Giving People What They Want
Updated: Oct 16
“Yellow Journalism” dominated newspapers in the late 19th century using loud, shocking headlines and articles trumped up with exaggerated claims and falsehoods dressed as facts. It was a bunch of nonsense and sensationalism, but it sold papers. The newspapers claimed they were giving the people exactly what they wanted.
Alfred Hargrove did the same thing. He had a talent for sensing what people longed to believe. When they looked to the stars for guidance, he promoted himself as an astrologer. When women hoped he could sense what was wrong in their lives, he became a clairvoyant. Soon thereafter, he transformed himself into a spirit medium, able to organize the spirits to ease their troubles and even claimed to have built a medicinal table by following instructions from the spirits. When men worried about their manhood or the consequences of their indiscretions, the so-called doctor reinvented himself as a specialist in men’s diseases.
Alfred Hargrove gave people exactly what they wanted. He was always a shameless fraud, but he sure could sell it.
MEET THE HARGROVES
The story of the Hargrove family started off pleasantly enough. In the mid-19th century, William Hargrove was a successful assistant foreman at a foundry near Aston Manor, outside of Birmingham, England. He and his wife Maria Louisa were newly married and starting a family in the midst of a rapidly growing Victorian industrial center. Birmingham wasn’t dominated by massive mills and factories; instead, it earned the nickname “City of a Thousand Trades” because the large workforce were scattered among small workshops, backrooms, and attics to create their wares made of metal, glass, and bone. Even women and children made buttons and pins for poverty-line wages.
As an assistant shop foreman of a foundry (a senior, salaried position overseeing workshop floors) William and his family were better off than the throngs of low-wage workshop craftsmen and pieceworkers whose income was frequently disrupted by trade depressions and the vices of the alehouse. At 19 Walsall Road, the Hargroves lived comfortably, though daily life would have been dominated by the sights and sounds of industrial progress – the clanging of the nearby railways, horse-drawn wagons on the turnpike, and the smoke from local foundries drifting across the Aston sky.
The Hargroves had started their family shortly after their 1845 marriage; their first two children were fine, healthy boys: William Randolph, born in 1846, and Alfred Alonzo, in 1848. But then something went wrong; their first daughter, Maria Lavinia, was born in February 1850 and died just eight months later, in October. Shaken but undaunted, they had another boy, Sydney Bulwey, a few months after Maria Lavinia’s death, in March 1851.
THE FAMILY CRUMBLES
In July 1852 they had their fourth son, Christopher, but he died after a brief month of life. A year after Christopher’s birth, Maria Louise gave birth to their fifth son, Leopold Walter Albert Henry; he was born and baptized in England. Three months later, the Hargrove family had crossed the high seas with their new infant and settled in Montreal, Canada, where they had to bury baby Leopold within a few months of their arrival. Of their six children, only three survived infancy.
The loss of babies was brutally difficult, but the loss of their father during a cholera epidemic was a sudden, shattering blow. William Hargrove died in July 1854, when Montreal was at the height of a devastating cholera epidemic. He was only 30 years old. He was buried in the Mount Royal Cemetery in Montreal the day after his death – no wake, no open-casket viewing – speed was considered essential to avoid the spread of the cholera contagion.
Thousands of working-class laborers and Irish immigrants died rapidly and were buried in unmarked mass graves or chaotic city plots. For William Hargrove’s family to successfully arrange a proper, individual burial at the brand-new, manicured Mount Royal grounds meant the Hargroves had sufficient funds to shield his memory from the indignity suffered by the less fortunate during that terrifying summer.
Maria Louisa Hargrove was unwillingly thrust into the role of widow and sole parent to three young boys, aged 8, 6, and 3 years. There they were, in a new land, an ocean away from everyone and everything they had called home.
GROWING UP QUICKLY
Instantly, Mary Louisa had to become a single parent and income-producer, and her three little boys would have to mature much more quickly than their bodies. Mrs. Hargrove was listed in Canada’s 1861 census as a grocer, 33, and a widow, which she would remain for the rest of her life. While their mother worked at the grocery store – William, 14, Alfred, 12, and Sydney, 10, were attending school. Mrs. Hargrove also rented out some rooms to two boarders for extra income. She and her boys moved to Brantford, Ontario, 400 miles southwest of Montreal, but just a little over 60 miles from Niagara Falls and the United States.
Their move so close to the U.S. may have been part of a long-term plan to move there, but when the Canadian census was being performed in mid-January 1861, it was quite clear that the U.S. was on the verge of war; South Carolina, Mississippi, Florida, and Alabama had already seceded from the Union and three months later, the Civil War had begun.
At an age far too young, Alfred Hargrove crossed into the United States to join the Union army. At just 16 years old and standing 5 feet 3 inches, he presented himself as 19 and successfully enlisted at Brooklyn, New York, in the 15th NY Engineers in 1864. He may have left home with a teenager’s passion for adventure but it is more likely that he determined to help his mother, as many young men did, by sending her some of his pay, bonuses, and enlistment bounty.
His unit constructed earthworks, forts, and trenches around Petersburg, Virginia, as well as assembled pontoon bridges across the James and Appomattox rivers to move Union troops. The 15th NY Engineers were among the first troops dispatched into the burning Confederate capital of Richmond to extinguish fires, clear the streets, and repair infrastructure.
At sixteen years old and barely five feet three inches tall, Private Alfred Hargrove entered the Union Army not as a seasoned soldier but as a laborer in one of its most demanding units. Company M of the 15th New York Engineers spent the summer of 1864 carving the war into the earth, and Alfred’s days were defined by the weight of a shovel and the sting of raw blisters. He dug trenches that stretched for miles across the Virginia landscape, hauled dirt in wheelbarrows, and cut saplings for the timber revetments that held the earthworks in place. The older, stronger men handled the technical carpentry and bridge work; boys like Alfred supplied the endless muscle needed to keep the siege lines expanding. His world was mud, sweat, and the steady rhythm of digging—simple work, repetitive work, but absolutely essential to the Union’s slow advance on Petersburg.
Alfred mustered out in July 1865, which meant he would have marched with his regiment through the streets of Washington, D.C., in the historic Grand Review of the Armies on May 23-24, 1865, celebrating the end of the war. Alfred had survived the war and later moved to Massachusetts, carrying with him a remarkable story of survival that started with a lie to a recruiting officer in 1864.
MENIAL JOBS WITH NO PROSPECTS
With the war over, the 17-year-old veteran had to figure out what to make of himself and start earning money as a very young civilian. The only skill he had developed was the use of a shovel, but he had no interest in making that back-breaking and hand-stinging work a career. Instead, his first post-war employment was as a grocery clerk, work that he had likely done as a young boy back at his mother’s grocery store in Brantford, Ontario.
By at least 1870 and probably earlier, he was a grocery clerk, reunited with his mother and younger brother, Sydney, in Boston, Massachusetts. Maria Louisa Hargrove was running a boarding house; at the time of the census, her boarders included a druggist, a brass finisher, two dressmakers, a teamster, a steam engineer, and a cap maker. Much as it had been back in Aston, England, the Hargroves lived right in the midst of working folks and made their living from the people who passed through the doors of the Aston foundry, the Brantford grocery, and the Boston boarding house.
Alfred’s older brother, William Randolph, had struck out on his own, never again living or working with his mother and brothers. In February 1865, at the tail end of the war, he had enlisted in the Union Navy at Buffalo, New York. In July 1867, long after the war’s end, he was injured in an altercation. A surgeon’s report from the U. S. Naval Hospital at Mound City, IL (on the Ohio River) wrote that William had "Received a contused wound of scalp about three inches in length, last night, while engaged in some row with a party of Negroes – no fracture of skull. Injury did not originate in the line of duty." He was 21 at the time of his admission to the hospital. William then disappeared into history until 1896 when he committed suicide in Brooklyn, New York; it was surmised that despondency led him to eat the arsenic-based vermin poison, Rough on Rats – a horrible, agonizing, but all-too-frequent method of suicide in the late 19th century.
In 1871 Alfred married Isabella Packard of Lynn, Massachusetts, a city nine miles northeast of Boston and renowned for its shoemaking industry. The marriage record shows that Alfred was still a clerk. The marriage was brief as Alfred remarried in Lawrence, Massachusetts to Frances Flora Bickmore in 1875; something seems a little fishy though, because the marriage record claimed it was Alfred’s first marriage. It also listed him with a new occupation – a “book agent” – someone who travelled door-to-door selling subscriptions and taking orders for books. His career as a book agent put him on the road, starting in Lawrence along the New Hampshire border, then to Providence, Rhode Island in 1876, where Flora gave birth to their first child. It was given no name however; their first child was stillborn.
ANSWERS FROM THE STARS
Something triggered Alfred to study the zodiac, planets, and stars for answers to life’s hard questions – or at least to claim he did. Perhaps he turned to astrology because of the staggering repetition of tragic family losses during his youth that were following him into his own new family. But then again, he may have been covertly targeting the blind faith of those who found comfort in astrological forecasts in order to exploit their gullibility. His advertising claimed that he started the study of astrology back in 1870 when he was a grocery clerk and began offering his services as an astrologer in 1873 when he was actually selling subscriptions door to door. He may have developed his astrologer business gradually while keeping his day job, but more likely, such early dates padded his astrology credentials, making him sound very skilled, experienced, and other-worldly wise.
The newly minted astrologer took his wife on the road, traveling in 1879 to Framingham and Worcester, Massachusetts, in the center of the state. No longer knocking on doors to sell books, he had transformed himself into an astrologer at the same time that his younger brother Sydney took over as the book agent of the family. In that year, Alfred’s wife Flora gave birth to their second child, a girl they named Maria Jenet. So hectic was their travel, their daughter’s birth was recorded in each town’s records, listing Alfred and Flora as residents of both towns. In Worcester’s birth register, Alfred was an astrologer; in the Framingham record he was listed for the first time as a physician. The boy-soldier and ditch digger who had stocked grocery shelves and sold books door to door had crafted himself into an astrologer and a physician, learning intimate details about people who entrusted him with their private problems and paid him for his vaunted expertise.
The young family had roamed down to Providence in 1880, but the traveling suitcase lifestyle no longer worked well with a baby included, so the Hargroves settled down in Boston in 1882, at 1243 Washington Street. As quickly as Alfred had refashioned himself into an astrologer and physician, he had transformed his rented apartment house into the “English Independent Medical Retreat.” The name used all the right words. “English” marked him as pleasantly distinct, familiar, and respectable, not someone with an awkward accent and of suspicious culture. “Independent” established him as practicing a form of medicine unlike the regular methods practiced by the often hated and distrusted medical establishment; and “Medical Retreat” conjured up a health sanctuary – a place of rest, cure, and safety.
Washington Street was on the south side of Boston. The neighborhood had breweries, a brick works, and a cemetery while the area to the south became devoted to maritime and manufacturing. It was part of the area that became known as an immigrant and tenement district as well as a place for theatres, penny arcades, and other amusements. Upper class Yankees officially avoided it even though many, including T.S. Eliot, were known to be there at night. It had attracted a large number of social service organizations including settlement houses and a bathhouse for the city’s poor. The water was kept lukewarm so that no one would take too long of a shower. The area housed immigrants including many Jewish, Italian, and Irish residents as well as Black Bostonians. Some of the neighborhood’s streets were lined with peddlers selling fruits and vegetables as well as other household necessities. It was Aston, England, and Brantford, Ontario, all over again. It was the place Alfred Hargrove could afford and these were the people that he knew and understood best. His medical retreat was an oasis in their midst, located for success. All he had to do was attract them into his retreat by giving them what they wanted.
Free private Clairvoyant Medical Examinations for Ladies ... Every ache and disagreeable feeling in the human body described with wonderful accuracy.
He started off right – free is always attractive – and a clairvoyant medical examination was intimate without awkward exposure. And in that one offer, Alfred Hargrove had promoted himself from astrologer and physician to medical clairvoyant – he was starting to carry more badges of honor than his officers in the war. The claim of clairvoyance meant he had the ability to see beyond what others could with their eyes; his internal vision transcended space and time; it was vision into the body and soul, the past and the future. In some ways it was far more convenient than astrology, since it didn’t require producing zodiac charts to explain things.
DRS. HARGROVE, HARGROVE & HARGROVE
His next business move was to have his wife Flora and brother Sydney introduced as fellow physicians. Flora became Mrs. Dr. Hargrove, providing medical treatments in the office for a hefty $3.00, usually a signal that women could come to her for some private and delicate assistance pertaining to their sex. Younger brother Sydney, whose only prior work experience was selling books door to door, was also anointed a physician; in fact, the two brothers called themselves “Intuitive Physicians,” implying they both possessed the gift of clairvoyance. One of their trade cards even spun the tale of their clairvoyant origin:
The remarkable powers claimed by the Doctors [Alfred & Sydney] was first noticeable, when in childhood, relatives of their family liv[ed] in different parts of England. If anything unusual occurred to them, the Doctors would describe and give full particulars of the event.
And from those precocious beginnings, miraculous powers developed to the astonishment and benefit of thousands, or so the familiar trope went:
So rapidly did these wonderful powers develop, that some thirteen years ago the Doctors were put to a thorough test in regard to the different diseases of the body, and to the astonishment of those present, diseases and their symptoms were described with wonderful correctness; and the vegetable remedies most suitable, selected and compounded, which have proven satisfactory in thousands of cases, and in no case a failure.
At least to modern ears, calling themselves “Intuitive Physicians” – discernment without conventional physical examination – sounds like an admission that their real skill was in figuring out what their patient needed to hear; not that they were, in fact, clairvoyant. But they were making all the promises that had made clairvoyant mediums such a fascination for so many:
... thousands have been surprised by their startling revelations and wonderful cures. Their advice in regard to all events of life is valuable and reliable.
Questions of health, such as cause of illness ... and the best mode of treatment, critical periods, etc.; matters of business – gains, losses, speculations, lawsuits, buying selling, removals and the like. Matrimonial predictions, giving full explanation of time and condition of marriage, if any; what kind of a husband or wife, and the hindrances and objections to happiness therein; travels, wills, secret undertakings, divorces, enemies, etc. ...
There was no question that Alfred was the initiator and “lead physician” in what became a family medical practice. Some of his advertising in the 1880s and 90s continued to be focused on him alone and he was the only one of the three that ventured to neighboring communities to generate more business. For a while in late 1882, he stayed at Lynn’s landmark hotel, the Sagamore House, drumming up business and exposure in the nearby large city of laborers. He called the combination of his specialties “Astro-Physic”; it sounded like something out of a Jules Verne novel:
An astrological judgment wherein can be correctly ascertained the true cause of chronic diseases, either atmospheric or constitutional, by erecting a map or figure of the heaven, and by careful observation of the different positions of the planetary bodies ... at once see with wonderful accuracy the origin of the disease, the nature, symptoms, and the changes from one stage to another, together with full particulars in regard to the organs which are afflicted.
It sounded like so much more than medical society doctors offered. At a time when astronomy, comets, and the like were of increasing popular interest, the Hargroves were purveying astrology as a science of the stars to cure disease and assured that they had “treated thousands of cases by this method” and provided “purely vegetable remedies prepared by us.” Such specialized expertise cost more than the more mundane methods: ladies paid $1.00 and gentlemen $1.50. Advice by mail cost $2.00 and a stamp. While Dr. Hargrove could do a clairvoyant examination or an astrological chart for someone who visited him in the Sagamore House, he made it clear to all that they would have to come to his Medical Retreat in Boston to use the Table.
ANSWERS FROM THE SPIRITS
Any spiritual medium worth his salt had connected to a Spirit Band – a group of spirits, from Indians to kings, dedicated to communicating with him and giving him guidance for his customers. Alfred Hargrove’s spirit band were an especially high-spirited bunch, willing to give him directions to create a unique table that would cure people of their ills. “This wonderful invention,” one of his trade cards explained, “consists in disposing the medicinal substances,” wafting up through holes in the table upon which the patient placed her hands. A central chamber in the pedestal of the round table held the vegetable matter instructed by Dr. Hargrove’s Spirit Band, and the vapors “electro-magnetically” followed channels cut through the tabletop to the holes above.
When in use, the patients ... sit at the table, and two of the openings are uncovered for each sitter at the table, and the hands of the patient are placed over the openings, and the active medicinal properties of the vegetable substance which the disease of the patient requires are transmitted through passages to the system of the patient, and produce the desire effect ... Spirit forms are frequently seen and described by the medium and others at the table. Manifestations of a remarkable nature are continually occurring.
Astrologer, Physician, Medical Clairvoyant, and Spiritual Medium – Alfred Hargrove kept adding and changing according to what he perceived the customers wanted.
In the mid-1880s, it certainly seemed like the spirits were in harmony and the stars were aligned over Alfred Hargrove. His business seemed to be thriving, he was advertising heavily in Boston and Lynn newspapers and on trade cards. He seemed to be establishing his tenement as a veritable séance center and medical complex, renting out rooms to two spiritualists, “Mrs. L. F. Hancock, CLEAR-SEER. Test and Business Communications” and “Mrs. E. A. Cutting, “MAGNETIC and Developing Medium. Nervous Diseases and Female Weakness a specialty.” In May 1884, Alfred Hargrove’s wife gave birth to a son, Sydney G., and a few weeks later, his brother Sydney B., got married. The celebrations were short-lived.
In September 1884, the Hargrove curse had returned. Four-month old baby Sydney died of teething (as best as they understood). The following year 1885, Alfred’s cherished mother passed away, then in the next year, 1886, Alfred and Flora lost the one child who had lived beyond a few months: Maria Jenet, aged 7 years and 2 months, died of the croup. All of his intuition and spiritual guidance couldn’t stop the sable train of death.
FOR MEN ONLY
Something different was afoot. Dr. Hargrove, who had been advertising as an astrologer through 1887, suddenly stopped advertising altogether in 1888. The silence was deafening; it almost seemed like the Hargroves had pulled up stakes and disappeared from the region, or had met with some terrible illness or tragedy that dragged them under the ground to join all the other Hargroves that had died untimely deaths.
He did return. When he re-emerged in 1889, he was a different doctor – in every sense. He and his brother focused exclusively on a new audience that they barely touched on in the previous decade – men. Gone were any mentions of astrology, Spirit Bands, clairvoyance, or the Spiritual, Medical and Developing Table. The new message, big, bold, and emphatic, was that they were specialists in the diseases of men. Same address. Consultation free.
Passing mentions were made that Mrs. Dr. F. Hargrove had a remarkable and successful method in the treatment of chronic diseases and the she had dedicate the past 15 years to the study of “Woman and her Diseases,” but the advertising saturation was devoted to Dr. A. & S. Hargrove, specialists in men’s diseases. Dr. Alfred Hargrove, an 1890 advertisement assured, had “20 years’ practice. 10 Years at the Same Office.” That would again mean that he started that specialty when he was still a grocery clerk, but fact-checking wasn’t pursued as rigorously as it is today.
The two male specialists of men’s diseases said they had a “NEW METHOD” of curing kidney and urinary troubles, unhealthy discharges, seminal weakness, want of energy, and more. “Special attention given to Bright’s Disease and Diabetes.” In fact the 1890 ad assured that over 7,000 cases had been treated successfully in 3 years. In 1893, the number was increased exponentially: “25,000 bona fide cures in 10 years. No mercury used.” The ad poked at the use of mercury for venereal diseases by the regular medical establishment and to justify their own “independent” practice, as irregulars usually did. They also gave the regulars a hard time because their medicines smelled and tasted so bad:
Many physicians in their practice employ medicines which are so thoroughly disgusting, both in smell and taste, that the patient would rather face death than to undertake such treatment. I can assure you that if such remedies poison the mind they must certainly poison the body; and how can you expect to be cured under such circumstances? ... Cut this [ad] Out [and save it]. ... N.B. Working people should take advantage of the Sunday Hours.
Urbanization and crowding in Boston increased infections: strep, tuberculosis, and other bacterial illnesses surged in cities often damaging kidneys. The industrialized work environment that men were faced with increased toxin exposure; factories, chemicals, and polluted water supplies contributed to chronic kidney injury. The profligate ways of many men also earned them one or another of the venereal diseases; even when committed years or decades earlier, some of the strains followed them to the grave. Repeated infections and poor nutrition meant chronic diseases like diabetes and nephritis advanced rapidly, making sick men desperately in need of medical care – and there they were, two amazingly successful specialists in men’s diseases – the Drs. Hargrove, in a busy part of town.
Alfred Hargrove may have had several reasons for leaving astrology, spiritualism, and clairvoyance behind, but bursting into the newspapers again in the form of specialists in men’s diseases was a reaction to opportunity more than a distaste for the challenges of maintaining his former roles. Just call it intuition.
In 1893, Flora gave birth to their last child – another stillbirth. All five of their children failed to survive to adulthood – heck; none of them made it to 8 years old. In the 1900 census, Alfred, Flora, and Sydney were all listed as physicians; their wealth had allowed them the luxuries of a servant and a housekeeper in the house, but their home missed the joy of children.
In 1905, Alfred provide his testimonial for a proprietary medicine called X-Zalia. He had burned his arm with a cigar and the sore became red, inflamed, and very painful. As the story went, “he tried many remedies, but it grew worse and worse. Yesterday, Dr. Hargrove was treated at Putnam’s drug store, and in less than three hours the sore showed signs of healing; the inflammation had gone and the doctor was free from pain.” No zodiac or spirits were needed.
Mortality finally caught up with Drs. Hargrove, Hargrove, and Hargrove. Flora died in 1907 and Sydney died in 1909; both were in their 56th year.
During the 1910 census, Alfred Hargrove lived alone in his large house at 1243 Washington Street, a widower and the last of his family. In 1912 at 63 years old, still practicing as a specialist in men’s diseases, he finally succumbed to kidney disease and kidney stones, one of the “men’s diseases” that he had promised to cure. Maybe his star chart had revealed his end of days was near at hand; hopefully his spirit band welcomed him home.
What a fascinating narrative. I can imagine a biopic of the lives of this family. Such tragedy, spooky adventure and bogus intrigue. As always, Andy’s research is incredible and his writing compelling. Perhaps Alfred’s greatest talent lay in continually reinventing himself, from ditch digger to astrologer, from clairvoyant to physician - no credentials necessary. The AI illustrations are wonderful. This is a true tour de force!
A wonderfully written and interesting story. Makes me wonder what Doctors are selling us today.
WOW!