“Spalding’s Glue.”
I was informed by a Mr. Johnston, who engineered the advertising of the preparation, that it cost but one eighth of a cent per bottle. If you want to make a liquid glue, dissolve a quantity of common glue in water at nearly boiling point, say one pound of glue to a gallon of water; add an ounce or less of nitric acid to hold it in solution, and bottle. The more glue, the stronger the preparation.
The pain-killers and liniments are the most costly, on account of the alcohol necessary to their manufacture; and, in fact, the principal item of expense in all liquid medical articles put up for public sale, is in the alcohol essential to their preservation against the extremes of heat and cold to which they may be subjected.
Soured Swill.
There is an article which “smells to heaven,” the acidiferous title of which glares in mammoth letters from every road-side, wherein the audacious proprietor obviates the necessity of alcohol for its preparation or preservation. It is merely fermented slops—“dish water,” minus the alcohol. Take a few handfuls of any bitter herbs, saturate them in any dirty pond water,—say a barrel full,—add some nitric acid, and bottle, without straining! Here you have Vinegared Bitters! The cheeky proprietor informs the “ignorant public” that, “if the medicine becomes sour (ferments), as it sometimes will, being its ‘nature so to do,’ it does not detract from its medical virtues.” True, true! for it never possessed “medical virtues.”
The cost of this villanous decoction is scarcely half a cent a bottle! Soured swill! It is recommended to cure fifty different complaints! It sells to fools for “one dollar a bottle,” and will go through one like so much quicksilver. “Try a bottle,” if you doubt it. The “dodge” is in advertising it as a temperance bitter. Having no alcoholic properties, it in no wise endangers the user in becoming addicted to stimulants.
Sarsaparilla humbugs are only second to the above. But a few years since an immense fortune was realized by a New York speculator in human flesh on a “Sarsaparilla” which contained not one drop of that all but useless medicine; nor did it possess any real medical properties whatever.
The Down East Farmer’s Story.
To illustrate this point, we introduce the following conversation between the author and a “down east” farmer, in 1852:—