Marketplace of the Marvelous (30 page)

While mental healing systems that grew out of mesmerism proliferated, by 1900 mesmerism itself had quietly disappeared as a subject of popular interest. American mesmerists, while successful, had never established mesmerism as a professional medical science. No official schools of mesmerism were established. No professional organizations formed. Many magnetic healers abandoned their mental healing practices after a few years in favor of more metaphysically inclined psychological theories, a trend that only increased after Quimby's death. Some mesmerists became spiritualists, concentrating their mental powers on speaking to the dead in the spiritual realm that they believed the mesmeric state activated. The actual practice of mesmerism languished in the 1870s and mostly expired in the 1880s with the emergence of psychology as a professional scholarly field. These new psychologists sought to demonstrate the superiority of their psychology to its philosophical predecessors by writing articles denouncing mesmerism and mind cures as speculative, irrational, and unscientific.
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Although mesmerism itself never achieved scientific acceptance, it spawned many legitimate scientific fields and stimulated new strains of inquiry. Mesmerism, like phrenology, was one of the first in a long line of American popular psychologies that promised to impart the
secret to personal renewal. Mesmerism differed from phrenology, though, in that it had nothing specifically to do with the brain as an organ but rather envisioned the mind and thought itself as a physical force. Where phrenology put a detailed map and vocabulary for self-development into the hands of Americans, mesmerism provided them access to their innermost mental domains. While other scientists, physicians, and healers alluded to the potential of the mind to cure, Mesmer was the first to elevate the mind to primacy in the healing process, inspiring waves of cures and healing movements based on mental powers.

In many ways, though, Puységur's name is the one we should know. His discovery of the unconscious mind through somnambulism led to the first truly psychological treatment, and his method and emphasis on the psychological, rather than Mesmer's focus on an imperceptible physical fluid, became the standard form of mesmerism (despite the name) practiced in the nineteenth century. He observed and recorded all of the core elements of modern hypnosis: the idea of a therapeutic connection between the magnetizer and subject, an altered state of consciousness with noticeable lucidity in some patients, and the near total amnesia of the trance experience that followed. Experimentation with somnambulism led to the development of dynamic clinical psychology as scientists, including Sigmund Freud, used data provided by entranced patients to formulate the rudiments of psychoanalysis. By the late nineteenth century, the act of bringing someone into a trance state, now known as hypnosis, had finally won the scientific and medical backing that Mesmer had so desperately craved in his own life.
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Mesmerism's ideas and healing successes stimulated public interest in the inner workings of the mind and laid the groundwork for psychology, psychiatry, and the modern use of therapeutic hypnosis as a healing tool.

But if mesmerist practice mostly disappeared in its original form, the pop-cultural image of a flamboyant doctor turned mystical scientist and the idea of altered states certainly did not. Virtual travel through altered states like that induced by mesmeric trance has become a staple of books and movies. Think of the
Matrix
movies, where heroes act in a virtual space while their physical bodies sit immobilized. A similar idea underlies the plots of the movies
Avatar
and
Inception
. Books like
The Secret
and those of Eckhart Tolle promoting
the power of thought to change lives continue to sell briskly.

As with phrenology, mesmerism spoke to a deep-seated desire to unlock the potential of the mind for human use. To know and understand ourselves and others, to be better people, to cure what ails us—these are goals humans are still striving to achieve. The idea that the answers might lie within continues to mesmerize.

Lydia Pinkham marketed a patent medicine that bore her name and, unusually for the time, her face. She was one of few woman entrepreneurs in a crowded and predominantly male patent-medicine marketplace. (Wikimedia Commons)

 

Despite the common belief, most patent medicines did not contain snake oil. Snake oil did exist, however. Clark Stanley, better known as “The Rattlesnake King,” likely inspired the association with his “Snake Oil Liniment,” which cured everything from rheumatism and sciatica to lumbago, frostbite, and sore throat. Stanley claimed to have learned of snake oil's healing powers from his years as a cowboy out west with the Hopi Indians in the 1870s and 1880s. He shared his discovery with the public at the 1893 World's Columbian Exposition in Chicago, where he pulled live snakes out of a sack, slit them open, and plunged their bodies into boiling water. As the fat from the snakes rose to the top, Stanley skimmed it off, mixed it with his previously prepared oils, and sold his liniment freshly made to the crowd that gathered to watch the spectacle. A few years later, in 1897, he published
The Life and Adventures of the American Cowboy: True Life in the Far West by Clark Stanley, Better Known as the Rattlesnake King
, which explained cowboy life, contained lyrics to cowboy songs, and, of course, promoted the healing wonders of his snake-oil liniment. Stanley's liniment became so successful that a reporter who visited his office in Beverly, Massachusetts, found it filled with snakes, some more than seven feet long, slithering around the room and up his arms. He claimed to have killed three thousand snakes in 1901 alone to meet demand for his product. Stanley's was not the only snake-oil remedy on the market. Consumers could also find Tex Bailey's Rattle Snake Oil, Tex Allen's Rattlesnake Essential Oil Compound, and Monster
Brand Snake Oil, among others, which capitalized on American fascination with cowboys, the Wild West, and Native Americans. Snake oil itself had an even longer history in Chinese medicine, in which people had rubbed the fat of the Erabu sea snake, not rattlesnakes, on aching joints for centuries.
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Snake-oil salesmen like Stanley exemplify the image most people have of “quack medicine”: the charlatans making outlandish claims to make a buck off the gullible. These quacks, as popularly conceived, marketed bottles of alcohol blended with a few herbs and spices as cure-alls for dread diseases both real and imaginary. They hawked medicine on street corners and onstage, turning medicine into magic and beguiling audiences with the idea that anything was possible.
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Medicine was serious, not a game, cried regulars, and it was certainly not entertainment. Regular doctors tended to paint those who sold patent medicines and medical devices with the broad brushstroke of quackery, but the lines of legitimacy remained far from clear in the nineteenth century.

Nicholas Boone of Boston placed what is believed to be the first American patent-medicine ad, in the
Boston News-Letter
in 1708: “Daffy's Elixir Salutis, very good, at four shillings and sixpence
per
pint Bottle.”
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The remedy was not Boone's own invention but an English remedy from the late seventeenth century said to cure innumerable ailments from rheumatism, gout, and scurvy to the King's Evil, a lymph infection popularly believed only curable by the royal touch, a commodity even harder to find in colonial America than a trained doctor.
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Colonial Americans imported English patent remedies that they learned about from newspaper ads. These ads tended to be mostly lists and not the drawings and screaming headlines yet to come. Although many colonists concocted their own home remedies from herbs and other botanicals, British patent medicines remained the premade remedy of choice for those that could afford them until the American Revolution disrupted trade. American pharmacists, who before the war had sometimes counterfeited medicines by refilling and reselling old British bottles with their own remedies, found a robust market for their wares in an independent United States eager to break ties with all things British. Struck with a new nationalist fervor, Americans began to demand made-in-America medicines.
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These homegrown remedies rarely contained any new or special ingredients. Most consisted of herbs and drugs found in the standard drug formularies and home medical guides of the day.
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The nineteenth century revolutionized the patent-medicine trade. The commercial and printing advances of the new century changed the relationship between seller and consumer from one that was face-to-face to one at a distance—and one of trust gained through the printed word. The greater numbers of newspapers, books, and magazines in circulation gave Americans more and new ways to learn about and engage with science. It also exposed them to ads for patent medicines. Consumers eager to exercise their purchasing power found an ever-increasing array of medical devices, pills, and health regimens to try, the megavitamins, glucosamine, and green coffee beans of their day. The flood of products made for a fiercely competitive
marketplace among sellers. To make their products stand out, medicine makers developed name brands with distinctive packaging and bottle designs, proclaimed testimonial success, and made extravagant healing claims.
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Thomas W. Dyott became the first American patent-medicine baron. A pharmacist in Philadelphia, Dyott marketed his Robertson's Infallible Worm Destroying Lozenges nationally. He claimed the pills were named for his Scottish physician grandfather, but the line was likely a lie. Agents sold his lozenges in cities and towns across the country. Together with his newspaper advertisements, Dyott became nationally known for his cure in the 1810s. By the 1820s, Dyott had generated a quarter-million-dollar fortune off the sale of his remedy. He purchased a glass factory to bottle his own medicines and constructed a model company town, Dyottville, for his employees. The town included a hospital, athletic fields, a church, schools, and farms. He also opened a bank that printed its own money. Dyott's face graced every bill. The 1837 national economic panic did Dyott in, though, and he lost much of his fortune.
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Despite the use of the name, most of these remedies were never patented. The name “patent” likely came from the British practice of granting a “patent of royal favor” on eighteenth-century remedies, which then allowed medicines to feature the crest of the king on the label. To actually file for a patent in the United States would have required sellers to reveal the ingredients, which most were loath to do. The mystery added to a remedy's selling power and mystique. It also provoked some of the biggest complaints about patent medicines from regular doctors and represented a sharp break from other forms of irregular health care that made a virtue of their transparency. Makers did, however, trademark their product names and label design. Ads and product labels tended to boast that the remedies were painless, nice tasting, and nonmineral, direct shots at the practices of regular doctors and right in line with their irregular compatriots. In fact, many patent-medicine makers were motivated by the same factors that contributed to the rise of Thomsonism, homeopathy, hydropathy, and the other irregular health systems: the arrogance of regular doctors and the dangers of heroic medicine.
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Impatient with doctors who “physic us to death,” Lydia Estes Pinkham devised her own remedy that she promised would make her the “Saviour of her Sex” in the 1870s.
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Born in Lynn, Massachusetts,
in 1819, Pinkham grew up in a reforming household in a town well known for its passion for agitation and social improvement. Pinkham's parents left the local Quaker church after members refused to endorse the abolition of slavery in the 1830s. In its place, Pinkham's mother Rebecca introduced the family to the science-based theology of Emanuel Swedenborg and later to spiritualism. The Pinkhams' devotion to the antislavery cause made their home a popular meeting place for abolitionist leaders, including journalist William Lloyd Garrison, writers and activists David and Lydia Maria Child, and the Quaker poet John Greenleaf Whittier. The family counted Frederick Douglass, Lynn's most famous resident, as a close friend. Just down the street lived the Hutchinsons, a family of singers who would later become famous for their social reform ballads, including the satiric song “Go Call the Doctor, & Be Quick, or Anti-Calomel” with its dozens of verses highlighting the greed, ignorance, and indiscriminate dosing of regular doctors. Raised in this environment, it's hardly surprising that the adult Pinkham supported abolition, spiritualism, women's rights, temperance, and eventually, irregular medicine.
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