THE ONE DOLLAR MIRACLES OF BATTLE CREEK
For those readers who wistfully yearn for
the Good Old Days of deregulation, let us examine the patent medicine
industry
as it existed before 1906, and let us further focus our historic
microscope
on the role that these medical miracles played in the midwestern hamlet
of Battle Creek, Michigan.
There was a video based on this bit of typing, too! One Dollar Miracles of Battle Creek
PUTTING THINGS IN PERSPECTIVE
The nineteenth century was a boom period for the production of patent medicines. Morphine, cocaine, and opium were quite freely available, and if mixed with a good dose of alcohol, the resulting product could fill the general coffers of an ambitious entrepreneur before he could say "Perry Davis' Vegetable Pain Killer." The term "cure" was liberally used. For example, the patent medicine industry reasoned that if (a) morphine reduced the body's natural desire to cough, and (b) alcohol induced a state of euphoria, then the potential customer worried about his tuberculosis would, in effect, be "cured" by the combination of the two ingredients...or at least be dead from the disease before he could register a complaint. There was a toxin for practically any occasion: arsenic could kill toothache pain and produce a glowing complexion while cyanide was sure-fire Pick-Me-Up in nerve tonics.
This is not to say that the established medical community offered better choices. Physicians understood just as well as the patent medicine industry that 80% of all diseases cured themselves. If one actually turned to a doctor for his ills in those days, he could be placing himself in the hands of a person who had completed the State-Of-The-Art two year program at the University of Michigan...if he was lucky. Even ethical drug companies were more concerned with the purity of their product line than they were with the vaguely understood effects that their drugs had on the human body. At the birth of the twentieth century, research and development was little more than an accidental sideline of the chemical industry; for the patent medicine companies, it meant no more than an advertising department.
C.W. Post took out ads promoting his Postum
as a cure for "coffee neuralgia" and "coffee heart," as a preventative
for "the blindness possible by drinking coffee," and assured the reader
that his beverage could "make blood red." Not bad for a
combination
of bran and molasses. Grape Nuts was a specific for appendicitis,
he claimed in 1898, and could quickly dispatch malaria and
tuberculosis,
even feeding the brain directly through some mysterious passageway not
found in any edition of Gray's Anatomy.
Such advertising bestowed quite a reputation
upon Battle Creek, and this fact wasn't missed by enterprising souls
who
saw "The Road to Wellville" as a potential road to wealth.
IT DIDN'T TAKE LONG
Not everybody bothered setting up an office
at first. Wa-Hoo Bitters were supposedly produced at the Old
Indian
Medicine Company of Battle Creek and Toledo, who even offered the
locals
a bargain price of 25 cents per bottle. It is doubtful whether
the
board of directors of the Old Indian Medicine Company ever set foot in
Battle Creek. The same can be said for CMC of Battle Creek, whose
Lung Balsam therapy treated tuberculosis with 9% alcohol.
Miss Janes of Battle Creek actually gave a
suburban address for her "laboratory." Your complexion was her
specialty,
and her crushed rose petals would "not perspire off" as they reproduced
"a natural tint of perfection that does not betray even the slightest
trace
of artificiality." No structure appears at her advertised site
today,
and only empty bottles remain to recall her secret methods of removing
wrinkles, freckles, and that "so-embarrassing tan."
Some local talent moved into town to set up
shop. Dr. Edward R. Jebb, of nearby Climax, arrived in
1901.
While practicing in Climax, he sold various experimental cures through
a pharmacy he also owned. Thus began Jebb's Rheumatic Cure,
Eczema
Cure, Pile Cure, and Catarrh Cure. His board of directors and his
advertising circulars claimed a working capital of $300,000; the local
papers reported it as $50,000. His marketing technique was to
offer
a free consultation from either his downtown offices in Battle Creek,
or
by mail, with "satisfaction guaranteed" for his cures. Free
trials
of Jebb's Rheumatic Cure were offered, each containing 10%
alcohol.
"What it has done for others it will do for you," was his slogan, and
there
were "unsolicited testimonials" from Chesaning and Pentwater to satisfy
even the most skeptical disbeliever.
NO PLACE LIKE HOMEOPATHY
By 1901, there were 21 colleges of Homeopathic
Medicine in the United States. They shared the philosophy that
"like
cures like," and that the symptoms of the disease were more important
than
the disease itself, which was thus reduced to various "psora," or
"itches."
Once you had the symptoms defined, you treated the body with substances
that caused symptoms similar to those "itches" and, in no time--well,
actually,
in 30 to 60 days--the body was cured! Further, if you diluted
these
substances, say to one part in ten million, then the symptoms of the
disease,
coupled with the symptoms of the cure, would worsen the patient's
condition
only by the smallest of fractions, making the curative power even
greater!
Humphrey's Homeopathic Remedies certainly
couldn't fill the needs of such a philosophy on its own, so in 1904,
Winfield
Ensign, a Union City printer, moved to Battle Creek to set up both a
print
shop and a market for his Ensign Remedies. He billed the products
"Biochemic Preparations and Tissue Foods" and sold the pellet sized
tablets
by mail for $1 per vial.
The advertisements for the remedies offered
treatments for "deafness, barber's itch, goiter, gray hair, bunions,
cancer,
bow legs, lockjaw, ingrowing toenails, toothache, tuberculosis,
smallpox,
warts, worms, rheumatism, paralysis, rupture, mumps, tobacco habit,
epilepsy,
crossed eyes, cataract, emaciation and corpulency."
Bashful?
There was remedy 186A. Delusions? If they were animals,
then
187A and B could cure you; if the apparitions were human, substitution
with 187E and F did the trick. If you were feeling "lost and
damned"
you ordered 187L and M, and for "despair of your soul's salvation" you
sampled remedies 188E and F.
"Whatever is sufficient to build a human body
is sufficient to keep it in repair," was the Ensign motto, adding, "the
Ensign Remedies are composed of foodstuffs and substances necessary to
every human body. These Remedies are to be relied on in the most
dangerous
aliments. The appropriate remedy will relieve pain more quickly
and
certainly than the most powerful drug."
If you had doubts after that, you were
instructed
to "remember, you are not taking medicine, but absolutely essential
material,
which will be used if needed and thrown off as waste if not."
Even
in an election year, that would be a pretty safe statement to make.
A KELLOGG IN NAME ONLY
The advertising columns of the 1901 issues
of Collier's magazine asked the question, "WHY BE FAT?" when "There is
a New Home Treatment that Quickly Reduces Weight to Normal Without Diet
or Medicine and is Absolutely Safe." Thus the publishing world
was
introduced to the self-proclaimed "Professor" Frank J. Kellogg of
Battle
Creek, Michigan. The Professor had both the names of Kellogg and
Battle Creek working for him, although his affiliation with the Kellogg
cereal company amounted only to a year's work as a factory
foreman.
Until he began reducing the overweight American, he had been a
toiletries
salesman, with no relation to either of the more famous Kellogg
brothers.
The "perfectly safe" and "remarkable" treatment was never specified in
his ads, but went by the various names of Sanitone Wafers,
Malto-Fructo,
and Rengo. If the weight loss proved too dramatic, he even
offered
a "patented flesh builder," Protone, to reverse the process. When
someone wrote to request the advertised free sample, it soon arrived in
an actual plain brown wrapper, along with an additional unsolicited
month's
supply and a bill for $5. If this approach didn't loosen one's
purse
strings, subsequent letters appeared from the nonexistent "Protone
Building"
that requested lesser payments. Enough people responded to the
approach,
however, to move Professor Kellogg from his relatively modest dwelling
on Green Street to a fashionable Maple Street address and land him on
the
board of directors of Battle Creek's City Bank. The city
directories,
however, always listed his address as being in his older neighborhood.
Dr. James Peebles was born in 1822, vigorously worked for the abolition of slavery, served under President Grant as consul to the Turkish city of Trebizonde, pamphleteered against vivisectionism, lectured as a universalist minister, promoted vegetarianism and women's suffrage, communicated with 3000 spiritualists, and claimed to have psychic powers. He wrote books against vaccination, on how to keep young, and about spiritual unity. With the rallying cry, "Calvinism causes biliousness," he began the Peeble's Institute of Health on the third floor above Minty's Cigar Store in 1901. His institute did "not care for local practice," but chose instead to sell mail-order epilepsy cures, the most popular being "Dr. Peebles' Brain Restorative for Epilepsy and All Diseases of the Brain and Nervous System" and "Nerv-Tonic for the Blood and Nerves."
Dr. W. Thompson Bobo was educated in Missouri and met Dr. Peebles in Texas, where the anti-vivisectionist ran a sanitorium that burned to the ground a decade before their move to Michigan. He promoted the new clinic in Battle Creek with the same zeal he took to his investments in the local cereal industries, Florida orange groves, and golf. Soon, over two dozen assistants were helping distribute the Brain Restorative and Nerv-Tonic across the land.
OTHER CONTENDERS
There were other companies, other treatments,
other cures. In 1902, articles of association were filed to
create the Kellogg Blood and Food Company, promising to produce a
medicine
of "unusual curative and healing powers." Again, the Kellogg
involvement
was incidental. This time, the project was the brainchild of
Frank
Mitchell, a local pharmacist, and his tailor, Alexander Calder.
Claude
Kellogg, of the Staines-Houghtaling Advertising Agency, loaned his name
to the project and became secretary of the venture. Nothing was
ever
produced but an initial capital of $5000, and there's no record of
whatever
became of that.
The Brooks Drug Company sold a Burdock Tonic
Compound, with the advertisement that "Burdock Tonic makes Blue Blooded
People's Blood a Bright Blood Red." It promised to cure
"rheumatism,
catarrh, kidney disease, stomach troubles, liver complaints, malaria,
constipation
and skin disorders," for only a dollar! With a basic alcohol
content
of 10%, its tongue-tied slogan must have been a challenge to its
frequent
users.
Truesdale Gorham offered to treat your asthma
by mail, although no one is exactly sure how. His "office" was at the
Michigan
Central Railroad depot, now the site of Clara's restaurant.
There were still others: the Battle Creek
Laboratory offered urinalysis by mail "for the busy man," Watson
Remedies
treated rheumatism with paper discs and bread pellets that had
"magnetic
properties," and uterine tonics appeared from undefined
locations.
In fact, with the combination of biologic living, cereal, clinics, and
cures churning like a tank of piranha in downtown Battle Creek, it
seems
remarkable that any disease would have a fighting chance in this part
of
the midwest. But other eyes were watching this unregulated
feeding
frenzy.
THE GREAT AMERICAN FRAUD
Ironically, the exposure of the patent
medicine
industry came from the magazines that stood, through advertising, to
benefit
the most from their continued success. The Ladies' Home Journal
commissioned
Dr. A. J. Reed of Battle Creek's own Sanitarium to conduct a test
comparing
the alcohol content of patent medicines with that of standard barroom
fare.
The flame burned brightly for the three largest selling patent
medicines
of 1905, while lager beer came in a distant fourth.
Later that year, Collier's began a celebrated
exposé of the entire patent medicine industry. A series of
articles by Samuel Hopkins Adams entitled "The Great American Fraud"
caught
the industry off guard with actual interviews of the dying users of the
assorted "cures," a follow-up on the writers of "unsolicited
testimonials",
and laboratory analyses of the ingredients in the assorted
treatments.
Adams went for the throats of the industry leaders by simply telling
the
truth. Within a year, Congress passed the first federal laws
regulating
the drug industry.
WHAT? ME WORRY?
While regarded as ground breaking legislation,
the Pure Food and Drug Act of 1906 was not initially regarded as a
major
threat to the patent medicine industry. Pressures by lobbyists
saw
that this first attempt at regulation was diluted to a mere stipulation
that the ingredients for patent medicines must be listed on the
label.
In fact, many companies used it as an advertising gimmick with the
addition
of the phrase, "approved by the Pure Food and Drug Act of 1906" to the
reprinted label.
As might be expected, the results in Battle
Creek were hardly immediate.
THE FIRST TO FALL
Interest in Jebb Remedies was already fading
when Dr. Edward Jebb suffered a fatal fall at his home on October 3,
1907.
His remedies were still distributed out of his home for a few years,
with
business affairs managed by his wife and daughter. While "Jebb's
Remedies" appears as an afterthought in the city directories until the
early 1930s, it was essentially a memory by the end of World War I.
Ensign's Remedies came under analysis by the
Michigan State Dairy and Food Commissioner, James Helme, in 1913.
His assistants sent for the appendicitis, hay fever, and pneumonia
treatments
and found them all not only to be 100% sugar, but 100% sugar at $59 a
pound.
In a singular bit of bureaucratic humor, Helme penned in Special
Bulletin
#23, "We doubt the efficacy of sugar as a cure for love sickness when
the
system is already over-cloyed with sweetness. Perhaps it might do
for jealousy or irritable dispositions."
The Ensigns were undeterred by this momentary
setback. In 1916, Winfield Ensign began using the publishing end
of the company to print "The Truth Teller," a voice for the
underappreciated
world of alternative medicine. The company continued to make and
sell its remedies for another generation of the Ensign family.
When
Thomas Ensign died in 1939, the remedies portion of the company faded
with
him.
"Professor" Kellogg probably thought calling
his weight loss products harmless "foods" would keep him away from
careful
scrutiny. However, his claims were singled out by the Adams
articles
as "ridiculous" and were further examined by Dr. Keebler of the AMA in
his 1912 publication, Nostrums and Quackery. Rengo, supposedly
"dried
from a luscious tropical fruit which grows in clusters similar to
grapes,"
was shown to be a combination of thyroid, poke root, cascara, acacia,
and
toasted bread. This was not only a violation of labelling under
the
new law, but since it was promoted as a food, it was also considered a
misbranded edible. The unflappable professor chose to merely
remove
the thyroid and remarket his product as "Casca Bean," an overnight
laxative.
By this time, he had other things to worry about.
THE THINGS WE DO FOR LOVE
While continuing to list his home as the
unpresupposing
dwelling on Green Street, Frank Kellogg had been actually living in
Detroit
with his eventual fourth wife. His attempts to end his
previous
relationship in exchange for a bit of farmland near Climax took divorce
proceedings to the State Supreme Court. In the highly publicized
case that followed, the Chief Justice found both parties guilty,
annulled
a decree granted in a lower court, and condemned them to a life with
each
other for another two years. When that 1912 ruling expired, Frank
was able to legally commit to his Detroit “landlady.” When Frank
Kellogg himself expired in 1916, the one-time millionaire's estate was
valued at $40,000, including the bit of farmland near Climax. His
fashionable Maple Street home briefly became a Bed and Breakfast and
now
houses an optometry office.
THE FINAL ACT, THE LAST CURTAIN
On June 1, 1912, Dr. James Peebles was called
into Detroit's U.S. District Court to answer charges of fraudulent
claims
regarding his mailorder epilepsy cures. Although in his late 80's
by this time, he appeared, dressed "like King Lear in a Brooks
Brothers'
suit," with a dazzling woman on his arm. Newspaper accounts state
that he claimed to possess the healing powers of Jesus Christ at this
trial
and, when asked to prove his claim, he arched back, gesturing to the
heavens,
and directed everyone's gaze to his provocative traveling
companion.
Testimony revealed that his "Brain Restorative" was an alcoholic
preparation
of valerian, flavored with bitter almonds...the polite term for
cyanide.
His institute's "Nerv-Tonic" was a sweetened, alcoholic solution of
vegetable
products, "containing no material having distinctive, active
characteristics."
Dr. James Peebles eventually pleaded nolo contendere to judgement #1079
and was fined.
Five dollars.
Having tired of the midwest, the good doctor
moved to Los Angeles, where some of his ideas doubtless live to this
day.
He blamed "The War to End All Wars" on evil spirits, singling out
soldiers
of the Napoleonic wars, and eventually entered the spirit world
himself,
just days short of his 100th birthday. On his centennial, a
séance
was held, and his alleged spirit was asked how he was able to live such
a long life.
"I behaved myself," came the reply.
Back on planet Earth, it was left to Dr. Bobo
to pay the five dollar fine and repair the damage done to the clinic's
reputation in Battle Creek. He chose to drop the troublesome
promotion
for epilepsy and settled on goiter as his disease of choice. He
also
merged the clinic with "The Easy Truss Company" and alternated the name
of his offices between "Battle Creek Appliance Company" and "The
Physician's
Advisory and Treatment Company." His goiter cure was relatively
harmless,
consisting of standard iodine solutions and massage. However, he
got into trouble when he became involved with the Sanborn clinic to
treat
diabetes. The clinic was using diuretics to mask the symptoms of
diabetes and give the illusion of treatment. In late 1933, he and
his clinic were taken to task for suspected fraud through public
hearings
in Washington. On a cold January morning in 1934, following
a sleepless two weeks, Dr. Bobo took his own life with a .32 calibre
revolver
in his apartments at 166 Capital Avenue. His wife, by now a
Christian
Scientist, was in Florida at the time, visiting their orange
groves.
None of the obituaries made mention of his business dealings, but chose
instead to concentrate on what the good doctor had considered to be his
crowning achievement: the layout and construction of Battle Creek's
first
18 hole golf course. Not that everyone was so diplomatic: a
contemporary observer quipped that, on that evening in January, Dr.
Bobo
had merely "joined his advertising agent in the seventh circle of
hell."
EPILOGUE
There came some half-hearted attempts to make
the medical community a bit more interesting during the 1930s:
Bon
Kora tried to streamline the bulky silhouette with a little
drug-induced
bulimia as part of its "Battle Creek Treatment." The addition of
a naked lady on the label, while a nice touch, seemed a bit like
desperation.
The Great Depression was taking its toll. By World War II, any
medical
miracles coming from Battle Creek were pretty much sugar frosted.
Battle Creek became known as "The Cereal City," and if it lost some of
its colorful notoriety, its Dr. Kellogg, or even the first established
Sanitarium in the process, it could find comfort in the fact that the
average
American consumed ten pounds of breakfast cereal every year, and that
most
of it came from this small midwestern town.
Bibliography
Adams, Samuel H., The Great American Fraud, Collier Press, 1906
Boyle, T.C., The Road to Wellville, Viking Press, 1993
Carson, Gerald, One for a Man, Two for a Horse, Doubleday and Co., 1961
Contemporary newspaper clippings, Battle Creek Moon Journal and Evening News, Michigan Room, Willard Library
Deutsch, Ronald M., The New Nuts Among the Berries, Bull Publishing, 1977
Goodman and Gilman, The Pharmacological Basis of Therapeutics, 8th Edition, Pergamon Press, 1985
Hechtlinger, Adelaide, The Great Patent Medicine Era, Madison Square Press, Grosset and Dunlap, Inc, 1970
Holbrook, Stewart, The Golden Age of Quackery, Macmillan Co., 1959
Keebler, et al, Nostrums and Quackery, second edition, AMA press, 1912
Middleton, James, and the Michigan Radio Players, "The Battle Creek Idea," (radio production) 1992
Young, James H., The Medical Messiahs, Princeton University Press, 1967
Young, James H., The Toadstool Millionaires, Princeton University Press, 1961
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