A Cure for Monsters

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

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

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

Footprints of Dragons instead of Angels

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Ungodly Origin of Man

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

THE NEW THEORY OF CREATION

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

      The common instinct of humanity revolts at the idea. …

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

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

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

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

 

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

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