Marketplace of the Marvelous (32 page)

Sex sold. Many patent medicines promised to restore sexual vitality. The Reinhardt brothers of Milwaukee declared themselves specialists in “private and secret diseases particular to men,” which was the polite way of saying they treated erectile dysfunction and STDs. Sexual weakness and other sexual diseases, both real and imaginary, ran rampant throughout the nation in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries—or at least that's what the Reinhardts led their patients to believe. Roping in patients with printed literature and advertisements making hard-to-resist promises, Willis Reinhardt and his brothers handed out diagnoses of sexual dysfunction and took in thousands of dollars in return.
³³

A repetitive emphasis on suffering in many ads forged what came to be known as the “pain and agony” pitch still used in medical advertising today, though with a slight reduction in the melodrama.
³⁴
“Grim death has taken darling little Jerry, The son of Joseph and Seveva Vowels; Seven months he suffered with the dysentery, And then he perished with his little bowels,” read one ad for Castoria.
³⁵
Others emphasized feelings of “constant pain,” “dull, heavy pains,” and “severe burning and sharp pains.” Critics charged that the extensive detail gulled the healthy into believing themselves sick. Ad men countered that detailed lists of symptoms instilled confidence in users that the manufacturer knew what he was doing, and that “most ailing people get a morbid satisfaction in reading vivid descriptions of their sickness.”
³⁶

Mythical and historic figures sold remedies for all kinds of complaints. Before moving to Milwaukee in 1901, the Reinhardts operated a fraudulent medical institute in Minneapolis known as the Heidelberg Institute, as famous for its cures as its fantastical waxworks window displays. Among the most dramatic was “The Dying Custer,” which featured Custer flat on his back while a machine pumped his
chest up and down as though he were taking his last breaths.
³⁷
The Roman goddess of medicine, Minerva, sold a pill for venereal disease while Ben-Hur offered cures for kidney ailments. Patriotism was frequently called into service as were ads that capitalized on the foreign and mysterious, such as Mexican Mustang Liniment and Dr. Drake's Canton Chinese Hair Cream. American Indian remedies also proved sufficiently exotic and ancient as to have been a major selling point, reflecting a belief that Indians possessed secret healing wisdom unknown to whites.
³⁸

Patent-medicine manufacturers did not rely solely on newspaper and magazines, however. They promoted their products in every way imaginable. They distributed pamphlets, books, calendars, joke books, and cookbooks. January, the
New York Times
sarcastically noted in 1860, has become the month of the “medicated almanac,” a “tremendous engine for the dissemination of its author's views—approaching the unsuspecting victim, as it does, in the delusive guise of a calendar, and seducing him into the purchase of three bottles before the first eclipse.”
³⁹
The W. H. Comstock Company, better known as the home of Dr. Morse's Indian Root Pills, sent out millions of almanacs annually, including editions in Spanish and German, beginning in the 1850s and continuing several decades into the twentieth century.
⁴⁰
Pinkham initially distributed a four-page “Guide for Women” that discussed health issues particular to women and explained how her remedy could provide much-needed relief. The Pinkhams also printed posters and illustrated cards.
⁴¹
The Reinhardt brothers seized on the long tradition of home medical manuals and produced their own, known as
The Home Private Medical Advisor
, which they sent free of charge to people around the country. Written in “plain language for the young people, the unmarried, and the married,” the Reinhardts' guide was part instructional text and part advertisement, supposedly written by an unnamed doctor known as “The Master Specialist.” Since they claimed to treat sexual diseases, a home guide was also a good way for patients to avoid the embarrassment of making a trip to their offices.
⁴²

Other sellers took their messages outdoors. They splashed advertisements on the sides of buildings and on fence rails. Promoters offered to repaint entire barns for those farmers willing to give one side over to an advertisement. Anywhere a train, ship, or wagon passed was prime territory. Rocks, trees, and even the faces of cliffs were called into service for medical sales.
⁴³

Still others hit the road to win customers. Scientific shows emerged in the United States in the 1830s on the heels of the explosion in printed materials that made science more accessible to the general public. Public demonstrations of science and technology found enthusiastic audiences eager to see and decide for themselves what they had only had the opportunity to read about in books and newspapers. It's what made Johann Spurzheim's phrenological tour of New England the hit of the 1832 season, and what drew hundreds to the mesmeric displays of Charles Poyen in 1836. The nineteenth-century science lecture and entertainment circuit did not just include people on the margins of science and medicine, though. Without the state support and patronage system that existed for science in Europe, American scholars had to cultivate audiences to win popular backing for their research and projects.
⁴⁴
“He must exhibit his disinterestedness, enthusiasm, and learning before large audiences; he must be constantly before the public in newspapers, periodicals and popular books,” lamented one writer in an 1867 article in the
Nation
.
⁴⁵
Eminent Yale chemist and geologist Benjamin Silliman gave frequent public lectures in the 1830s and 1840s. Perhaps to distinguish himself from the theatrics of other itinerant lecturers, Silliman asserted that he “had been successful in making the subjects on which I had spoken intelligible and attractive, without diminishing the dignity of science.”
⁴⁶
Even so, Silliman was known as a talented showman who loved dazzling demonstrations. In the 1840s, he grew particularly fond of the oxyhydrogen blowpipe, an early kind of blowtorch that he used to create pyrotechnic displays. His assistant claimed these displays provided “no lull or intermission” and were a “constant appeal to the delighted senses.”
⁴⁷
Popular science came in a variety of forms with no clear separation—except perhaps in the minds of the performers and their critics—between good and bad science, regular and irregular, or high and low culture.
⁴⁸
And with intense competition for audiences among itinerants and scholars, lectures and presentations became more lively and creative out of necessity.
⁴⁹

Medical shows and lectures thrived by mixing science with wonder and surprise to educate, heal, and hopefully, sell. The shows established a healer's authority and authenticity because audiences could literally see with their own eyes the miraculous cures that were possible. Patent-medicine sellers followed in this tradition, often putting on elaborate productions that had little overtly to do with healing
but provided tremendous entertainment. Some dressed as wizards or shamans and told dramatic tales of how they discovered their remedy, a practice common among irregulars of all types. Self-improvement and American progress also figured into the displays, as sellers made sure to demonstrate how their remedies would lead to a better, more perfect world. Patent medicine shows tended to perform a night or two and then move on quickly, hitting the road before customers had a chance to discover that their much touted and hoped for remedy might be no remedy at all.
⁵⁰

While it's tempting to label the tactics and theatrics of itinerant medicine sellers as quackery, many took their lecturing and doctoring seriously. Charles Came was a self-taught scientist and medicine man who toured upstate New York in the 1840s and 1850s selling patent medicines and offering electrical healing demonstrations. Posters announcing his arrival in town included a long list of diseases he could cure, including liver disease, paralysis, bronchitis, ulcers, and rheumatism. His lectures were accompanied by music from mechanical organs, magic lantern projections, and slides for presentations on everything from astronomy and phrenology to the Bible, architecture, and fungi. He also had a telegraph that audience members could use to send messages to each other. Vases on both sides of the stage shot flames into the air. Such promotions and theatrics make Came appear easily categorized as an out-and-out charlatan: that is, until he opened his mouth to speak. During his lectures, Came spoke about the promise of electricity to heal, but he also demonstrated Galileo's insights on the speed of falling bodies using a pneumatic device containing a feather and a coin inside a vacuum. He carried an orrery, a device showing the relative positions and motions of bodies in the solar system that he used to teach about astronomy. Came's appearances were like a tour through a science museum. He also stayed in towns longer.
⁵¹

Unlike the itinerant healers who offered quick fixes before leaving town, Came carefully tended to his patients, often hanging around for several days to treat certain cases as required. In 1850, he traveled to Michigan to care for his sister after several local doctors had tried and failed to heal her mysterious illness. His success in treating her, likely with a combination of patent medicines and electricity, won him more patients. After treating several others, he reported that the townspeople would “not hear about my going home,” though he did
eventually break free. Came also used his remedy on himself and his family, a sign that he believed in and took his own medications seriously. He wrote home often advising on remedies for his children. He also sent home money. And with the few cents he charged men—even less for women and children—to attend his lectures and demonstrations, his was not the lucrative scam that regular doctors would accuse itinerants like Came of running.
⁵²

Life on the road was hard. Like Samuel Thomson in his early years, Came spent months away from his family, traveling constantly to eke out a living. Competition for audiences and buyers was fierce. Women sellers often had an easier time because they faced little competition: there were few women doctors and even fewer treatments for female-specific ailments. Even so, nothing about performing on the road was easy for men or women: itinerancy made for a life of endless uncertainty and exhaustion. Many healers simply preferred a fixed address and the comforts of home that a regular medical practice often afforded.
⁵³

Although patent-medicine advertisements and shows encouraged self-diagnoses, many also cultivated direct relationships with their clients. Pinkham's ads urged women readers to write to her for advice. She promised to personally answer each one at no cost to the writer. Her kind and sympathetic face provided a personal touch that made readers feel comfortable seeking her advice and trusting in her response. Appealing to Victorian modesty, Pinkham promised that only women would ever read or even touch the letters. Encouraging women to write her also pulled potential customers away from regular doctors. One ad asked, “Do you want a strange man to hear all about your particular diseases?” Soon, dozens of letters arrived each week. By 1909, Pinkham's ads claimed that the company files contained “over one million one hundred thousand letters from women seeking health.”
⁵⁴

True to her word, Pinkham answered each one, though she was forced to hire a correspondence department to take her dictation as the letters increased in frequency. Many sought her advice on problems that had plagued them for years with no answer in sight. “Dear Mrs. Pinkham, I have been afflicted with a malady that my physician frankly tells me he has never met with before and I write to ask you the cause and what the cure [is],” wrote one woman. She went on to describe a mouth infection that had turned her gums and cheeks
white and left her face and throat swollen and painful. Her lower back was in “constant pain,” her urethra enlarged and painful, and her general condition utterly fatigued. Pinkham knew just the problem. “You have taken virulent poisons in the form of medicine that has caused disease of the mucous membranes,” she wrote. From the symptoms, Pinkham declared that the woman suffered from mercury poisoning that resulted from overdosing with calomel. Heavy doses of calomel had resulted in similar cases of mercury poisoning throughout the nineteenth century. That this woman's doctor could not identify her symptoms underscores the difficulties women faced in getting proper medical care; many doctors did not recognize or know how to treat women's complaints, and some doctors also shied away from full examinations for fear of offending female modesty. Pinkham advised the woman to bathe with hot water, eat fibrous foods, drink warm broths, take walks, and to get plenty of fresh air. Of course she also recommended a course of her Vegetable Compound but instructed her to take it in dry form as the alcoholic version would aggravate her symptoms.
⁵⁵
It was straightforward advice that made sense to her patients as well as promoting the health hygiene common to hydropaths. It probably even helped her.

The Reinhardts also offered advice to patients through the mail from their Milwaukee offices, though perhaps of a more dubious quality. Readers of their
Home Private Medical Advisor
were urged to write for advice on all aspects of love and sexuality to save themselves from the tremendous pain that might result from mistakes. Sexual diseases offered a particularly ripe platform for healers like the Reinhardts to ply their services. While some sexual dysfunction was real, most of the cures offered by people like the Reinhardts embodied the specific anxieties of the Victorian age about the body and pleasure. Sexuality was seen as both a benevolent power and a source of misfortune and danger for nineteenth-century men and women. Many believed that sensual desires could easily become insatiable and lead to moral degradation and suffering, a belief callously played up by both quacks and moral reformers at public expense. Sexuality, so the story went, had to be controlled and directed to achieve its benevolent effects. Into this arena marched the Reinhardts, eager to “treat” and bill those they diagnosed as being on the perilous path to sexual excess and downfall.
⁵⁶