This Old Paper

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The front of this medicine card shows children in a theatre, and advertises “TAKE HOOD’S SARSAPARILLA TO PURIFY YOUR BLOOD – 100 DOSES $1.00″  And at the bottom, “COPYRIGHTED AND PUBLISHED BY C.I. HOOD & CO. LOWELL, MASS.”

This card is delightful.  For various reasons: The colors are vivid, the depictions of children are charming, and instead of the typical “I wholeheartedly recommend blah blah blah” on the backside, it has a playbill!  Too cool.  But.

Sometimes things that are delightful can also be vexatious.  In this case, the amount of material available on each of these topics separately is great: C.I. Hood, Sarsaparilla as medicine, Forepaugh’s circus, and variety shows.  And yet I couldn’t seem to dig up anything to cement this card together.  In digging for connections, I came up with more than you would perhaps care to read, but also some side-stories that make for interesting points-of-entry into the time around when this card was made.

For mercy sake (and so that I can stall and do just a bit more research), I’m dividing this card into two articles.  This one will be about C.I. Hood and his medicine, and the next one will be about the playbill on the back.  And if anyone can tell me what that red thing the lil child is holding in his hand, I’d love to hear about it…

Charles Ira Hood was born in 1845 in Chelsea Vermont.  His father Amos R. Hood was the town’s druggist and he grew up inside his father’s store.  In 1861 he first came to Lowell Massachusetts, and he was so excited to see this new city that he left behind a package of apple buns that his mother had made him for the journey, a happening he long regretted.  He apprenticed himself to the druggist Samuel Kidder for five years.  He was hoping to become a partner in the business when Kidder retired, but this fell through.   He secured a position with the Theodore Metcalf & Company in Boston.  Possibly on account of the climate and fatigue from overwork, Hood soon headed homeward.  Returning again to Lowell in 1870 he secured the capital to start his own drug company.

At first a drug store, Hood soon began making his own formulas for wider sale around 1876, perhaps inspired by an herbal concoction that a customer had him make and which was quite successful.  Hood’s Sarsaparilla was born.  It was also around this time that he took sole ownership of his company.

Fueled by heavy advertising, Hood’s business grew.  Around 1883 the company expanded to a large four-story brick-built compound on the edge of Lowell, near the Boston and Lowell Railroad depots.  The facility was further expanded several times subsequently.  All of the product formulation, bottling (the storage tanks held enough for 195,000 bottles), and packaging was done here, and so was the prolific printing of trade cards, calendars, and other advertising.

As mentioned above, Hood advertised aggressively.  In a speech in his hometown of Chelsea VT in 1902, he claimed to have printed up to that date 25 million cook books and 75 million calendars, that in a single year 25 million pieces of advertising were published by him and that in 1901 he had shipped 13.5 million ads to help sell his product in England.  Furthermore he took out ads in many journals and newspapers.  A few examples of his advertising: The American Agriculturist (1893), Public Opinion, a publication of the Conservative Party of Canada (1897), and of course Hood’s practical cook’s book: For the average household (1897).  As of 1899 Hood was spending $500,000 yearly on advertising, second only to Beecham’s company, and roughly on par with the Centaur Company.  This statistic comes from the advertising trade journal Printers’ Ink (1899) which also stated: “The largest advertisers in the world are patent-medicine men.  Some of them invest even as much as seventy-five per cent of their yearly revenues in advertising.”  (An excellent site with lots of scans of Hood’s advertising as well as pictures of his bottles and packaging here.)

It should also be noted that Lowell, Massachusetts was something of a center for patent medicine firms:

Patent medicines reached the zenith of their National popularity some time between the Chicago Fair and the publication of certain articles in one of the muckraking weeklies of New York City. Lowell in this period was, with the possible exception of Rochester, New York, beyond peradventure the Nation’s greatest patent medicine city. The initial successes of the Ayer and Hood enterprises stimulated others to try to win fortunes through manufacture and sale of proprietary compounds. Not all succeeded in their ventures, but rather a surprising number of financially prosperous businesses grew up in this field. Father John’s Medicine, Hoyt’s German Cologne, Rubifoam, Hilton’s Specific, Ellingwood’s Cough Balsam, Shaw’s Life Guard, the Novelty Plasters, Magee’s Emulsion were among the medicinal mixtures that came—and in some several instances still come— out of Lowell. Moxie, which was started by the late Dr. Thompson as a nerve tonic, soon acquired a popularity as a beverage which seems to have been steadily maintained. It was one of relatively few of the so-called temperance beverages to be commended in the celebrated Westfield pure food list.

Hood’s business was booming but it was not an easy thing to maintain.  Counterfeiting of medicines was common, as were trademark disputes.  More pressing for Hood though, was the changing relationship between patent medicine firms, jobbers (wholesalers), druggists, and the dreaded ‘cutters’ (that is, anyone willing to sell patent medicines at a cut-rate, represented most forebodingly by the quickly rising institution of department stores).  Hood had stirred up a bit of frenzy when in 1891 he proposed to retail druggists that a minimum price of 83 cents be imposed, seventeen cents below the advertised price.  Selling at 83 cents would be less that the ‘full 50′ margin that druggists had been used to, and at the same time they felt it was an invitation by Hood for his wares to be sold at the lower price in dry goods stores and at fairs.

The situation was certainly complex and probably beyond the scope of a brief blog posting like this to explore satisfactorily; I would note though that it is certainly amusing to peruse some of the vitriol to be found in the pages of the American Druggist (1891), Proceedings of the American Pharmaceutical Association (1892), etc, where Hood’s plan was called ‘the ruination of the trade’–and even more amusing to read a published response to the druggists’ outcry from Siegel, Cooper & Co., the gargantuan (by the day’s standards) department store on State St. in Chicago:

Let us tell you, gentlemen, that we have bought up something like $25,000 worth of patent medicines.  We have paid for them too.  You are getting too much profit on your concoctions anyhow.  We help the people to them at a price which seems nearer right to us.  NOW STOP US IF YOU DARE.

For his part, Hood tried to calm the waters and defend his own difficult position, reminding retail druggists that he had once run a shop as well and understood their situation:

One great difficulty with us has been (in one way a misfortune and in another a good fortune) that the demand for Hood’s Sarsaparilla has been so great, that our preparation has been used by department stores as an inducement to draw other trade to a greater extent than any other single preparation, and while we do not sell department stores they apparently have no difficulty in getting goods and selling them often at less than our rebate prices, thereby proving the source of vexation to us and to the entire retail trade in their vicinity, and the unfortunate point of this is that we individually and alone are absolutely unable with a business of the magnitude of Hood’s Sarsaparilla to control and prevent their getting these supplies.  We say this after making strenuous efforts to govern the sale of Hood’s Sarsaparilla without permanent success.

But there was another changing dynamic in the world of medicine other than the economics briefly discussed above.  The old world of nostrums and patent medicines was giving way to a newer, more scientific pharmacy.  As B.F. Buchanan put it in an Editorial comment of the Western Druggist (1891):

If these preparations will meet the demands of the drug business, then of course the druggists of to-day can step down and out or go into the grocery and dry goods business and hire a cheap boy or girl to hand out the cure-alls from the medicine department; and that is just where this class of medicines ought to go.  Druggists themselves are responsible for most all this trouble.  If they would unanimously resolve all such preparations out of their business and not allow their names used in any manner in connection with them, they would soon become a thing of the past and we could go forward in legitimate, scientific and profitable pharmacy, hand in hand with the legitimate practice of medicine, and the next generation would rise up and call us blessed.

Although Hood’s preparation had already been derided as ‘molasses and water’ in the drug periodicals, it was a later and more thorough inventory that would spell the end for his Sarsaparilla and many other similar patent medicines.

It may be useful to provide the briefest of sketches about Sarsaparilla.  The name Sarsaparilla comes from the Spanish ‘zarza’ + ‘parilla’, meaning something like ‘thorny lil vine’.  And indeed that is a good general description of the plant.  Sarsaparilla could refer to a number of different species and is (to this today) commonly conflated with Sassafrass.  The medicinally active Sarsaparilla came from Central and South America.  It was probably used by native cultures before the arrival of Europeans.  The Spanish used it starting c. 1530 for ‘venereal complaint’.  It slowly fell into disfavor but starting in the late 18th century saw a comeback, in part by Sir William Fordyce who reccomended it as a companion medicine to mercury.  In 1845 its resurgence was noted, and it was listed as a useful application mostly for ’secondary syphilis’, but also chronic rheumatism, scrofulous affections, certain cutaneous diseases and other general health problems.  Since it’s precise function on the body was not known, it was called an ‘alterative’.  According to The dispensatory of the United States of America by George Bacon Wood and Franklin Bache (1845), Sarsaparilla was considered to have a therapeutic effect, but since the quality of extracts depended on freshness, quality of source material, and proper preparation, it was unlikely that store-bought Sarsaparilla extracts would be of any value.

As for why Sarsaparilla was such a popular name for proprietaries, that’s an interesting thing to think about.  Maybe because it was a memorable word.  Maybe because it had been classed as an ‘alterative‘ so it was easy to make the claim that it was a general blood purifier.

By the early 20th century, Sarsaparilla had again fallen out of favor in the world of medicine.  Earlier research into its active components was dropped.  The 1911 Encyclopedia Brittanica entry on Sarsaparilla bluntly states that the plant is “pharmacologically inert and therapeutically useless”.  The 1906 Pure Food and Drug Act was a federal law that would severely limit both the claims and the ingredients of the patent drug makers, on the heels of a muck-raking expose in Collier’s Weekly by Samuel Hopkins Adams called “The Great American Fraud”.

The American Medical Association, in Nostrums and quackery (Vol. 1 1912)  slammed proprietary Sarsaparilla formulations as being totally ineffectual for their intended ailments.  Citing a 1911 report from the Connecticut State Agricultural Experiment Station, nine different proprietary brands were found to contain ‘yellow dock, stillingia, burdock, licorice, sassafras, mandrake, buckthorn, senna, black cohosh, pokeroot, wintergreen, cascara sagrada, cinchona bark, prickly ash, alcohol, glycerin and iodids of potassium and iron.’  The point made here was that the potassium iodide, the alcohol, and the senna and cascara sagrada would all have more ‘potent’ (in the sense of noticeable) actions, and that the amount of Sarsaparilla was unlikely to be therapeutic.  Hood’s product was shown to be 18 percent alcohol and “contained 4.4 grains of potassium iodid per fluidounce”.

Six years later, 1918, and the Hood Company was charged with misbranding the Sarsaparilla extract.  “Federal chemists reported that the product was a mixture of alcohol (16 1/2 per cent.) and water, containing about 0.90 per cent. of potassium iodid, 5.5 per cent. of sugars, 6.5 per cent. of vegetable extractives, which bore indications of the presence of sarsaparilla, licorice and a laxative drug resembling senna.  The preparation was sold under the claim that it was a remedy for “scrofula”, eczema, “cancerous humors”, “catarrh”, rheumatism, “female weakness,” consumption, dropsy, varicose veins, and various other conditions.  These claims were declared false and fraudulent, and the company was fined $50.”

C.I. Hood died about five years later.

A little side-note here on ole’ Charles Ira before we wrap this up.  His other passion was raising Jersey cows.  He had bought some farmlands in 1890 around Lowell and when he attended the World’s Columbian Exposition at Chicago in 1893, he purchased five dairy cows from the ‘great dairy contest’.  Though his farm had started as a hobby, it soon become profitable for him and he became the country’s premiere breeder of Jersey cows:  His livestock won upwards of 600 ribbons and awards, including the grand championship at the St. Louis Exposition in 1904.  By 1907, his herd of Jersey cattle was up to 350 head.  He sold the milk and cream in Lowell, and shipped the butter to the Adams House in Boston.  He also raised Berkshire swine.  And as we might expect, he formulated and sold animal remedies.

This outline of Hood’s life mostly via:

Massachusetts of today: a memorial of the state, historical and biographical (1892), Lowell: the mill city by the Lowell Historical Society (2005), History of Lowell and its people, Volume 2 by Frederick William Coburn (1920)

Thanks for sticking around, and hopefully more information about the playbill on the back of the card soon!  Stay tuned…

The playbill reads:

FOREPAUGH’S GREAT SHOW

Immediately after the regular ring performance a Grand

C-O-N-C-E-R-T

Will be given by some of the very best artists known to the variety profession.

LYNCH & EUSON,
In their Celebrated Irish Specialties.

PHIL GIBBONS,
The Unequaled Ethiopian Personator.

SALLIE ST. CLAIR,
The Dashing Song and Dance Lady.

DILKS & GRAY,
The Wonderful Musical Mokes, presenting a very artistic feature.

HENRIETTA CORBETT,
Refined Vocalist.

SADIE CONNELLY,
Artistic Song and Dance

McMANUS & CROWLEY,
Wrestlers.

JAMES DONOHUE,
Clog and Jig Dancer.

Performance to finish with the laughable sketch,

FUN IN A BARBER SHOP.

THE PECULIAR
Combination, proportion and preparation of Hood’s Sarsaparilla give it peculiar curative powers, different from and unequalled by any other medicine.  It accomplishes cures where other medicines entirely fail.  It is the most popular and successful medicine before the public or scrofula, salt rheum, and all diseases of the blood, dyspepsia, headache, catarrh, rheumatism, etc.  Sold by all druggists.  $1; six for $5.  Prepared only by C. I. HOOD & CO., Apothecaries, Lowell, Mass.