Make Salve, Not War

In a world of secrets, revealing a cure was revolutionary - and dangerous.

Reflecting on the brave but shaky start to our great nation on the 250th anniversary of its creation, we hold this truth to be self-evident: Life, Liberty, and the pursuit of Happiness have come at a dear price. While all three virtues were passionately pursued by the new government, they were also being sought by its citizens as the unalienable rights of personal health: everyone wanted freedom from sickness and pain, a life enshrined in health and happiness. This is the story of one early American medicine that tried to live up to those ideals.

Dirty Little Secrets

     In 1790 the first U.S. patents reflected the dynamic energy of the emerging nation. Better ways of building bridges, making nails, boots, gun powder, and steam engines were all meticulously described in the new country’s earliest patent applications, along with improvements in candles, stoves, pianos, and medicine. By 1796, the United States issued its first patent for a medicine, Lee’s Bilious Pills; however, very few medicine makers applied for patents; it required revealing the medicine’s formula – the ingredients and method of manufacture – which invited duplication or public derision by competitors. Most medicine makers chose instead to operate in their self-imposed world of secrets.

     Bottles and boxes of secret medicine were wrapped in gilded promises of amazing cure – but promises were hard to swallow. They were also a dubious luxury. At the turn of the 19th century, citizens of the newly united states lived on farms; well over 90% of the population survived on what they grew, raised, hunted, and made. Self-sufficiency was a requirement of their isolated existence. Although patent medicine ads were increasingly becoming regular features in newspapers and almanacs, the vast majority of rural households made their own medicines for their families and farm animals. The occasional medicine formula that also found its way into such publications was an open invitation to make their own medicine as much as a bread or pie recipe was for their next meal.

Keeping the Crew Shipshape

     Philip Crandal grew up in that remote world of self-sufficiency. Samuel and Mary Crandall and their brood of 15 children lived on the expansive family farm in quiet, pastoral Tiverton, Massachusetts Bay Colony (his father’s vast tracts of field and forest stretched over to Dartmouth, Massachusetts, my home town). When Philip was fourteen, his father became “very sick and weak in body” and decided he needed to get his will quickly written. An extensive estate inventory was carefully detailed down to food vessels of earthen ware and glass, eating utensils of “Puter & wood,” and to “a box & case of bottles,” but there was absolutely no mention of medicine containers or ingredients. When Philip grew up and moved to the coast of Maine, he had a recipe for what he called Crandal’s Salve [sometimes spelled Crandel’s Salve]; it may have been a family recipe he learned to make in his youth, but it also may have been a salve he concocted as a ship master, out of necessity to take care of the wounds, aches, and pains among his crew members. He had become Captain Philip Crandal, ship master of a privateer during the American Revolution.

     In 1781 he mastered a vessel named the Roebuck with guns, small arms, and a crew of sixteen men. The previous year he had been reimbursed £360 (about $110,700 in 2026 USD) by the Massachusetts’ Board of War for his services during the ill-fated Penobscot Expedition of July 1779, the worst American naval nightmare until the disaster at Pearl Harbor162 years later. Crandal’s Salve may have soothed some wounds but it wouldn’t have cured the terrible sting of defeat.

Good Deeds of the Dead

      In due course, the American colonies emerged from the debacle and won the war in a few more years. Philip Crandal then lived out the rest of his life on the coast of Maine, passing away in Portland two decades later at 74 years old. In the closing years of his life, the old sea captain was approached several times by others who wanted the formula for his salve. Since it had never been sold to the public, their interest must have been piqued by stories they heard about it or experiences they themselves had with it treating various wounds, burns, and bruises. The apparent demand for the salve suggests it could have enjoyed some commercial success but Philip Crandal wanted the formula for his salve to be made freely available to his countrymen. Despite the wealth he had accumulated from inheritance and a shipping career, and the dangers he had faced while fighting for freedom from British rule in the Revolution, it’s interesting and curious that one of his final concerns was about what was to become of the small pot of greasy unguent that would, indeed, become his legacy: Crandal’s Salve.  

The efficacy of Crandals Salve in cureing wounds bruises &c induced a number of gentlemen to obtain from him for a valuable compensation an exposure of the ingredients with which it was made and the maner of making it. It was however obtained upon the express condition that it Should not be made publick until the Death of Mr Crandall. This event having taken place it is thought proper as it may be of grate benefit to the public in general to publish it from the Original singed [signed] & attested to by him before a Magistrate [orthography and syntax as in original; emphasis added]

     The post mortem wishes of Captain Crandal were honored to the letter: he died on 15 August 1805 and the formula for Crandal’s Salve was published less than three weeks after his demise in the Portland Gazette on 2 September. It may have been submitted to the newspaper by his only son and namesake, Philip, who had followed in his father’s wake, captaining ships in the merchant trade and getting in trouble with foreign powers during the next war. After its publication in the Portland paper, the formula for Crandal’s Salve also took sail and traveled in quick succession to The Maryland Gazette (19 September), The Luzerne Federalist (Wilkes-Barre, Pennsylvania, 11 October), The Post-Boy, and Vermont & New-Hampshire Federal Courier (Windsor, Vermont, 22 October), and The Poughkeepsie Eagle and Constitutional Republican (New York, 19 November). The readership in those regions had never heard of Crandal’s Salve, but their editors knew that free access to a new medicine formula would catch the attention of many eager eyes.

"A Receipt for Making Crandals Salve." Most likely in the hand of Dr. Elihu Barker, circa 1825-1831. Note that in the early to mid-19th century, "Receipt," "Recipe," and "Formula" were used synonymously to mean a list of ingredients and instructions for combining them into final medicinal or food products. Rapoza collection.

Get the Lead Out

     Throughout the Northeast, the public was reading about a formula that seemed practical and useful because its ingredients were commonly known for their benefits on burns and wounds.  The list of ingredients was as follows:

1 gill neatsfoot oil

1 gill linseed oil

¼ lb white lead

¼ lb red lead

½ oz gum of myrrh

½ oz camphor

3 oz rosin

1½ oz beeswax

a large tablespoonful of West Indian

rum "for what I call half a mess" [measure]

     The problem with these ingredients – the very, very big problem – was the use of white and red lead. In any color, lead is an extremely toxic heavy metal; even the smallest exposure to the body is hazardous, tragic, and often deadly, whether it was swallowed, inhaled, or, as with Crandal’s Salve, absorbed through the skin. Like a barrage of bullets, lead targets the whole body; depending on the amount of exposure, serious damage to the brain, blood, heart, skin, kidneys, nervous system, and reproductive organs can develop slowly over months and years or quickly, within days or hours. Pregnant women and children are especially vulnerable. In total, there was a half-pound of lead in Crandal’s Salve – 36% of the recipe’s total volume when even a thimbleful would have been plenty dangerous. The salve was providing extremely temporary relief for a lifetime of misery, whatever lifetime was left.

     In my lifetime, lead has been removed from paint, toys, water pipes, dinnerware, cookware, cosmetics, and gasoline, but Crandal’s Salve was being made in 1805, not 2025. No one back then had a clue that it was harmful and dangerous. Then in 1825, fully twenty years after the formula for Crandal’s Salve had been introduced in the Portland Gazette, it was resurrected by none other than the Boston Medical Intelligencer, a publication in alignment with the educated medical establishment in Massachusetts. Three days later, the New England Farmer was quick to copy it onto their pages from the Intelligencer, effectively reintroducing it to a whole new generation of the general public.

It Must Be Okay – Everybody’s Doing It

     Shortly after the 1825 reprints of the Crandal’s Salve formula, the passion for recipes and formulas to help with home economy and self-sufficiency grew into book form – collections of “how-to” recipes and formulas primarily designed for use in the home. They almost always contained a combination of food recipes and medicine formulas (which were often designed for man and beast, enabling farmers to take care of their draught animals and livestock), and the more robust volumes included formulas helpful to tradesmen like barbers, blacksmiths, painters, and merchants. Some of these massive collections were extremely popular, but with all the improvements the century brought, they still didn’t get the lead out of their medicinal recipes. Leading the way were Lydia Maria Child’s American Frugal Housewife, in which she gave her formula of lead in rosewater for the relief of a nursing mother’s sore nipples, and Dr. Chase’s Recipes; or, Information for Everybody, which instructed how to make a salve for burns from beeswax, opium, and lead; an eye water made of tobacco, lead, opium, and rain water; and laying a sheet of lead on the chest “for days or weeks” to fight cancer. First printed in 1828 and 1856, respectively, these two books were huge best-sellers in that genre; Child’s book went through over 30 editions within a decade, and Chase’s encyclopedic work claimed that by 1867 it was in its 49th edition with over 358,000 copies printed; by 1915 over four million copies had been sold.

Dr. Baxter’s Legacy

     The single piece of ephemeral evidence of Crandal’s Salve in my collection is a tattered copy of the original formula on old, watermarked bond that had once been in the possession of Dr. Elihu Baxter (1781-1863). He was born in Vermont and attended two courses of lectures at Dartmouth College in Hannover, New Hampshire, graduating in 1802. He set up his medical practice in the village of Lemington, Vermont, along the Connecticut River in the state’s remote northern reaches. There he got married in frigid February 1806 during a snowstorm.

     Grief brought him to coastal Maine and the formula for Crandal’s Salve. Six weeks after their white-out wedding, Dr. Baxter’s 18-year-old bride, Clarissa, attempted to cross the iced-over Connecticut River on horseback, but the ice broke and Clarissa (and most likely her horse as well) disappeared into the icy depths; she drowned, her body never to be found. A boy first broke the news to Dr. Baxter, who reacted with anger, assuming it was a bad joke since it was April 1st, known even then as April Fool’s Day. But as other messengers followed quickly with the same tragic news, it was Dr. Baxter’s heart that broke. An account of the tragedy stated, “The young physician was overcome with grief and soon wearied of the place where he had lost his young wife,” so he moved to Maine, eventually ending up in Gorham, outside of Portland.

     He became wealthy and well-established in the community, and the patriarch of a prominent Maine family: one of his sons became a mayor in Portland and one of his grandsons would become a governor of Maine. Dr. Baxter distinguished himself in his medical career, willing to take an unpopular position on controversial medical issues; he was one of the first physicians in Gorham to advocate vaccination as a preventative for smallpox. An admiring fellow doctor called him “a physician rather ahead of his time,” but he didn't have to be an eccentric medical maverick to advocate Crandal's Salve – in 1825 it was a typical salve composed of standard ingredients for wounds and bruises. So it comes as no surprise that Dr. Baxter was apparently one of the “gentlemen” that requested and paid Captain Crandal's son for the salve formula. I have found no evidence of his daybooks or other records documenting his practice, so he may or may not have incorporated the salve into his personal prescribing formulary; however, he apparently thought highly enough of Crandal’s salve formula to eventually pass it on or sell it (either means of transmission by a doctor would have been considered unethical if he considered it ineffective or dangerous) to another gentleman, Hugh D(avis) McLellan, a young merchant in Gorham.

McLellan’s Boondoggle

     A somewhat enigmatic note is written on the back of the copy of the Crandal’s Salve formula that I own; it reads:

                                                A Receipt for

                                                   Crandels Salve .. from

                                                Dr Elihu Baxter .. To

                                                Hugh D McLellan

                                                From the 2 after the origin

                                                al [original]

Advertisement for the store of Hugh D. McLellan, Portland Press Herald, 5 JAN 1838, p.3.

     “From the 2 after the original” is a perplexing notation; perhaps this copy that Dr. Baxter was handing off to McLellan was a copy of a prior revision of the original, but it bears no evidence of a change in ingredients or directions from the first version printed in the newspaper back in 1805. The curious phrase seems more likely to be a count in the formula’s ownership lineage, going from Philip Crandal, the son of the salve’s creator, to Dr. Baxter (the “2 after the original”) before it came into the custody of McLellan. Assuming that Hugh D. McLellan of Gorham, Maine, wouldn’t have been professionally interested in the salve until he was at the age of his majority (21) in 1826 while getting into business as a merchant in Gorham, and given that Dr. Baxter left Gorham in 1831, it seems

most likely that Dr. Baxter gave McLellan the formula for the salve between 1826-1831. McLellan eventually wrote a history of Gorham containing a few biographical lines about Dr. Baxter, whom he clearly knew. These included the observation that Dr. Baxter had “a lasting reputation as a good citizen and a faithful and successful physician.” McLellan trusted and admired the physician who was giving (or selling) him this salve formula. The next question is, did merchant McLellan take ownership of the formula in order to produce tins of the salve for sale in his store? Was he going to dishonor its creator’s last wish by selling it as a nostrum instead of giving it away freely to all?

     As best as I can tell, the answer was no. Advertisements for McLellan’s store in 1836 and 1838 listed scores of items for sale, but they didn’t mention any kind of salve. One of the 1838 ads was especially comprehensive, listing dozens of items from shaving soap, raisins, pepper sauce, thread, forks, and pen knives, to cigars, sugar, and “Preston’s Prepared Cocoa, the best preparation of Cocoa ever made, for the sick, or those in health” – but no salve. McLellan’s History of Gorham, Maine, also made no mention of the salve. If McLellan had purchased the salve recipe for profit, he either gave up on the idea or the result.

Kids, Don’t Try This at Home!

The centuries-old formula eventually found its way into the hands of my friend and fellow historian, Jim Schmidt, and he has now entrusted it to me, it’s current steward. And so I will close this blog post with the formula that Captain Philip Crandal wanted to share with the world; it’s my tribute to him, perpetuating it as he had hoped, making it available in all its toxic, dangerous, deadly glory. Although it’s a cure for nothing (other than perhaps staying healthy and alive), it can serve as a reminder of the blessings we have in modern medicine. Our science is still far from perfect, but at least we’re getting the lead out.

A Receipt for Making Crandals Salve

The Maner of Making as Follows Viz

1st Take the Neats foot Oil and put it into a mug that has not ben used or greased (it must be an earthan mug and nothin els) & boil it, keep stirring it untill it has done sparkling then put in the White Lead & keep stiring it untill it begins to rise Braking the lumps and taking out the gravel if thare be any then put in the red Lead and do the same being carful to Put in no grit; Boil this mixture untill the color turns, not boiling it too much and be careful not to let it boil over then let it cool a little and then add the Gum of Myrrh then the Camphor then the Roosin then the Bees wax stiring it after one ingredient be put in so that thay may be well mixed before you put in another after all these are added. then put in the Rum drop after Drop when it coolls a little so as not to let it foam and run over keep it stiring until it has got Cool and then it is made.                                Philip Crandel [orthography and syntax as in original]  

Note on the reverse side of Crandal's Salve Receipt. ca. 1825-1831. Rapoza Collection.

Postscript: I apologize for the 10-week delay since my last post; the past few months have been a busy time in my life and the delay was unavoidable. I have several more blog posts in the planning stages and hope to resume a more frequent posting schedule for the balance of this year. Thanks for your patience.

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

The Clairvoyant Healer's Secret

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.”

Dr. Fitzgerald's Clairvoyant Discovery, ca. 1873. (Collection of Wyatt E. Brumfield II)

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.

Carte-de-visite of a very young Dr. Orrin Fitzgerald, ca. 1864, set in a photo album page. (Collection of Elton Brumfield.)

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

Aqua, square-based DR. FITZGERALD'S // CLAIRVOYANT DISCOVERY // DEXTER, MAINE, ca.1871. (author's collection; photo by Daniel G. Lakatos)

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.” 

Orrin Fitzgerald's 1873 patent for a bottle protector, a wooden block bored in the center to protect the neck from damage. INSET: Photo of the square-based CLAIRVOYANT DISCOVERY bottle, ca.1871, the shape of which was the pattern used for for the wooden collar patent. [Note: The fourth panel was unembossed for placement of the label, which bore the main product name, Dr. Fitzgerald's Invigorator.] (author's collection; photo by Daniel G. Lakatos.)

Rare, original medicine banner for Fitzgerald’s Improved Invigorator, ca.1880. Oil-cloth and linen banner, 3ft x 6ft. (Photo courtesy of McMurray Antiques and Auctions)

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.”

DR. FITZGERALD'S // IMPROVED // INVIGORATOR, ca. 1880. [Note that the "Z" in the doctor's name is reversed.] (Collection of Wyatt E. Brumfield II)

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.

Advertising trade card, front side, for Dr. O. Fitzgerald, ca.1892. (author's collection.)

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.)

Dr. Fitzgerald's Improved Invigorator trade card, front side, ca.1880. (author's collection.)

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.

Dr. Fitzgerald's Improved Invigorator trade card, back side, ca.1880. (author's collection.)

Fitzgerald House still stands in Dexter Maine. [Note: home is privately owned.] (Photo from Google Maps.)

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.

Advertising trade card of the Elmwood Hotel, Waterville, Maine, Orrin Fitzgerald, Proprietor, ca.1880. (Photo courtesy of Dave Cheadle Card Store on Ebay.)

Header of a sheet of letterhead for The Medical Home, Dr. Orrin Fitzgerald, Proprietor, Chief Examining and Consulting Physician. [Note: Handwritten letter below this header is signed by Orrin Fitzgerald and dated 29 August 1888 .] (author's collection)

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.

Advertising trade card, back side, for Dr. O. Fitzgerald, ca.1892. (author's collection.)

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

The Gift

One Father’s Day, a little over 30 years ago, my wife and children presented me with a gift that has ever since been dear to me. They had gone to the famous Brimfield Antique Flea Market and purchased an amazing medicine display: Balm of Tulips. I loved the gift because it wasn’t a tie or fishing pole; they knew exactly how to make me happy. But I was also thrilled to own a piece of patent medicine history that was so unusually beautiful and perfectly complete. It is so pristine, it almost looks brand new, yet it is clearly, quintessentially Victorian.

Peering through the infinite window of the internet over the intervening decades, I have seen this complete set appear in diverse locations, from eBay to the Smithsonian. There are two reasons why such patent medicine artifacts show up in significant quantities.

First, common bottles are evidence of successful sales. The ubiquitous Lydia E. Pinkham Vegetable Compound bottle is a perfect example. They sit covered with dust on dealer’s tables (or in boxes under their tables) at bottle shows and antique shops, as annoyingly omnipresent as trade cards with her face. Why? Because it was one of the best-selling patent medicines of all time. If there’s such a thing as a patent medicine axiom, it might be, “The more popular the medicine, the more unappreciated the collectible.”

Then there are patent medicines that show up more often than would be expected; yet there they are, just like the Balm of Tulips display, with all of its tiny bottles still harnessed to the showbox since the day they were first strapped in. I would speculate that there are two to four dozen of these displays in existence, the result of a cache being found somewhere; perhaps “… sealed in a few master cases stored on the second floor above the store of a former harness maker and carriage trimmer in Foxcroft, Maine, until the late 1980s” (he wrote, hoping to sound something like Sherlock Holmes) “in sealed cases because none appear touched by bugs or vermin and the paper elements show no darkening or bleaching from the sun ... In Maine because they show no staining or foxing damage from high-humidity southern or coastal regions ... Stored above a store because the uncirculated condition (no wear from handling) reveals the fact that they sat unsold ... In storage until the late 1980s because they started appearing broadly in the antique marketplace and museums in the early 1990s ... And on the second floor above a harness maker and carriage trimmers shop in Foxcroft because that’s where Henry A. Robinson, their inventor and maker, had his business. Elementary." (My apologies to Sherlock Holmes; I just couldn’t resist.)

Born in 1840, Henry Addison Robinson lived his entire life in Foxcroft, Maine. It’s northwest of Bangor, on the way to Moosehead Lake and Beaver Cove; it’s deep, central Maine. He was a pillar of the community, well-known and well-liked by his townsmen, who fondly recalled after his death how he loved to visit and swap stories at the local store and newspaper office. He took it upon himself to make and put street signs (“name boards”) on the thirty different streets in Foxcroft and neighboring Dover.

He graduated from the Philadelphia Dental College and Hospital of Oral Surgery in 1867 and came back to his hometown to practice dentistry there. He was earnest and determined in his new profession, trying to improve on the process of filing down old Spanish quarters like his Foxcroft predecessor and mentor had done to create amalgam for filling cavities, and in 1883, even inventing and patenting a metalized rubber compound for dental use. He was very well-regarded in Foxcroft as a dentist and citizen. He practiced dentistry in his hometown for 40 years, but dentistry was not his passion.

He also made the Balm of Tulips. The product’s trade card explained in a straightforward way, that a “lady writer in one of the popular household monthlies ‘wished some Yankee would find a cure for Cold Sores.” As a dentist, he explained, he was well aware of the “annoyance and inconvenience caused by cold sores,” especially on the lips of his patients, and with his education and expertise in oral medicine and surgery, he already had “a clue to a remedy.” His choice of name was also a clue; it may have been a scientific statement (if the medicine was made from tulip oil) or a metaphorical device for its use on two lips. After several years of experimentation he had invented Balm of Tulips: a little dab on the fingertip, rubbed on the lips was a cure for cold sores. The responsible dentist and pillar of his community made no claims that it also fixed bad livers, weak kidneys, or congested lungs, like the barrage of promises constantly fired by many cure-alls on the market. He stretched his medicine’s singular purpose a little bit, claiming it also “relieves the irritation and soreness of many skin and scalp diseases,” but the single sentence came across as more of a modest observation than a fabricated sales pitch. He tried his best to make a good medicine, but the Balm of Tulips was not his passion.

Had it been his passion, the product would have been advertised more aggressively and distributed much farther than his hometown; he was one of the largest taxpayers in town so had the means to do so, but he didn’t. Out of thousands of newspapers searched in a major online newspaper archive, only a single sentence in one 1890 newspaper could be found: “Balm of Tulips cures cold sores.” I’ve only seen one style of trade card advertising his products in 40 years of collecting – the one packed in his product boxes. No testimonials of satisfied customers have been found. No endorsements by the press as often happened even for obscure and unsuccessful medicines. His obituary covers all the highlights of his life, but makes no mention of the Balm of Tulips.

His heart wasn’t in sales. Interestingly and accurately, he described himself on his trade card as being “of an observing and inventive turn of mind.” He was an inventor, not an entrepreneur. Besides his invention of improved dental material, he had three more patents for packaging medicines. He didn’t patent his own medicine (as a dental professional, he probably considered it unethical to do so), but he patented the containers in which they were shipped and displayed.

The first was the “Postal Packet,” patented in 1886, a small wooden cylinder with a tightly fitting wooden cover and a band ensuring it stayed in place, yet “easy for a postmaster to undo it to examine the contents of the packet, and afterward to refasten it without breaking it.” It was a crush-proof shipping container that would even survive today’s often perilous shipping journeys. The one I recently purchased had not been opened in over 130 years – I didn’t feel like I was opening an antique, but a time capsule. Inside was a vial of the Balm of Tulips, with full, perfect label, crystallized contents, crowned in tin foil with a little, bright pink twine tied around the neck – the means by which the consumer could pull the vial out of the postal packet. Wrapped around the vial was a piece of advertising surrounded by an elegant illustration of a tulip, the perfect homonym for his medicine.

Robinson’s other two packaging inventions were both patented in 1890. Number 435,022 was the vehicle which carried his medicine on its voyage through time to my collection today. The result with his product in it, is a stunning display of color and creativity. The header card features the actual image of Dr. Henry A. Robinson, surrounded by the product name and the words “PREVENTS. BANISHES.” (I just love the use of BANISHES here.) It’s promise to cure “Band Players’ TENDER AND SORE LIPS” seems smart too; my dad was a musician, playing clarinet and saxophone – his lips were his moneymakers.

The trade cards and other instructions were all exactly the dimensions of the box, as was the header card, all of which were designed to arrive at a store ready to be removed, assembled, and set up as a counter or shelf display, with trade card handouts for the customers. The showbox displays from both sides: the header card is printed on both sides and there are a half-dozen bottles on each side as well. Robinson knew exactly what he was doing – he was trying to do things better than they were being done by medicine makers anywhere else in the country:

We aim to excel and be original. Original medicine, trade-marked. Original mailing packet, patented. Original double-faced, self-advertising carton, patented. All our own.

Keep it in sight of customers, and hereafter in stock. It is not in the way, does not catch dust, cannot be pilfered from. It displaces nothing else that you now sell. (His emphasis.)

The third patent, number 435,023, born minutes after the Balm of Tulips showbox, was another style of showbox that, if it was ever made, I haven’t yet seen. Perhaps it was designed for use by other medicine makers, as Robinson never made his medicine in a large, square-based version, to the best of my knowledge. The compartments in the front were designed to each hold three much smaller versions of the featured product than the display bottle in the center, making a full dozen with all four sides of the display. The patent suggested the corners could be used for “statuettes, or other ornamental articles.” Dr. Robinson spent a great deal of time and effort designing effective packaging for shipping and display medicines, but inventing was still not his passion.

His passion, by all accounts, was fruits and flowers. “Flowers, both wild and cultivated, were his friends, and a small knot of them usually adorned his coat through the summer.“ He was very active in Maine’s Pomological Society and won five first prize awards for various species of apples after the 1901 harvest season, just a few months before he died. He loved being on his land, caring for his large orchards of apple, pear, and plum trees, and cultivating all manner of grape and berry vines. It was eloquently said of him,

Each individual tree and bush received his careful attention, and he was never happier than when working among them. As his health failed, his interest in fruits seemed to increase. He was as eager to see and learn about a new variety as an astronomer to see a new star.

For several years, Dr. Robinson had suffered from severe stomach trouble which had gradually reduced his strength, but he persisted in taking care of his dental patients and his fruit trees until just a few days before his death on 24 January 1902. Dentist, community leader, medicine maker, inventor, horticulturalist – he was a true renaissance man. For one who accomplished so much, it is all the more amazing that his least significant achievement, the Balm of Tulips, is his most visible legacy, wrapped in his brilliant packaging, survived hidden away somewhere for decades, to re-emerge in collections today, looking as grand as the day they were made. His cure for cold sores has turned into a gift; ironic to be sure, but thankfully true.