Dr. Kilmer's Unforgettable Organs

Personal Note from Andy: In most of these blog posts, I've tried to entertain you with great history, solid research, and engaging writing. Sometimes, however, I will write a blog post with different goals. This post, for example, is a tribute to three great bottles that are seldom seen together and an equally prized advertising trade card for the same products. I am, after all, a collector, and sometimes I just need to pause and share some treasures from the great hobbies of bottle and ephemera collecting, whether or not I have some deep, untold story to tell about it. So please enjoy these pictures of "Dr. Kilmer's Unforgettable Organs."

When I started collecting medicine bottles and trade cards some 40 years ago, some of the first of both that I fell in love with were certain pieces put out by the extremely successful Dr. Kilmer of Binghamton, NY. Although he made a bunch of different medicines and in different sizes, collectors have always loved and lusted for three certain bottles because they each feature a different organ set in a similar, striking design. Yet few collections seem to have all three because they weren't equally popular.

As I've mentioned before, scarcity was usually the result of weaker sales; conversely, if a bottle is frequently found in collections it was a hot seller in its day. So how do the Kilmer's "organ" bottles compare?

Dr. Kilmer's Swamp-Root Kidney Liver & Bladder Cure is a fairly common bottle, but still very desireable because of its unique design, with a kidney deeply debossed into its main panel, and it has that really great product name! Let's face it: if it was just called Dr. Kilmer's Kidney, Liver & Bladder Cure, it just wouldn't be as much fun to our 21st century ears. In fact, "Swamp-Root Cure" has long been used by the popular press as synomous with "quack cure." The example of this bottle below is in my collection.

Dr. Kilmer's Ocean Weed Heart Remedy is not common but it's certainly not rare. In addition to the always popular heart shape debossed in the glass, Ocean Weed is another great name; I suspect that it was a more genteel way of saying seaweed, but that would be all the more amazing if Victorians would have been turned off by a medicine with seaweed but okay with a medicine made from swamp-root! These days it seems to sell at a cost of about ten times more than the Swamp-Root cure.

I bought mine just over 20 years ago from a digger whom I will simply call "Mike from Memphis." Whenever I purchase an antique, I like to ask the seller for the backstory about where it was found, so that I can experience the early life of the piece I'm adopting through the eyes of its previous caretaker. Mike was wonderful; he shared the whole story of how excited he and his digging buddy were when they found this bottle. The fact that a glass bottle can be found intact after being thrown into a pit and then covered with more debris, dirt, and then overgrown by nature has always been just amazing to me. I feel privileged to own dug bottles that were hidden from civilization for so long. The Ocean Weed bottle shown below is the one I bought from Mike and his engrossing digging recollection is the last part of this post.

Dr. Kilmer's Cough-Cure Consumption Oil is quite rare and getting it is still a dream, but it won't likely happen for me. These days that bottle goes in the $2,000 price range, five times more than the average Ocean Weed remedy bottle. The example shown here is found in the Virtual Museum of Historical Bottles and Glass, courtesy of the Federation of Historical Bottle Collectors. I urge you to check out this sensational museum which features 360-degree rotating views of many of the best bottles in existence, and the FOHBC website always has exciting new things of interest to bottle collectors, like news about the national event for bottle and glass enthusiasts, Houston-24!

So now you will see below something else that is seldom seen, all three of the Kilmer organ bottles in one place. Maybe you're like me, happy to at least have the privilege of seeing all three together, even if you can't own all three!

Dr. Kilmer's Cough-Cure Consumption Oil, courtesy of the FOHBC's Virtual Museum of Historical Bottles & Glass.

The rare advertising trade card below promotes Swamp-Root, Ocean-Weed, and Consumption Oil, all in one extremely detailed and colorful card. Set in a drugstore, the giant bottle looms over all other medicines, insisting on its tremendous importance. The artist figured out how to include the FOURTH organ for which there is no corresponding articulated bottle: with very Victorian modesty, the area of the female generative organs are hidden behind a golden apron-like shield, covered in nonetheless large lettering, "Complete Female Remedy." There was simply no way that a fourth bottle was ever considered to have ovaries and fallopian tubes, or even a uterus debossed into the main glass panel ... but wouldn't that have been a fabulous find for bottle collectors? I wonder if it would have been the rarest of them all?

As promised, here's the 21-year-old letter written to me by Mike from Memphis about the day they found Dr. Kilmer's Ocean-Weed Heart Remedy; I hope you'll enjoy it as much as I did.

We dig bottles anywhere that we can find them. 99% of the bottles we find are found in Memphis, Tn. Mostly we like to probe for privys because they are older. In 1880 Memphis started getting plumbing so a lot of the privys were going away. Your bottle we found at a huge dump site that we found before anyone else. We were riding down the street when we looked over at a construction site and Bill said “look! There is black dirt right there.” I looked over and said “Lets go check it out!”

We went and seen black dirt in different spots. Their was a road partially cut and that’s where we started. At first on the side of the road. We found a few things – all blown stuff 1895 to about 1905. A few Memphis drug bottles, Hutchinson sodas, Amber Cokes from Memphis. Oh man we were in heaven! We tried another spot about 30 foot over – still more and more bottles and whiskey jugs (unmarked). It was too good to be true.

On the second trip there we decided to dig in the road. After we were there for about 10 minutes, about 6 foot into the road we dug down into a soft ashey type dirt. Our shovels just sank down. We kept digging and found a blown Memphis drug bottle, then a couple more insignificant bottles and then Bill stuck his shovel in and pryed up. Then out of the powdery dry dirt, there it was!!! I looked down and thought it was a Swamp Root, but it not being turned exactly straight up I couldn’t see it very well. But their was something different about this one. He reached down and picked it up and he said “its got a heart on the front of it” and my heart started pounding real fast and I was thinking – it couldn’t be one of those rare Dr. Kilmers, could it? I snatched it out of his hands and turned it over and there it was. I know what it is don’t you?” he said “No. What?” I said “It is one of those rare Dr Kilmers Heart bottles!!” He said “No it ain’t” and quickly snatched it back out of my hands but then said “Yea it is too!!” We looked at each other with our eyes wide open and with big smiles on our faces. I hope nobody seen us like this because I know we looked like a couple of nuts. Anyway we both rushed it to the truck and ran back to our digging spot. Then we really started digging faster after that.

We ended up digging a lot of real good stuff out of that dump site until their wasn’t any digging left. That was a very memorable experience. It was the first great bottle that we dug from there. Maybe one day we’ll get really really lucky and dig the lung bottle. I hope! Well anyway that’s the way it went about 4 months ago in the middle of October.

–Mike from Memphis, 3 February 2003