The Unwelcomed Success of Dr. Curtis
- Andrew Rapoza
- May 6
- 21 min read
Updated: 5 days ago
He proudly specialized in upsetting the apple cart.
John Lackland Curtis lived just 50 years, from 1830 to 1880; exactly half of those years were spent as a doctor. During his abbreviated career, he attracted a devoted base of patients and a bitter group of enemies among his fellow physicians. Today, the scant evidence of his career could just as easily be interpreted to expose him as a dangerous quack or to shine on him as a valiant physician. Either way he is a fascinating actor on the Victorian stage of sickness and health – Shhh! The play is about to begin!
SCENE 1: (painted on the backdrop) – The Eagle Hotel
The three-story brick hotel was a hive of commotion, abuzz with activity. Workers and drones from near and far came to the Eagle Hotel and its watering hole, the Eagle Tavern. It was a landmark in the village of Batavia, New York, half way between Buffalo and Rochester; the village was building up quickly now that the Civil War was over, and the Eagle Hotel lorded over the bustle.
“Opposite the Eagle” was the key direction in advertisements of businesses that stood on the other side of Main Street, in the shadow of the hotel. The local news stand, the incongruously paired Oyster, Fish, and Fruit Depot, and the furniture store carrying chairs, coffins, and picture frames, all told their customers to find the hotel first in order to find their stores. The Eagle was also namedropped to help customers find the Sunbeam Gallery, a photographic studio in its second-floor perch on Main Street. Nearby businesses thrived on the existence of the Eagle.
The Eagle provided free omnibus transportation to and from the trains and it had large barns and an attentive hostler to take care of the carriage and wagon teams of those who came by horse. The Eagle also had its own tavern “furnished with the best brands of Wines, Liquors, and Cegars,” as its 1866 advertisement promised. The Eagle’s telegraph connection had also given it some national attention back on 15 April 1861 when President Lincoln’s call for 75,000 volunteers was read at the hotel and immediately responded to with what a congressional investigation later confirmed was the Union’s first volunteer. In 1869 an ambitious salesman was allowed to set up his American brand sewing machines in the hotel’s drawing room (parlor). The Eagle also served as a wedding venue in 1867 for a groom from Battle Creek, Michigan, and his bride from the nearby village of Pavilion. From hotel and tavern to wedding venue, salesroom, and local landmark, the Eagle was a gathering point for everyone and none relied on it more than traveling doctors.
A well-located, affordable hotel provided traveling doctors everything they needed: a place to sleep, set up a temporary office, receive patients, and leave quickly when it was prudent. Temporary doctor’s offices in hotels happened so frequently and in so many of the nation’s hotels, those needing medical care often accepted such a location as a standard part of the medical landscape during the mid and late 19th century.
The doctors’ hotel accommodations served as clinics, examining rooms, and operating rooms, when necessary. In July 1866 a local farmer injured in a carriage accident had his leg amputated at the Eagle Hotel and he was reportedly recovering favorably “under the circumstances." Four years later he was still lame but for the balance of his life he was able to resume his career as a farmer.
The public were nonetheless generally leery of traveling doctors – the very term smacked of quackery and those claiming special skills made them even more suspect – but there were those whose advertisements were well written with tones of supreme medical knowledge, accompanied by testimonials of astounding success and, well, they just sounded so doggone believable. People who were sick enough and already disillusioned by the ineffectiveness of their regular, local doctor were ready to try something new because maybe, just maybe, that new doctor at the Eagle Hotel had the cure. So the desperate and hopeful went down to the hotel quickly because the traveling doctor was usually there just a day or so before he had disappeared in the morning haze or the dusk of twilight.
The Eagle Hotel was that kind of hotel, a favorite stopover for traveling doctors. Dr. Bort, the “Celebrated European Eye, Ear and Lung Physician,” was an eclectic doctor, meaning he tried a little bit of everything in his healing. Dr. Williams assured Batavia he was “no impostor or quack” but a “master of his profession,” thoroughly educated at a university, and Dr. Liston from the Albany Eye and Ear Infirmary would operate on your eyes there in his hotel room. Dr. Crumb promoted himself as an “Oculist and Aurist” who could also remove cancers without pain or use of the knife, and Dr. Vescelius, Magnetic Physician, had “performed such wonderful cures in this village recently.” In 1867 the Batavia newspaper wrote admiringly of its prompt-paying customer, Dr. White, an Analytical Physician:
We do not count the doctor as a "travelling physician," since his appointments are so regularly kept. … we have always found him … a good example to the many jugglers who wander the country over, calling themselves "physicians"! Dr. White must not be confounded with these. The Doctor will be at the Eagle Hotel on Monday, Oct 21st.
Even the Genesee County Medical Society held meetings at the Eagle Hotel, probably while protesting that quacks were allowed to nest under the same roof for the day. It was bad enough that the Batavia newspapers were filled with ads for quack medicines, like Cherokee Pills, Dr. Wright’s Rejuvenating Elixir, and Dr. T. B. Talbot’s Medicated Pineapple Cider, all designed to thwart the use of medical society doctors; and J. W. Poland’s Humour Doctor – a veritable doctor-in-a-bottle – but in the eyes of the medical society, the Eagle Hotel had become a den of iniquity, a seedy shelter for pay-by-the-day medical scoundrels. On 25 May 1867, Dr. John L. Curtis, “Physician, Surgeon and Obstetrician” was the newest of those non-medical society doctors to set up in the hotel for a one-day stay. He had already been selling his medicines out of Batavia from June through August 1866 and was the only doctor advertising surgical services during that time, so he might have been the one who performed the farmer’s amputation in July. It was getting crowded at the Eagle; feathers were going to fly.
SCENE 2: (enter) – The Villain
By their way of thinking, there was a lot for the Genesee County Medical Society to dislike and disapprove of about Dr. J. L. Curtis; to them, he was the poster boy for quackery. He made and advertised his own medicines, the principal one being Curtis’ Cholera King. He also promoted himself in Batavia’s The Spirit of the Times newspaper from 1867 to 1868, touting his specialization in cancer, consumption (tuberculosis), and “Obscure Diseases of the BRAIN and MIND.” He duplicated the wording from his newspaper ad on an eye-catching advertising trade card that also let people know he would be at the Eagle Hotel each Wednesday afternoon.
I believe Dr. Curtis's choice of card style was a significant reflection of his personality. He was innovative in his medical methods and not afraid to explore options for the optimal solution to a problem. This card style, developed during the closing years of the Civil War, was a little-used choice among advertising trade cards at the time he selected it, being overshadowed by designs transitioning from the century-long use of ornate copperplate engraving to the arrival of color lithography, often with illustrations of flowers, animals, and children. Instead, Dr. Curtis chose this avant-garde technological advance that blended together a piece of albumen print photography glued on to a card printed in letterpress. His card focused not on the intense detailing of copperplate, nor the attraction of color or appealing florals or animal designs, but on himself and his business – and given the description of his practice, which stated that he was a physician and surgeon specializing in such difficult and usually hopeless diseases as cancer and consumption and, more radically, “Obscure Diseases of the BRAIN and MIND,” his card was quite unusual and distinctive in the public’s hands. They knew exactly who he was and what he said he could do, as well as where he would be doing it.
In the medical society court of opinion, however, Dr. Curtis was a medical heretic. An ugly, painful wart on the backside of the medical profession. They were convinced he was just another quack, no more creditable than Dr. Vescelius, the magnetic healer; just another nostrum maker who bottled and sold his fraudulent cure to a gullible public, using newspapers, these “private cards,” and handbills to attract their business. They were right about one thing – he was not one of them.
The medical journey of John Lackland Curtis started long before he came onto Life’s stage. His father, Newman Curtis, the son of a farmer, engaged in a personal migration in search of his own farm. He traveled from his home in the hills of western Massachusetts, across upstate New York, and settled on the fertile black muckland of the Genesee Valley. The land treated him well, providing bounteous harvests of wheat, corn, and potatoes, and feeding his many sheep, swine, horses, and cows. There, on a farm in Shelby, Orleans County, one mile south of Millville, he and his wife, Mariah, raised their eight sons and six daughters in a way few parents equaled – all fourteen survived their childhood and became adults.
In the process of guiding them through their young lives, all of the children were enrolled in Millville Academy, where their father Newman served as president of the academy’s board of trustees for at least a year. The Curtis farm was 120 acres; it was larger and more profitable than a majority of the 200 farms in the county. The Curtis farm and family were both doing well; five sons continued the family legacy of farming while the other three continued their education, two becoming lawyers and one, John, becoming a physician.
In 1855 new opportunity called John’s parents to Iowa. They sold their 120-acre Shelby farm and purchased 250 acres of prime farmland in Iowa. Ten of their children moved west as well, of which six continued their father’s farming legacy with their spouses. The three daughters and one son remaining in New York were adults; two of the daughters were already married and settled down, and the third may have been engaged, since she married shortly after her parents’ move. The only son remaining in New York was 25-year-old John L. Curtis; in 1855 he had gotten married and graduated from medical school, the culmination of ten years of medical education. The Iowa soil did not call out to him; New York was the young doctor’s past, present, and future.
SCENE 3: (backstage) – The Medical School Marathon
John started down a medical path early in life when he had developed a passion for reading and study. After his graduation from Millville Academy, his parents sent 15-year-old John 53 miles away to Genesee Wesleyan Seminary in Lima, NY, to engage in more advanced studies, ranging from chemistry and electricity to trigonometry and zoology. A year later in 1846, the 16-year-old was able to begin his medical apprenticeship, training for the next five years under Dr. Azotus M. Frost, physician, druggist, and county coroner in Medina, NY (next to Millville), then with Dr. Almon V. Belding (a physician in Shelby who later became a dentist), and finally with a Dr. Benjamin.
In 1852 the 22-year-old John went off to Geneva Medical College, a school noted for producing the nation’s first female physician, Elizabeth Blackwell in 1849, and the Native American physician, Wa-o-wa-wa-na-onk of the Cayuga tribe in 1844. While there, John was advised and influenced by the school’s chair of surgery to attend the Philadelphia College of Medicine to get specialized training in treating obscure diseases of the brain and mind and chronic diseases considered incurable. The highly motivated medical student took his mentor’s advice.
For the next two years, John prepared for his matriculation at the Philadelphia Medical College by first attending the Philadelphia School of Anatomy where he specialized in microscopic anatomy, specifically cell structure. He then entered the Philadelphia Medical College, a five-story building with two lecture rooms, an anatomical theater, a dissecting room, classrooms, and a pharmacy department to instruct advanced students. He took two semesters of courses from its vigorous medical curriculum, which included such subjects as chemistry, obstetrics, toxicology, surgery, and pathology. The courseload involved five or six lectures daily, except for Wednesdays and Saturdays, when those mornings were devoted to attendance at hospitals and the college clinic, where patients were “exhibited, operations publicly performed, and lectures delivered.”
There were six requirements for graduation; the student must have: (1) been at least 21 and have spent three or more years acquiring knowledge of medicine; (2) studied two or more years as a pupil of a regular and reputable physician; (3) taken two full courses of lectures; (4) completed a thesis upon some medical subject; (5) presented a letter of recognition from a preceptor; and (6) successfully passed an examination before the faculty. John Lackland Curtis, age 25, had passed through all the hoops of the medical gauntlet and he excelled as he did so, having been named the college’s prosector for several terms (the student appointed by the college’s surgical chair to have the privilege of dissecting the corpses during anatomical demonstration). He was one of nineteen in his graduating class, receiving his medical degree on 7 July 1855. His parents probably missed his graduation – two months earlier they were almost a thousand miles away, purchasing their new farm in Iowa. Then two months after becoming a medical doctor, he married Lucy Cram back in New York. Babies followed shortly thereafter, as babies usually do.
SCENE 4: (stage right) – The New Physician Breaks the Mold (with brief cameos by his children)
Marriage and career can both be demanding masters, which can make their co-existence a challenge. The newly minted Dr. Curtis was now juggling both, dividing his time between providing for his family and succeeding in his new career. The year following his graduation and marriage, he returned to Philadelphia and studied at Dr. Warrington’s Obstetric Institute; only graduated physicians were invited to attend. The post-graduate study of the diseases of women and children was a professional choice, but preparing for his own family may also have been on his mind. After ten years of almost continuous medical study, he was ready for the practice of medicine, settling his new family in the village of Elba in the Genesee Valley, close by the old family farm of his youth. And then the children made their appearances, some in brief cameo roles.
In 1858 Bellanora “Bell” Curtis was born, but she died after just a little more than two months of life. It was a bitter reality for 19th-century families, but perhaps a little more bitter when a doctoring father couldn’t save his own baby. The next year Lucy gave birth to their second daughter, Cora Belle Curtis, and she was able to slip past the lethal accidents and diseases of youth. Then in 1862 John and Lucy were blessed with their first son, Franklin H. Curtis, but in another ten months, he too had passed away; today the graves of Bellanora and Franklin share a single white marble headstone with two weather-worn carved lambs resting peacefully on the top. Three months after Franklin’s death, Lucy gave birth to their last child, John L. Curtis, their only surviving son, named after his proud father.
During the Civil War, Dr. Curtis was busy trying to create his family and establishing an income. He took up manufacturing goods for market, starting with grape wine; he was taxed on 160 gallons in 1865. He then began advertising his own medicines in 1866. He undertook making and selling conventional medical products of the day, like a croup balsam, a blood and liver corrector, and medicated plasters, all of which were put up in bottles and boxes that simply had glued-on labels. None of his medicine bottles were embossed; the glass was probably aqua tinted and riddled with bubbles, but all sides were smooth and slick. The majority of embossed bottles on store shelves were nostrums competing for attention and full of empty promises – perhaps young Dr. Curtis was trying to distance his product from those his newspaper advertisement called “Life Elixirs, Quack Cures, and Pain Eradicators, &c. &c.” Even his principal product with the high-toned name, Curtis’ Cholera King, came in plain, labeled bottles. The price of his medicines were also not exorbitant like so many patent medicines that cost a dollar or more; his were fifty cents per bottle and twenty-five cents per plaster.
Dr. Curtis had focused on making medicines that he said benefited the entire family; he called them “FAMILY MEDICINES.” He vividly described what he saw when his oldest and youngest patients (perhaps even his own children) were attacked by Asiatic cholera, “when scorched by fever, frantic with pain, writhing in colic cramps, or seemingly torn in flesh and broken in bone by convulsive spasms.” He again wrote with the first-hand knowledge of a doctor and perhaps, also as a father, when he called his croup balsam “a Heaven-sent harbinger of good to the family during Fall and Spring,” when lung diseases hit, “decimating the ranks of childhood, dangl[ing] the pall of death over every hearthstone.” Selling his own medicines was an excellent way of generating some cash in the post-war economy and it was a practice he had seen his medical predecessors engage in while he was under their tutelage. Dr. Frost, for example, ran his own pharmacy and had been actively promoting the sale of Vaughn’s Vegetable Lithontriptic Mixture for kidney stones and James McClintock, M.D., the founder of John’s alma mater, the Philadelphia Medical College, also sold an entire line of his own proprietaries, including Dr. McClintock’s Diarrhea Cordial and Cholera Preventive; Dr. McClintock’s Dyspepsia Elixir, and Dr. McClintock’s Vegetable Purgative Pills.
In 1866 Dr. John L. Curtis advertised his medicines in the Batavia newspaper. Unlike the flashy, brassy claims and promises other medicine companies splashed around in the same newspaper, his ad copy read more like a treatise for medical students; in fact, his erudite writing style probably made it too difficult for some of the less-educated readers to follow:
Cholera King is a therapeutical agent of acknowledged pre-eminent merit. Thoroughly scientific in its chemical combination, while it possesses mildness, safety, and marvelous potency of remedial action, combined with an extended range of application in domestic practice.
While he understood a memorable product name was important, it seemed as though he had no idea or just wasn’t concerned that it was equally important to keep the message simple; or perhaps he just lacked the requisite skills for effective marketing and compelling copywriting.
After just three months (from June to August 1866) of advertising his medicines in Batavia’s The Spirit of the Times, the advertisements disappeared from the newspapers – even his trade card in 1867 didn’t mention his medicines; his focus, first and foremost, was on being a successful physician.
John Curtis did well as a doctor and provider for his family. In 1860 he was recognized by the census taker as a “Phisisian & Surgeon” with an estate valued at $1,850; by 1870 it had increased to $10,000 ($71,281 in 1860 vs $239,325 in 1870, when inflation-adjusted into 2024 USD). His increasing affluence allowed him to contribute $25 ($503 today) to a fund-raising campaign for purchasing a site for a blind asylum in Batavia in 1866. His prosperity also seemed to be a measure of his popularity. He was repeatedly elected to be one of the county coroners, like his early apprenticeship master, Dr. Frost had been. He was an active Methodist and was chosen by its members to represent them at several conferences.
Depending on who was looking, Doctor Curtis might have seemed like other shady traveling physicians who practiced strange, unorthodox, and even dangerous methods out of a hotel room and were gone by the next day’s light. But neither his travels or his methods were borne out of devious design – right or wrong, he did what he did because his believed his education and self-confidence elevated his ability above the standard, orthodox practice of medicine in his day. His travel was not a shady itineracy but a well-publicized travel triangle with a scheduled pattern of stops in Buffalo, Batavia and Rochester, each on the same day or days each week, at the same hotels. He was recognized for using many non-standard medical tools and methods in his practice that reflected his medical education in electricity, chemistry, and microscopy. He used electricity and magnetism “for those multitudinous diseases of the nerve and brain which are so alarming on the increase”; for lung congestion and consumption he used electro-atomic pulmonary baths (whatever those were); and his treatment of cancer involved hypodermic medication of the parts, accompanied by electrolysis with the galvanic battery – hypodermics were a new technology that had only become available for general use after the Civil War. His allies and apologists in the newspapers said his unusual methods were all a reflection of his approach to medicine,
(1874): His method of treating disease varies according to the requirements of the case. He will not be tied down to any one straight-jacket theory or practice but is a reformer in every sense of the word; and yet he adheres strictly to the use of only approved remedies and remedial agencies.
(1875): Dr. Curtis is a specialist in the ranks of the old school of practice.
(1876): While adhering, as a basis, to the old school of practice, he has had the independence to seize upon and apply every discovery of modern thought and science, from whatever source it came, that promised any valuable aid in the art of healing. … his mission is to … break down all merely arbitrary barriers, and extend all such limits … [emphases added]
The rather awkward high-brow advertising copy for his medicines were a reflection of who he had become: a well-educated, innovative, non-conforming doctor. Depending on who was speaking, he was called a medical reformer, pioneer, or an outright quack. Wounded and angered that Dr. Curtis was being hoisted on a pedestal at the expense of their reputations and “old school” orthodox practices, the Genesee County Medical Society publicly excoriated him, it being centuries too late to stone him.
SCENE 5: (stage left) – The Bull in the China Shop (cacophonous crescendo)
The Genesee County Medical Society loathed everything about Dr. John L. Curtis; every diagnosis he made, every treatment he advised, and every medicine he sold was an abomination. To them he was an iconoclast, a revolutionary disrespectfully breaking every rule they lived by – he was the proverbial bull in their China shop. When he applied to join their medical society they refused his application. Their list of his violations to the rigid code of conduct for a member of the medical society ranged from major and minor infractions to ones that were totally fabricated. Their list of 13 sweeping objections can categorically be synthesized town to a half dozen:
He practiced “irregular” medicine (practicing outside of the codified medical society standards). (major violation that was true)
He was unschooled in medicine (he didn’t attend medical society-approved schools). (major violation that was false)
He bought his medical diploma. (major violation that was false)
He filled out the medical society membership application incorrectly. (minor violation; the truth is unknown)
He advertised his medical services. (major violation that was true)
He made, advertised, and sold his own medicines. (major violation that was true)
The newspapers analyzed the medical society’s objections differently:
… he incurred the hostility of certain members of the county medical society because he sometimes differed with them as to the proper mode of treating certain cases or forms of disease. [He preferred practicing] medicine in his own way, rather than to be hindered or interfered with by any society. This so irritated the members … that they began to [spread rumors that he] was a mere quack and medical swindler; that he had no diploma; that he couldn’t become a member of the society. (Jamestown [NY] Daily Republican; emphasis added)
Dr. Curtis took the Genesee Medical Society to court – the New York Supreme Court – and won his case. The court ordered the medical society to admit him as a member and said that, once a member, if he didn’t abide by the by-laws, “the question of expulsion will arise.” The society received him as a member in January 1872, “under protest.” Like a stern parent, the court had laid down the law between two squabbling children, but neither side was willing to play nice. Nothing had been resolved.
SCENE 6: The Expulsion and Life Beyond (trumpet flourish)
The court’s opinion proved prophetic – Dr. Curtis was expelled from the Genesee County Medical Society slightly more than two years later, on 9 April 1874, for “gross violation of the Code of Medical Ethics.” Yet Dr. Curtis’s career didn’t skip a beat – if anything he became more successful. The newspapers in all three corners of his travel circuit supported and praised the doctor and consistent advertiser. At each destination he had established his own staffed pharmacy (called “one of the most elaborate and extensive in the country”) and medical office, where “he did a large business both in the sale of his medicines and by his practice.” In 1877 the editors of a Buffalo newspaper proclaimed,
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