[In this country we are familiar with the ghostly looking picture of a man, the said proprietor of a medicine, “before he took the pill” (aloes), and “after;” the “after” being represented by a ridiculous extreme of muscular and adipose tissue.]
“Captain Wragge’s” is the style in which most medicines are placed before the public. We take up our morning journal: its columns are crowded by patent medicine advertisements. We turn in disgust from their glaring statements, and attempt to read a news item. We get half through, and find we are sold into reading a puff for the same trashy article. We take a horse-car for up or down town, and opposite, in bold and variegated letters, the persistent remedy (?) stares you continually in the face. We enter the post office: the lobbies are employed for the exposition, perhaps sale, of the patent medicines. We open our box: “O, we’ve a large mail to-day!” we exclaim; when, lo! half of the envelopes contain patent medicine advertisements, which have been run through the post office into every man’s box in the department. And so it goes all day. We breakfast on aloes, dine on quassia, sup on logwood and myrrh, and sleep on morphine and prussic acid!
“The humors of the press” sometimes inadvertently tell you the truth respecting this or that remedy advertised in their columns.
A religious newspaper before me says of a proprietary medicine, “Advertised in another column of our paper: It is a hell-deserving article.” Probably the copy read, “Well-deserving article.”
Said a certain paper, “A correspondent, whose duty it was to ‘read up’ the religious weeklies, has concluded that the reason of those journals devoting so much space to patent medicine announcements is, ‘that the object of religion and quackery are similar—both prepare us for another and better world.’”
The proprietor of a pill,—not Captain Wragge,—threatened recently to prosecute a New Hampshire newspaper publisher for a puff of his “Gripe Pills.”
As every fool, as well as some wise people, read the “personals” in the papers, an occasional notice of a tooth-paste, bitter, or tonic is inserted therein, thus:—
“Augustus Apolphus: I will deceive you no longer. My conscience upbraids me. Those pearly white teeth you so much admire are false! false! They were made by Dr. Grinder, dentist. I use Dr. Scourer’s tooth-paste, which keeps them clean and white. ‘O, how sharper than a serpent’s thanks it is to have a toothless child.’
Susan Jane.”
Great and public men are sometimes induced or inveigled into recommending a patent medicine. In London, one Joshua Ward, a drysalter, of Thames Street, about the year 1780, introduced a pill, composed of the usual ingredients,—aloes and senna,—which, owing to some benefit he was supposed to have derived from their use, Lord Chief Baron Reynolds was led to praise in the highest terms. The result of this high dignitary’s patronage was to give prominence to Ward and his pills, which subsequently sold for the fabulous price of 2s. 6d. a pill! General Churchill added his praise, and Ward was called as a physician to prescribe for the king. Either in consequence, or in spite of the treatment, the royal malady disappeared, and Ward was rewarded with a solemn vote of the House of Commons protecting him from the interdiction of the College of Physicians. In addition to the liberal fee, he asked for and obtained the privilege of driving his carriage through St. James Park! Notwithstanding the pill, Reynolds died of his disease not long afterwards.