotel in Waterville, Maine, he became its proprietor.
The fashionable, comfortable, powerful life of Dr. Fitzgerald was made possible by a combination of many sales of his one-dollar medicines and his doctoring and surgical fees. “His fees in many cases have been enormous,” reported his obituary, like those paid him by the governor, “and scores of other rich men paid equally as well,” but he was generous to the poor and many patients receive free treatment along with a ten-dollar bill slipped into their hand as they left the doctor. He had also sold a half-interest in his original Life Invigorator medicine back in 1873 to Noyes P. Whittemore, an ambitious livery stable owner in Nashua, New Hampshire and in 1891 he put out his third medicine, Fitzgerald’s Membrane Cure for lung disease, hay fever, and deafness. But “had he the disposition to save,” his obituary continued, “he might have been a multimillionaire long ago.” Instead, he embellished his image and empire by elegantly finishing his home estate and buying and updating other impressive properties with fine furnishings, as well as tip generously and quietly donate to impoverished patients.
The doctor’s house in Dexter was often referred to as a mansion and one of the finest homes in the state. It had two sets of ornately carved mahogany front entrance doors with exquisitely etched glass windows; murals were painted on interior walls and chandeliers hung from 12-foot-high ceilings of copper and steel. A half-dozen marble fireplaces and mahogany woodwork spread throughout the house and elaborate gingerbread laced the exterior. Even the stable was grand and beautiful, exceeding the craftsmanship of most houses. A small army of Black servants maintained his house, stables, and prize horses.
He also owned a newspaper, the Eastern State, which he used largely for self-promotion, printed in yet another of his buildings, the Fitzgerald Building in Dexter. One of its advertisements featured another of his new enterprises, a building in Allston, west of Boston, that he named the Massachusetts Medical Home. It was a sanitorium for the wealthy, complete with elegant rooms, hot and cold water, electric bells, baths, modern appliances, and expansive lawns.
His last purchase was the estate along the Merrimack River in Tyngsboro, Massachusetts that he named Colonial Hall. The place cost him $80,000 ($2.75 million in 2024 USD), then he spent much more to beautify the grounds, build structures, create a trotting racecourse and generally turn the place into one of the finest estates in eastern Massachusetts.
Taking the Blindfold Off
Understanding Orrin Fitzgerald’s success seems an impossible task. He made a lot of money on the basis of his alleged clairvoyance and he spent it with the swagger of someone who was certain the money would continue to flow in – he was either truly psychic, a business genius, or very lucky – maybe it was a little of all three. He was definitely more complicated than just another blindfolded healer wowing onlookers by peeling away a tumor as if it was a banana. His inventive turn of mind had him devising a protective device for bottles, a capsulized form of anesthetic; and of all things, an invention to protect train passengers from smoke inhalation and accompanying cinders and sparks from coming into their cabins.
The smoke and spark conveyer invention, patented in 1887, was extraordinary, in some ways, far ahead of his time. Fitzgerald’s redesigned locomotive looked every inch like a futuristic invention from a Jules Verne novel. He bent the engine’s smokestack backwards at a rakish 45-degree angle and extended it by a series of pipes, clamps, and braces that predicted the automobile exhaust engine of the 20th century. While the invention’s design came from a mechanically-oriented engineering mind, the reason for its creation clearly came from the health-conscious heart of a doctor:
The great discomfort and inconvenience in traveling by rail arises from the smoke and cinders which come from the locomotive. The vast cloud of smoke which is always pouring from the smokestack often obscures the landscape, and the cinders, from the same source, enter the cars at every crevice, and almost fill the eyes, ears and mouths of the passengers. The cars must be closed even on the hottest and most sultry days, on account of this nuisance.
As far away as Tahlequah, Cherokee Nation, Indian Territory, the newspaper Cherokee Advocate bubbled over with enthusiasm about Dr. Fitzgerald’s train exhaust improvement:
Railroad men all over the country have evinced great interest in the matter, and Dr. Fitgerald has received many offers for an interest in his great invention. There can be no doubt that in a short time it will be applied to every passenger train in the civilized world, and travel upon the railroad will be shorn of its greatest inconvenience and discomfort.
Theoretically, redesigning a train’s exhaust system was no more complicated than removing a cancerous tumor or reattaching a toe, but I just have the feeling that while the healer worked in the dark, the inventor wasn’t wearing a blindfold.
The Secret of Health
The back of Fitzgerald’s unusual octagonal trade card proclaimed “THE SECRET of Health is in Fitzgerald! Who is Fitzgerald?” It was both a great philosophical and practical question. Was he truly a clairvoyant or a charlatan? Did he perform baffling cures or skillful tricks?
Fitzgerald himself admitted he was not a qualified physician in the traditional sense, but insisted that his clairvoyance was even more valuable the regular doctor’s tools:
The Dr. has never graduated at any Medical School, neither has he diplomas from any institution of Science, yet in the SUPERIOR CONDITION [in the clairvoyant state] – the human system is transparent as Glass. … by the peculiar gift bestowed upon me … I am enabled to discover the source of diseases hidden from the eye of the common practitioner.
The debate between believers and non-believers continued to rage throughout his life and likely upon the completion of each surgery or performance, as the case may be. An adamant believer insisted he was cured by the clairvoyance of Dr. Fitzgerald and tried his best to convince others that Fitzgerald presented himself to be.
Now, readers, what can I say of Dr. Orrin Fitzgerald? Is he a fraud? Is he a quack? Or has he ability? Some of my friends advise me not to see him! [But] where would I have been, had I not seen him? I consider myself free from this terrible cancer and am a living witness of the most wonderful and successful physician living.
A newspaper reporter who knew Fitzgerald well and followed him closely shared a rare personal glimpse of the man behind the blindfold after his death:
At heart, the doctor was an entirely different man than what the casual observer judged him. His outward appearance was rather a game of bluff while he read the emotions of those with whom he came in contact and admired or despised them according to his standard of measurement. Those who knew him well realized this fully. [emphasis added]
As the newspapers told the story, wherever he went, the people came, crowding his hotel room and parlors, sometimes waiting all day without getting to see the popular doctor. They followed the clairvoyant healer like devoted disciples following their biblical savior. And why not? He really seemed to be performing miracles.
He gave me a singular-tasting medicine and made an application to the cancer for ten days which entirely separated it from the flesh and left the leg in a perfectly healthy condition. After enduring what I had, this process and result was marvelous to me. It seemed as natural as the separating of the banana from its peeling. I can describe it in no other way.
He performed another medical miracle, so the story goes, in front of everyone at a busy train station … in just two minutes … with his eyes closed:
The doctor was about to depart when a team drove up frantically conveying a lady who had not time to consult him during his stay in town. It was a case of a tumor on the eyelid or the eye itself, tradition in this instance not being fully explicit. The doctor asked for the train to be held two minutes, got out a knife, SHUT HIS EYES, and proceeded to operate. The growth was removed and the patient afterwards stated she felt little pain during the operation. [emphasis in original]
It was either a breathtaking demonstration of courage, clairvoyance, and skill or a fabulously staged hoax to increase his legend – you be the judge.
Orrin Fitzgerald, clairvoyant healer of thousands, died of cancer at age 55, in 1897. Even after his death, non-believers criticized the clairvoyant for his inability to detect his own illness or to get cured by his Clairvoyant Discovery, the Improved Invigorator ...
But then again, maybe he did see the prophetic writing on the wall about his impending end. His advertising always stated, “He will undertake no cases that he cannot cure.” – perhaps he applied that rule to himself as well – "THE SECRET of Health" in Orrin Fitzgerald may actually have been that he didn't have it - he was dying of cancer and he chose not to let anyone know until the end. Instead he decided to spend every dollar as soon as he earned it and enjoy every moment of life he had left. After all, life is short, even for a clairvoyant healer.
Lynn Massachusetts history - History of medicine - 19th-Century Health Remedies - Vintage Medical Ephemera - 19th-century medicine
Updated: Jan 16
The inventor of a hair tonic, an electric plaster & a window lock ... he was plagued by success.
Everything Reuben P. Hall needed to know about business was covered in Aesop’s fable, “The Goose that Laid the Golden Eggs.”
But he didn’t learn.
Too bad. So sad.
If he had taken the children’s fable a little more seriously, his life story could have been hoisted up as one of America’s all-time success stories. Patent medicine royalty. Lots of people thought he was an entrepreneurial giant, but Reuben P. Hall wasn’t the success who was standing behind his own name.
Okay, let me crack open this scrambled story for you.
Brick Dust and the Destitute Italian Sailor
Reuben P. Hall started out his life like most people in New Hampshire in the early 1800s – one of many children in a farmer’s large family. Nothing was getting handed to him – he was destined to live only by the sweat of his brow. When he married Betsy Barrett in 1844 they started their lives together next to her parents’ farm, probably on land her parents had gifted or rented to them. Reuben and Betsy lost their first two babies but in census year 1850, they had 6-month-old Loretta with them. Reuben’s work life began with the physically demanding job of making bricks; with the town’s poor house just a dozen buildings away, the young father and husband was daily reminded that any work was better than none at all.
Three more babies arrived over the next decade and by 1860, Reuben had left brickmaking in the dust and turned to farming. But his farm was one of the lowest valued in the area and the Hall’s only sure crop seemed to be babies, with yet two more sprouting in 1861 and 1862. Having become the breadwinner for a family of eight in twelve years, Reuben was increasingly concerned about relying on nature and weather to yield a cash crop; so he bid his wife and six little ones adieu and disappeared down the country road, a 44-year-old peddler.
Peddling was a standard form of selling goods around the countryside in those days, providing the advantage of the store coming to the house, especially important in the rural states of northern New England. As the story goes, somewhere along his travels, Reuben Hall, peddler, crossed paths with an Italian sailor. Reuben might have come across the old salt in his travels to Salem, Massachusetts, some 50 miles from his home, where census records show there were a few Italian sailors knocking about the port town in 1860 and 1865, or less likely if his peddling peregrinations took him to Searsport, Maine, 200 miles from home, where there was a single Italian sailor during that time (there were no Italian sailors in all of New Hampshire or Vermont during these years). Harder to fathom, perhaps, was why this seafarer was carrying a hair tonic formula in his otherwise empty pockets. But the sailor was described as “destitute,” apparently synonymous with desperate, so the money-strapped peddler bought the formula from the stone-broke sailor. The chance encounter was about to change the trajectory of Reuben Hall’s life.
To modern ears, the sailor’s curious formula read like a recipe from Arsenic and Old Lace: sage and raspberry leaves were to be steeped in water and mixed with tea; then the brew became sinister: mix in oil of citronella, glycerin, milk of sulfur, and white sugar of lead and presto, it was ready for use on hair that for one reason or another had had the audacity to go gray or white. Lead was the magic in the medicine that turned light hair dark; the more frequently used, the darker the hair would get, like 100,000 tiny barometers of lead poisoning. Lead is a neurotoxin that can cause memory problems, muscle pain, headaches, constipation, and high blood pressure, and if the system absorbs enough of it, it could bring about seizures, comas, kidney failure, and death. But let’s not be unfair by judging Reuben too harshly; after all, it wasn’t until 2022, over 150 years later, that the federal government decided to take the lead out of hair products. Like the “help” Aunts Abby and Martha thought they were giving “suffering” old bachelors, Reuben thought he was selling the people what they wanted.
He called his medicine Hall’s Vegetable Sicilian Hair Renewer, the addition of “Sicilian” being an allusion to the Italian sailor who sold him the formula. Make-believe origin stories were created all the time for patent medicines because they were part of the standard medicine advertising pitch, getting waved on the same flagpole with the equally dramatic promises of cures. But while the name hinted at its Italian sailor beginning, this origin story never appeared in the advertisements, trade cards, or booklets. If it was a fiction, it was entirely underutilized. It was more likely true but not a tale that Hall cared to share. The truth sounded too concocted and make-believe, like a storybook beginning that flowed out of an advertiser’s pen, and Reuben Hall was much more pragmatic and deliberate than that. He knew his hair renewer was darkening hair and bringing back moisture to dry scalps and that was the story he wanted customers to hear. So he peddled the stuff from his wagon as fast as he could, one door at a time.
Gangrenous Greed
Like his cart on the bumpy backroads, sale of his hair renewer was slow going. His modest manufacturing operation was taxed at only $10, the same amount he was taxed for the combination of his gold watch and the piano his wife and children had to entertain themselves during his long absences. His remedy needed an infusion of cash if it was to succeed, and he found that in Charles A. Gillis, the well-heeled son of a wealthy father. Reuben brought on Gillis as a partner, turning over to him a controlling share of the company; by June 1865 Gillis bought the entire company for $30,000 ($697,791 in 2023 USD). The deal had made Reuben a wealthy man but in the process he had sold his soul: the deal had not only made Gillis the sole owner of the company, but in so doing stripped away Reuben’s rights to the secret formula for the hair renewer, the rights to make and sell it, and the exclusive right to use the product and company names – his own name – from there on out.
Gillis set up a manufacturing facility in Nashua, New Hampshire, and immediately invested heavily in advertising. Before Gillis came on board, Reuben was only able to afford advertising in a single Vermont newspaper. In the next year he had increased that to four states; but when Gillis took the reins in 1865, newspaper advertising of Hall’s Vegetable Sicilian Hair Renewer swelled to 23 states and by 1870 it was being broadcast across 30 of the 37 states then in existence. In court, Gillis admitted to making an annual profit of $50,000 to $60,000; Reuben had estimated it to be closer to $80,000 and standing on the outside looking in, he felt he deserved much more than what now seemed like a paltry $30,000 that he had accepted five years earlier. So despite his contract with Gillis, he started to make and sell the same medicine from a different location in Nashua. He called it R. P. Hall’s Improved Preparation for Restoring the Hair.
In July 1870 Reuben’s clandestine company was brought to court for having engaged in the secret manufacture and sale of the now-famous Hall’s Vegetable Sicilian Hair Renewer and using a facsimile of the trademark; they were arraigned upon the charge of “counterfeiting wrappers or labels with intent to cheat and defraud.” In the 1870 court case of Gillis v. Hall, Gillis, the plaintiff, claimed Reuben had broken every covenant of their contract, by commencing the manufacture of Hall’s Vegetable Sicilian Hair Renewer at another location in Nashua, under the same firm name, R. P. Hall & Co., and endorsing the bottles with a trade-mark which was “a palpable imitation” of the one in use by Gillis’s company. Gillis brought the signed contract before the judge, which showed Reuben Hall had covenanted:
He would not use or allow his named to be used in the preparation of any similar article;
He would not engage in the manufacture thereof;
He would not impart to anyone his secret or recipe for the manufacture thereof;
He would not engage in the manufacture of any article similar to this;
He would allow the plaintiff the free, uninterrupted and exclusive use of his name in the manufacture and sale of said preparation.
Defendant Reuben P. Hall claimed there was another document that restored his rights; but he couldn’t produce it, so the final judgement was predictable. The judge ruled that Reuben could make hair preparations or any other product he wished, but he wasn’t allowed to make or sell Hall’s Vegetable Sicilian Hair Renewer and he couldn’t use “the name Hall, or R P. Hall, or Reuben P. Hall, …upon any such preparation, and from making or using any trade-mark, label, or wrapper in imitation by those now in use by plaintiff.” Over the decades to come, millions of trade cards and newspaper advertisements would be made to promote the hair tonic named Hall’s and tell the world that it was made by the R. P. Hall & Co. of Nashua, New Hampshire; unfortunately the future success and legacy would no longer have anything to do with its creator and namesake, Reuben P. Hall. He no longer had any rights or privileges to his hair product, its trademark, name, or face on the tax stamp. He probably wasn’t even allowed in the company’s door. For 30,000 pieces of silver, he had lost himself.
Green-Eyed Monsters
Before he could catch his breath over his staggering losses of fame and fortune, he was about to lose something even more precious.
Reuben and Betsy had moved their family down to Vineland in southern New Jersey during the spring of 1870. When Reuben returned to New Hampshire for his arraignment on making counterfeit hair renewer, his 20-year-old daughter, Angela, met and began a relationship with an older man: 38-year-old Dr. Edward Sharp, a successful physician and the son of prominent and wealthy parents. The papers would later describe him as “well-connected and in good practice” and young Angela “was beautiful and well-to-do … nothing seemed wanting to a perfect matrimonial condition. But soon a cloud arose.”
Reeling from his losses in New Hampshire, Reuben returned to his family in Vineland and learned that after a whirlwind 4-month courtship, Angela and Dr. Sharp were going to get married. On that fateful wedding day, 21 September 1870, Reuben and Betsy went to the posh residence of Dr. Sharp’s attorney, ready to celebrate their daughter’s wedding, but Angela took her father’s breath away with the doubly-shocking news that she was pregnant and Dr. Sharp was demanding that Reuben provide his daughter a $20,000 marriage gift or else Sharp wouldn’t marry her and she would forever be identified as a ruined, “fallen woman”. It was extortion, pure and simple. And what made it even worse was that Angela was the one badgering her father to pay. About an hour before the wedding ceremony, Reuben signed a bond (conveniently drawn up by the attorney and wedding host), agreeing to pay his daughter as Sharp had demanded. But it turned out that Angela was not pregnant (in fact, Angela never had any children during their subsequent 57-year marriage).
Reuben consequently refused to pay as the bond required. It was fraud, he said; a conspiracy on the part of his daughter and Dr. Sharp to rob him of a large sum of money. In 1873, over two years after their wedding day, Dr. & Mrs. Sharp took Reuben to court over the bond he had voluntarily signed but refused to pay and the newspapers frothed, “there was much hard swearing, and great bitterness of feeling between the parents and their daughter was displayed at the trial”; it was “a first-class piece of scandal ….” In what seems to me to be a gross miscarriage of justice, the coercive daughter and her swindling husband won their lawsuit; Reuben had lost his second major court case and the relationship with his daughter had probably been irreparably ruined.
Trouble on a Chain
His past having gone up in smoke, Reuben could only move forward. In 1874 he and his son Philip were back in Nashua, setting up a new company to manufacture Reuben’s newest product idea: galvanic electric plasters. Regardless of how effective or ineffective it might prove to be, Reuben’s product (see my previous blog, “Hall’s Galvanic Gizmo,” 18 December 2024) was admirably inventive, combining the century-old use of electricity for health improvement with the medicinal application of plasters. Plasters and electrical devices had existed before and would continue long after Hall’s Galvano-Electric Plaster, but it may have been a unique invention that combined both forms of medicine; unique enough that he wanted to get it patented. Consequently, Reuben offered a very comprehensive and scientific-sounding justification for his invention in the patent application he submitted to the patent examiners, but his advertising for the plaster was simplified in order to appeal to the common man,
“STOP PAIN AS IF BY MAGIC. THEY REALLY PERFORM MIRACLES.”
There were plenty of galvanic batteries on the market and lots of medicated plasters too, but Reuben thought of combining the two in one, allowing the plaster’s medication to soak into the body while low-grade electrical current traveled through body sweat completing the electrical circuit begun by the battery embedded in his plaster. And like any worthwhile patent medicine of the 19th century, the plaster-electricity combo promised to cure all sorts of pains: rheumatism, neuralgia, sciatica, headache, sprains, spinal difficulty, nervous diseases, and female weakness.
Reuben tried to promote his new plasters the way that his old partner had done, by advertising the hair renewer in newspapers. Hall’s plaster advertising ran across nine states in 1874, but the number of states kept diminishing each year thereafter. The one bright spot seemed to be the Bell Mann & Co., a Chicago-based perfume distributor who had become one of the sales agents for the plasters shortly after their introduction in late 1874. In 1876 Reuben was listed in the Chicago city directory as a “plasterer” boarding at the Clifton House. (The directory publishers didn’t seem to know what to do with this rather unusual man who was making medicated plasters; so they added him under the Plasterer grouping with several other men who actually plastered walls.) The Clifton House was just a block away from the Bell Mann company on 163 Wabash Avenue; more importantly, however, Bell Man was now the proprietor of his plasters. Trouble had followed Reuben Hall to Chicago; actually, it had gotten to the point in his life that it seemed like he was just dragging trouble along with him wherever he went.
In January 1877, attorneys for Mr. Bell Mann were explaining to a judge that Reuben Hall had transferred the right to manufacture and sell Hall’s Galvano-Electric Plasters to a Milwaukee dentist for a royalty based on the number of Hall’s plasters the dentist made. But the dentist in turn transferred his manufacturing rights to Bell Mann, who then got the patent rights assigned to his company. Not seeing this coming, Reuben had also assigned a half-interest in the patent to another group of businessmen, (Hall seemed to have a franchise model of business in mind for his plaster), but Mr. Mann took them to court, insisting he had the patent rights and the court should require the defendants to assign their part over to him. There was more electricity coursing through the courtroom than was ever generated by Hall’s plasters. The result was that Bell Mann owned the trademark, patent, and manufacturing rights to Hall’s Galvano-Electric Plasters, leaving Reuben once again with nothing.
In November of the same year, the Chicago Tribune included a mention of a fire that had engulfed a one-story frame building at 4 Hubbard Court, about a mile away from the Bell Mann company; the newspaper noted that the burned building had been used by Reuben Hall as an electric plaster factory. It’s unclear whether it was an act of arson or accident, but either way, Reuben’s effort to counterfeit his own medical product had once again been stopped for good. The newspaper also reported that he couldn’t be found, so he had probably already gone back to his family in New Jersey; there was no future for him in Chicago.
Things then get quiet for Reuben over the next decade. He had retired by the time the census taker came by in 1880; the 62-year-old lived with his wife and sons Philip, 24, and Blanchard, 17, in Landis, New Jersey; Philip was a farmer and Blanchard worked in a shoe shop. In the years after Hall had lost his court case in Nashua, the massive J. C. Ayer Company had bought the rights to Hall’s Vegetable Sicilian Hair Renewer and reinvigorated the product’s promotion in newspapers and trade cards on a scale that only the Ayer company could do (in 1885, advertisements appeared in newspapers of 45 American states and territories). The Hall name still reached across the country, selling the hair renewer and on a much smaller scale, the plaster, but no longer because of the one man who had started it all.
Out of the limelight and the courtroom, Reuben quietly focused on his next big idea. He was more of a visionary and inventor than anything else. He never claimed to be a doctor, although some of his apologists claimed that distinction for him. And constantly trying – and failing – to break deals he had made, he definitely was not a businessman. He got his hair formula from an impoverished Italian sailor but others made it a nationwide success. His patent application for the galvanic-electric plaster looked at the human body as part of a mechanical process.
His last invention – a lock to secure windows and shutters – was as logical and pragmatic as the plaster. In 1886, at age 68, he secured a patent for his “Fastener for Windows and Shutters,” a remarkably detailed mechanism that would fasten windows closed and keep shutters open. And perhaps best of all, no one tried to lock him out from his own invention or patent rights.
Reuben died two years later from cirrhosis of the liver. While the disease can be caused by a number of contributing conditions, it is best known as the result of alcoholism. If that was the cause for Reuben’s cirrhosis, the toll of his legal, financial, and personal miseries had likely contributed greatly to his final, tragic end.
Then as now, almost everyone who saw his name in print assumed the man behind the advertising was a genius, a tycoon, and leader in the patent medicine industry. In truth, he was a visionary with a creative mind, but also a man of poor judgement, questionable ethics, and a pawn in the hands of others who outplayed him. Few knew the real story of Reuben P. Hall – until now.
Lynn Massachusetts history - History of medicine - 19th-Century Health Remedies - Vintage Medical Ephemera - 19th-century medicine
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).
