Updated: Feb 27
Starkey & Palen sold air to the terminally ill – it was Alsina Richards’ last hope.
She was desperate and scared.
Each breath she took felt like it was stolen, scraping up nothing but bloody phlegm from an empty chest with nothing left to give. Cough pains sizzled across her lungs that long ago had filled softly and emptied effortlessly.
With every passing day, she became weaker. The once vibrant woman who did housework, helped her husband, visited friends, and went shopping had dissolved into a fragile, feeble weakling for whom each movement took far more out of her than any benefit she got back.
As the disease set in more aggressively, it seemed to be consuming her from the inside – she was becoming emaciated and skeleton-like, the type that people across the street pointed at, whispered about, and walked away from, quickly.
Her skin became paler, as if the very lifeblood was being drained from her body. In a way, it really was: when she coughed, there was blood spatter in her handkerchief. There was nothing left about her that suggested life, certainly not a future.
Weaker, paler, thinner, sicker. She knew she was dying.
Mrs. Alsina Richards was 33 years old and terminally sick with tuberculosis.
In her day, 1880, the disease was most often called “consumption” because of the hallmark symptom of emaciation. It was, far and away, the leading killer in the 19th century and unlike most diseases that attacked children and old people, it most often struck young adults, like Alsina.
Infection
Alsina Richards was just about as unassuming as any other young Victorian woman in rural America. Her most distinctive feature may have been her name – no one seemed to know how to spell it – she appears in records as Elzina, Alcina, Alsina, and Alsona. She lived with her parents at their small farm until she was married. In 1877, at 30 years old, she married Alphronso Richards, three years her junior. Like her parents, he was of modest means, pouring concrete for a living. A scant four months after their wedding, Alsina gave birth to a stillborn daughter; it was the only pregnancy she would ever have.
On 16 June 1880, Alphronso and Alsina were enumerated together for the first time in their own home in East Pepperell, northern Massachusetts; Nashua, New Hampshire was just over the border. Although some neighbors were found to be afflicted with such troubles as rheumatism, measles, and dyspepsia, Alsina was not among those listed as “sick or temporarily disabled” – but she knew there was something very, very wrong with her. About six months before the census she was trying to find a cure for sickness that had come over her so quickly, out of nowhere. It wasn’t a casual concern; it was a deep-seated fear of what was taking over deep in her lungs.
![Stamped Starkey & Palen advertising envelope, cancelled PHILADELPHIA, PA, 17 DEC [1881], 2AM; addressed to Mrs. A. [Alsina] S. Richards, East Pepperell, Mass. (author's collection)](https://static.wixstatic.com/media/7441e9_b4083b8208f946a2a0afbaa2346b0a24~mv2.jpg/v1/fill/w_980,h_616,al_c,q_85,usm_0.66_1.00_0.01,enc_avif,quality_auto/7441e9_b4083b8208f946a2a0afbaa2346b0a24~mv2.jpg)
Consolation
Alsina wrote to several women whom she had read about in promotional materials for a lung remedy. She was curious and guardedly hopeful that the women really existed and whether they truly benefited from the remedy. These questions were the common concerns shared by other sick women all over America; even the manufacturer acknowledged that many cautiously wondered about the testimonials, just like Alsina:
… they write to know if there really is any such person ... or is it only an advertising dodge? … the simple truth about [the remedy] would be the best credentials it could have; hence we were not tempted to invent testimonials, nor to steal genuine ones, nor to romance on any.
Alsina didn’t have money or time to waste on a bogus medicine, so she was determined to find out if she could really believe the testimonials that appeared for Starkey & Palen’s Compound Oxygen, an unusual product that was grabbing a lot of attention and gaining popularity. To protect the writers’ privacy, the manufacturer rarely included their names, but told readers that “Any one, upon application, will be furnished with the exact address of any … of these cases.” So Alsina had to write to the manufacturer to get the testimonial writers’ addresses, wait for the reply, then write and send letters to the testimonial writers and wait again, hoping they would reply … all while she got sicker and weaker.
The women’s responses to Alsina, dated from 15 February 1880 to 20 November 1881, assured her that they had, indeed, written them and were not distorted or rewritten by the medicine maker. Mrs. A. G. Fourquereau of San Marcos, Texas, began her postcard response to Alsina, “I take pleasure in stating that the testimonial … with my name attached, is genuine, and was sent to [the manufacturer] without solicitation from them.” In her postcard response, Julia Barnes of Carmel, New York, wrote, “Yes, my letters … are just as I write them” and Mrs. E. L. Miller of Beecher City, Illinois, also told Alsina that her statements in the publication were true.
Each response Alsina received was handwritten, further making them seem very much like personal notes from good friends and all of them asked their new friend Alsina to write back. Sallie R. Fisher of Irvington, Illinois, wrote to Alsina like a dear friend and fellow sufferer, full of empathy:
Your card was received last night. I hasten to reply, I know just how you feel in regard to hearing of others being cured. I thought if I could know of one [who] had benefited as low as I was … it would revive my spirits, [emphasis added]
Sallie had written to another testimonial giver, just like Alsina had done with her; and so the correspondence read like chain mail, the women who were writing to reassure Alsina had once upon a time been in Alsina’s situation, writing to someone else who suffered from a lung disease. Alsina valued the correspondence, keeping five postcards and two letters from the women who responded to her pleas for help. The personal notes validated the printed testimonials, allowing Alsina to trust the promotional stories of the ladies’ harrowing ordeals, use of the remedy, and consequent restoration of health. Several personal descriptions of women who were suffering from consumption must have resonated with Alsina – they really did know just how she felt:
Julia Barnes told her, “I used to think last Winter, oh, if I could only stop coughing one day.” Vienna Douglas of Huntsville, Alabama, knew she had consumption; her testimonial in one of the promotional booklets must have been what triggered Alsina to write to her to verify her existence and her story:
I … was hollow-chested, with deep-seated pain in my lungs and great difficulty breathing. That dread disease, consumption, had been coming on me for more than fifteen years. [I] was so reduced [in strength] that I was unable to attend to my household duties – hardly able to go from room to room – with the expectation of myself and family and friends that I would not live many months. [emphasis in original]
Similarly, another consumption testimonial by the apparently wealthy Texan, Mrs. Anna Givhan Fourquereau, (described as the wife of a “gentleman of elegant nature” in the 1880 census), was the likely reason that Alsina wrote to her,
She had been coughing for two years, with occasional hemorrhage. .. having fever all the time, expectorating profusely, so much so that she could not sleep at night, having night sweats, and reduced so in flesh and strength that she could barely leave her bed. [emphasis in original]
What Alsina did not know was that despite endorsing Starkey & Palen’s Compound Oxygen as “the most wonderful remedy in the world for sick lungs,” Mrs. Fourquereau died at 37, just a little more than a year after responding to her. Consumption was no respecter of wealth or social status. The only protection from the disease would have to be a medical miracle.
Sensation
Alsina Richards had learned about these ladies from the promotional materials of the Starkey & Palen Company of Philadelphia, the makers of Compound Oxygen, the product that all the women she heard back from were swearing performed miracles on their medical miseries. Despite the fact that naysayers from the medical fraternity called magnetized oxygen compounds “the quintessence of bosh,” the fairly new product was in high demand by the time Alsina Richardson was in desperate need of a miracle.
Emaciated by the consumption, Sallie Fisher and Julia Barnes happily regained weight after using Compound Oxygen; Sallie went up to 172 pounds and Julia to 150; plus, she noted, the pain in her lower left lung left her after just a half hour after her first treatment with the Oxygen, “and I have not felt it since.” Vienna Douglass called the stuff her “life preserver.” By using it regularly, she was once again able to walk to and from town “and is in a great many respects vastly superior to a dead woman.” [emphasis added. Although this phrase was clearly meant to be tongue-in-cheek, it reads as one of the strangest endorsements in my forty-plus years of research on 19th century medicines!]
As was the case with many patent medicine success stories, Compound Oxygen was not the invention of those who made it a big seller. It was invented by a Dr. Harrison J. Hartwell of Philadelphia in 1867, but he transferred his entire interest in the business to George R. Starkey, A.M., M.D., in 1870. By that time, others in New York City, Chicago, and Omaha were advertising their own therapeutic products also named Compound Oxygen, but only the version sold by Dr. Starkey was successfully promoted and sold across the country.
Prior to building their oxygen empire, Starkey and Palen had been non-practicing physicians. George Rogers Starkey had been teaching in a homeopathic medicine school until poor health forced him to stop, and Gilbert Ezekiel Palen worked as a chemist in a tannery before the two men became partners in the Compound Oxygen venture. The principles of using air medicinally fit perfectly into Dr. Starkey’s homeopathic mindset; homeopathy favored only the smallest, most diluted doses of medicine until it seemed to many like there was nothing there – just like air.
Dr. Starkey considered it strategically critical for the public to believe his remedy was just full of air; even the trademark he registered adamantly insisted in big, bold letters: “NOT A DRUG”. It was only oxygen and nitrogen infused in water, he explained, “the two elements which make up common or atmospheric air, in such proportion as to render it much richer in the vital or life-giving element”; then he somehow magnetized the air then infused it in water and bottled it. When inhaled, the Compound Oxygen supposedly stimulated the nerves, “giving energy to the body.” This magnetized air was said to be so energizing that a certain clairvoyant was unable to slip into a clairvoyant trance because she was too stimulated. Like coffee and cocaine, Compound Oxygen kept its users invigorated and all aflutter.
“The cases of consumption – confirmed phthisis – which the Compound Oxygen has cured can be counted by scores,“ Starkey & Palen’s literature promised, and Alsina’s postcard friends urged her to join their pilgrimage of converts to the miraculous compound:
“I hope you will not delay …” – Sallie R. Fisher
“Hoping you will give it a fair trial” – Grace Davis
“I hope you will get it and take it.” – Julia Barnes
“I do hope you will feel safe in using it as it is the onley [sic] thing that will restore the Lungs.” – Vienna T. Douglass
Every day was getting incrementally worse than the previous day for Alsina. As she exchanged letters and postcards about Starkey & Palen’s Compound Oxygen and studied its literature, she was trying to make the wisest, most conscientious decision possible, but like so many others in her situation, she really just hoped for a miracle.
Decision
Dr. Starkey knew there were many, like Alsina, in poor health, desperate for a miracle in his bottles, so he tried to temper their wild-eyed expectations and even admitted that sometimes his product would not work:
Do not expect a miracle to be wrought in your case. Although some cases here reported are marvelous in the rapidity with which they have marched health-ward; still many of the most satisfactory and even brilliant cases have been slower paced.
… more than eighty percent of these victims could have been well people to-day had they made TIMELY USE of the Compound Oxygen. Note the emphasis laid upon the phrase, timely use. … Not in all cases would we recommend it, with the idea of holding out a promise of cure. [emphases added]
Dr. Starkey’s pragmatism and cautious confession about his remedy’s limitations might have been the sign of an honest medicine maker, but it also gave him plausible deniability if things didn’t work for a customer, even to the point of death.
Alsina was very sick but her postcard friends urged her to try the Compound Oxygen. It’s also possible that her own doctors had told her she had a chance if she took their own prescriptions to cure consumption, but she took the leap of faith and chose Starkey & Palen’s Oxygen Compound. It was her last gasp of hope.
Sick of sickness and scared of dying, Alsina Richards made the hefty $15 investment in a two-month supply of Compound Oxygen home treatment and hoped for her own miracle, despite Dr. Starkey’s public disclaimer.
Invention
At first Dr. Starkey made the oxygen treatment available for those visiting his Philadelphia office, but soon after buying out Dr. Hartwell's business, he realized the Compound Oxygen could go national if he also sold it as a kit for home treatment.
Unlike most other medicine makers, his whole business focused on lung disease and his medicinal repertoire consisted only of his two lung remedies, Compound Oxygen and Oxygenaqua (a liquid form of the magnetized oxygen compound that could be swallowed rather than inhaled). Sure, he threw in claims that the magnetized oxygen products cured other parts of the body of other things – dyspepsia (indigestion), diabetes, headaches, sometimes paralysis, rheumatism, and kidney disease, and perhaps most obscurely, spermatorrhea (involuntarily ejaculation). “We have proved that a number of diseases which … have been assigned to the category of ‘incurables’ no longer belong there,” the Starkey & Palen literature crowed, but virtually all of their advertising focused on the benefits of the magnetized oxygen for diseased lungs.
Dr. Starkey saw a nation full of potential customers with corset-constricted lungs and inescapable sickness forming in the stagnant, smoky air of factories and homes. He told the consumptives, asthmatics, and victims of pneumonia, bronchitis, or other lung diseases his Compound Oxygen was a three-pronged remedy that: (1) increased oxygen in the lungs; (2) purified the blood of poisons that collected there from disease and pollution; and (3) energized the nerves and nerve centers (he liked to compare the nervous system to a galvanic battery with electricity sparking through it), bringing vitality to the person.
When someone at home received their two-month supply, they received two boxes: a larger one containing a cobalt blue bottle of Compound Oxygen and a clear glass bottle (Dr. Starkey referred to it as “the white bottle”) with Oxygenaqua. A paper cover, illustrated with the two medicine bottles and either images of Drs. Starkey and Palen or a woman using the inhaler, was glued to the wooden box. The box was hinged for the bottles’ storage and reuse.
The smaller box was constructed in the same way and contained what looked like a little laboratory. There was a clear glass inhaler bottle with a rubber stopper and two rubber corks in the top, and a set of attachments: two glass elbow straws, two nasal tubes, a tiny bottle, a vial, and a few other glass fittings. The whole lot must have made the user feel something like a pharmacist, preparing the medicine for their own cure. The label covering the box showed the inhaler bottle sitting in a tin cup filled with hot water, per the directions – tin cup not included – the customer had to get their own. This inhaler kit only needed to be purchased once since it could be used over and over, so the Compound Oxygen was sold separately.
The instructions for use were pretty basic but important to be followed exactly since any misstep by the junior pharmacist could mean their own demise. Water was to be poured into the inhaler bottle up to the line embossed on the glass, then the measured dose of Compound Oxygen was added, the chosen breathing attachments inserted into the rubber stopper, and the whole unit immersed in the tin cup full of hot water “as hot as a cook can bear her finger in it”. Then the pharmacist became the patient and inhaled the vapors created by the heated mixture of water, magnetized oxygen, and nitrogen - it operated on the same principle as a hookah pipe. Inhalation treatments were done twice a day and increased in one-minute increments every other day from a starting treatment of two minutes to a maximum of six minutes after several days. Each subsequent dose would be stronger because more Compound Oxygen would be poured in to replace the liquid that had been inhaled and otherwise evaporated.
Alsina followed every step precisely and she inhaled.
Over and over.
Devastation
It wasn’t working – she continued to spiral towards her death and she knew it. Panicked, she wrote to Starkey and Palen. She told them how sick she was with consumption and apparently pleaded for
hope – perhaps there was something she was doing wrong or something else she could do. What she received in return, twelve days before Christmas, was the hardest letter she had ever had to read:
Philadelphia, Pa. 12 Mo 13 1881
Mrs A. S. Richards
Dear Madam,
Yours of 12-9 is received and its contents are carefully noted. We are sorry to be obliged to say that we cannot recommend the Compound Oxygen as being able to do anything more than to make you comfortable. You have indeed been a victim to wicked charlatanry. The disease has made too great progress to be checked.
We remain
Very Respectfully,
Starkey & Palen
Starkey & Palen confirmed her worst fear – she was doomed – their medicine would not cure her. What “wicked charlatanry” she had been subjected to is not clear without seeing what Alsina had written to them. Perhaps she had explained that local doctors had wasted valuable time earlier in her illness, prescribing other medicines or instructions of no remedial value. Possibly, but unlikely, the phrase might have been referring to the zealous testimonial writers she corresponded with who overpromised a cure from the Compound Oxygen that never came. The somber letter was accompanied by two gratuitous pamphlets containing more information and advice that would never help her.
There is one more piece of correspondence in the Alsina Richards collection. One year after the heartbreaking response from Starkey & Palen, she received another letter from them in response to her request for their charity. She apparently told them that she and her husband were financially on hard times and could not afford their medicine, which she had apparently continued to take because it provided some measure of relief even as the disease continued its destruction. Starkey & Palen responded, “From your representations of pecuniary disability we will send you a 2 [month] Home Treatment for the Ten Dollars.” [emphasis added; it implies that she requested they discount the cost to ten dollars and they were agreeing to her terms. Saving five bucks may not seem like a lot today, but $15 in 1882 would be $461 in 2024 USD and $10 back then would be $307 now; when’s the last time your pharmacist agreed to a $154 discount on your medicine?] Ironically, it came with another booklet, “Unsolicited Testimonials,” but the time for striking up a correspondence with them was past.
Alsina S. Richards died 22 January 1884 of pulmonary tuberculosis (the death certificate called it phthisis); she was buried in the Pepperell Cemetery and her husband joined her in death 22 years later – he also died of “pulmonary phthisis” after being afflicted with it for just eight months.
Conclusion
Alsina and other users of Starkey & Palen’s Compound Oxygen died sad, shortened lives despite their desperate hopes for recovery, but ironically, the medicine enjoyed healthy sales, growth in distribution, energetic advertising, and four more decades of life. A few years after Alsina’s death, Starkey & Palen put out a series of four trade cards featuring four people from very different corners of life with Compound Oxygen the one ingredient that tied them together. There was one card of an accomplished businessman, apparently a railroad tycoon, who was taking a break during his busy day to take his inhalation treatment of the Compound Oxygen; a second card showed an old woman relaxing at home, happily taking her Compound Oxygen treatment as well, while her cat played with a ball of yarn on the floor; both of these older people were healthy, at ease, and capably managing their health by using the Starkey & Palen products. In contrast, the third card was a close-up of an athletic, muscular young man sailing his boat while holding up a bottle of Starkey & Palen’s Oxygenaqua, implying that just a sip of the stuff was easy treatment for a man on the ocean.
The last card would likely have been the one Alsina would have stared at the longest, comparing her own decrepit health to the subject of this fourth card: the young, wasp-waisted woman was promoting the Compound Oxygen along with the inhaler bottle on the table, ready for use. She was stunningly attractive, vivaciously healthy and self-assured, dressed in daring clothing, reclining seductively, and smiling coyly – it was the perfect “painted lady” portrait, worthy of hanging over the back bar of any saloon. The unquestionably healthy young lady seemed to be taunting consumption, tightly corseted and looking like she would be more comfortable in a dance hall than a sanatorium for consumptives. Oh, to be young, healthy, and full of life – but Alsina Richards was only able to dream of such things before she died at 37 years old, miserably sick for at least her last four years, robbed of life and joy. She never had a chance; there was no miracle for Alsina.
Lynn Massachusetts history - History of medicine - 19th-Century Health Remedies - Vintage Medical Ephemera - 19th-century medicine
Updated: Feb 25
From the Civil War until the end of the 19th century, he was a mystical clairvoyant healer, performing surgery in the dark or with his eyes closed. Many sought him out to remove cancers and other things that regular doctors couldn’t fix – and it made him lots of money. Looking down our 21st century noses it would be easy to just dismiss him as a scheming fraud and laugh at his patients as ignorant fools. But that’s not history. Come walk in his world and find out what really happened.
This is the story of Orrin Fitzgerald, born in March 1842. His father was a carpenter of modest means and the family lived in the quiet town of Dexter, deep in the woodland interior of central Maine, along the banks of Lake Wassookeag and far from any major town or city – hardly the classic setting for fame and fortune.
News and entertainment took time to reach Dexter in the 1840s and 50s. A slow stream of itinerant preachers, professors, and healers trickled through Maine’s tiny towns and villages like Dexter with their sermons, lectures, and cures, and catch-penny menageries and magicians occasionally stopped by to entertain with their oddities and tricks. Newspapers from Maine’s distant cities revealed the lives and doings of people all over the country and the world whom they had never seen but who were out there, nonetheless. Articles also shared that some scientists claimed their telescopes had found life on the moon and Mars and their microscopes had discovered another whole universe of creatures living in their water, food and bodies.
The newspapers also reported the rising tensions before the war and displayed advertisements of messengers from calmer realms – spiritualists and clairvoyants. The Fox Sisters of Rochester, New York, had begun the modern era of spiritualism in the late 1840s, allegedly communicating with the spirits of the dead, yet another level of life invisible to the naked eye. Fascination with the invisibles had even entered the White House, with the First Lady, Mary Todd Lincoln, conducting seances. Life was so much bigger than the small world of Dexter; so much more complex, exciting, and mystifying. Knowledge was being tested and remeasured every day.
Maine newspapers in the 1850s included ads for a clairvoyant Indian doctress, a husband-and-wife team of clairvoyant healers, one that combined their mystical skill with electricity, and others offering a host of clairvoyant medicines that “produce the most wonderful and cheering effects.” When you’re sick, fevered, and in awful pain, it’s hard to resist the promise of a remedy that’s “wonderful and cheering,” regardless of the science behind it.
One physician employed a clairvoyant woman for her unusual diagnostic ability: she had the power to mentally “enter the interior part of the body, tell the most minute disorder, what and where the complaint is seated, and prescribe a remedy, and where the medicine can be found.” In a similar case, a woman in Falmouth, Maine, gratefully gave her testimonial for a clairvoyant physician who cured her. The sick woman had told disbelieving physicians for years that she felt “as though something was eating me up inside, but they all laughed at the idea of anything of the kind, and said I was nervous.” The clairvoyant, however, confirmed her suspicion; with her sixth sense she could see something brown inside the sick lady, looking “like a caterpillar as much as anything.” The healer then warned the sickly woman that she would be very sick when she took the medicine, and her prediction was as spot-on as her diagnosis, “I vomited for three days, and the third day I threw up something that resembled a lizard, and a horrible looking thing, about three inches long, about as large [a]round as my finger, and I think I owe my life to Mrs. Manchester” [the clairvoyant physician]. One ad estimated that “more than half of the towns and villages of New England” had people who had been cured by clairvoyant healing, “monuments of its mysterious skill.”
Insanity or Clairvoyant Genius?
Like the magicians, spiritualists, and travelling patent medicine showmen, clairvoyants had three audiences: the absolute believers, the equally adamant disbelievers, and the curious – probably the largest group – who balanced their wary skepticism with hope that there might be something to it after all. The Fitzgeralds had the debate thrust into their own home: as a teenager, young Orrin showed signs of “unusual healing power.” It was unnerving for his family who were “embarrassed by him as he walked along and suddenly went into a trance.” On some of these occasions his language became a halting, garbled form of Pidgin English, mixed with Indian words. Maybe it was all just teenage dramatic hijinks or the delusions of a daydreamer, or even a condition now called Dissociative Trance Disorder (DTD). But when it was happening, 150 years ago, it was unnerving and embarrassing and his family didn’t know how to deal with their oddball son. His father, “thinking his son insane,” sent his teenage son six miles away in “the wilds of” Garland to “refine his ability” with the help of a farmer there who also had a reputation for being able to reach into the invisible world. Orrin’s first experiences of applying clairvoyance to doctoring occurred in Garland when he was 17, “and the excitement caused by his cures at that time was most intense.” It was said he felt compelled to walk long distances to visit sick people who hadn’t even sent for him.
By 1860, 18-year-old Orrin was back to living in his father’s home, picking up odd jobs as a day laborer, but things changed quickly over the next few years. Orrin channeled his clairvoyant abilities into healing and had significant success. By 1863, the 21-year-old Orrin was a prime candidate for the wartime draft, but he paid the $300 commutation fee ($7,465 in 2024 USD), buying his way out of military service. His father’s entire real and personal property had amounted to only $900, so it’s unlikely he could pay the bill. In three years, Orrin had ascended from day laborer to clairvoyant physician and avoided the risk of war. For the next three years he paid the additional wartime taxes levied upon his occupation as a physician and in the year after the war was over, his tax payment also covered the piano he had purchased.
In an 1869 newspaper ad he was promoting himself as “THE GREATEST WONDER OF THE NINETEENTH CENTURY!! Acknowledged by all to be the GREATEST LIVING CLAIRVOYANT, PHYSICIAN AND SURGEON.” It was improbable that he could establish a large enough clientele to match his ambition along the backroads of Dexter and the wilds of Garland, so he joined in the traveling life of so many other irregular healers, but his ad spun that negative into a positive: “It was with the greatest reluctance that the Dr. was induced to leave his extensive home practice and travel; knowing that a prejudice exists against traveling Physicians.” By 1870 he had accumulated an estate of $6,000 ($143,595 in 2024 USD); he was, indeed, doing very well.
Orrin’s healing methods were the quintessential repertoire of a clairvoyant physician: he kept his eyes closed when examining patients or preparing medicine and performed surgery in the dark or sometimes when blindfolded; it was even rumored that he picked his medicinal plants at night. Darkness was the clairvoyant’s friend; it was said they could see into bodies, the future, and other mysterious realms – all places where the normal-sighted were hopelessly blind.
Young Dr Fitzgerald had quickly honed his clairvoyant diagnostic skills into a dramatically simple procedure; he could learn all he needed to know with the touch of a finger and a listening ear:
Dr. Fitzgerald always touched the forehead with his finger and a report would be heard that sounded almost like a pistol. (… one touch on the forehead and you could hear the snap of an electric shock all over the room.) Then, placing his ear over the heart, he would locate the trouble in an instant. With this diagnosis he never failed, and although all sorts of traps were placed for him he was never caught.
His reputation for performing wonderful cures followed him in his travels like a king’s royal mantle elegantly shuffling behind in his wake. He had quickly mastered the clairvoyant’s craft and finessed how to convert onlookers into disciples:
… a woman in Nashua [New Hampshire]… was a severe sufferer from some internal trouble. The doctors of that city failed to discover the nature of the disease and then Fitzgerald happened along and was called into consultation. Instantly he declared that she had a hard substance in her lung. Ordering everybody from the room and darkening the windows he performed a surgical operation and drew from the woman’s lung a bone nearly four inches in length. This wonderful operation was performed in the dark and without any assistance or pain to the patient. Although with no training as a surgeon he performed many marvelous operations and always in the dark or with his eyes closed.
In the town of Canaan, Maine, a man had his toe cut off and the doctors threw it away. When it came to Dr. Fitzgerald’s attention the next day, he ordered the discarded toe to be found. He then called for a needle and thread and then instructed to have all the gas lamps extinguished. When they were lit again, “perhaps three minutes later, … the toe was discovered neatly sewed in place, and the doctor was putting on his overcoat ready to depart.”
Appointments with the clairvoyant doctor were executed in rapid-fire succession, taking only moments for him to psychically diagnose and resolve, either by surgery or some of his medicine. In June 1873 he introduced his first bottled medicine, Dr. Fitzgerald’s Life Invigorator (the name appeared on the bottle label and the subtitle, Clairvoyant Discovery was embossed on the glass, along with the doctor’s name and his residence, Dexter, Maine) and his advertisement for the stuff was as enthusiastic as his claims for the medicine itself,
“YOUNG AGAIN. The “LIFE INVIGORATOR” that is now being introduced by me … Gives Youth and Buoyancy to the Body and Mind, Restores your Memory, … Gives Elasticity to the Step, and, in fact, makes the sufferer. HAPPY! COURAGEOUS!! SOUND!!! … I do claim to have discovered the secret of Renewing Health, Cheerfulness and Strength … [emphasis added]
There were certainly those disbelievers who tried to expose him through various acts of trickery, but he could apparently detect chicanery as clearly as cancer. An observer noted that in a village hotel where he was receiving patients for the day, a man came to his office appearing very much like a hopeless cripple. His legs were bandaged and he hobbled in on crutches. “No sooner had he crossed the threshold of the room than the doctor caught him by the neck, whirled him around and kicked him clear into the street …saying, ‘There, damn you, don’t ever attempt any of your tricks on me again!’”
The very next patient who came to the room was just the opposite – the very picture of health and strength. The doctor touched his forehead with a snap of his finger, then placed his ear on the man’s breast and stated somberly: “I am sorry, but it is too late. I can do nothing for you.” The unfortunate man was later reported to have heart disease and died shortly thereafter.
A Dandy Doctor
If he had just settled in on being a clairvoyant physician, Orrin Fitzgerald would have slipped off into history as nothing more than another colorful footnote like the rest – one of the many traveling clairvoyants who made a few dollars at the local village hotel before moving on to the next town. But he was a savvy, multi-dimensional businessman. He had two inventions patented in his career, the first being a wooden capsule to protect the necks of bottles during shipment and handling. He also established two very impressive business ventures in Massachusetts and a third in Waterville, Maine. But what really set him apart in the eyes of the public was his flair for showmanship. Panache, not inventiveness, business acumen, or even clairvoyance, was what set him apart from all the other clairvoyant healers.
Dr. Fitzgerald made every effort to stand out and to be remembered; for example, he dressed ostentatiously, somewhere between a dandy and peacock. When he was called to the governor’s mansion to treat his housekeeper (whom the governor’s own physician had failed to heal), he wore a magnificent sealskin coat, brightly colored silk stockings and patent leather shoes. Governor Coburn was well-known for dressing plainly and made a “subtle but rather caustic comment” about Fitzgerald’s outfit, but the clairvoyant doctor replied with a bill of $1,500 for his visit.
He had the best carriages and horses that money could buy – a stable of 20 horses with impeccable bloodlines, faultless form, and high spirits; one was a prize racehorse that he purchased for $7,000 ($261,000 in 2024 USD). An 1869 visit to a sleigh factory caused a newspaper reporter to froth in envy over the new sleigh being built for Dr. Fitzgerald: it was painted imperial green with white runners and gold and carmine pinstriping and trimmed with brown silk and velvet. The reporter declared it was “rich and elegant in the extreme” and excelled in beauty the famous sleigh that had been exhibited at the state fair. “We feel very sure he will have by all odds, the finest turnout in the Pine Tree State.”
![Orrin Fitzgerald's 1873 patent for a bottle protector, a wooden block bored in the center to protect the neck from damage. INSET: Photo of the square-based CLAIRVOYANT DISCOVERY bottle, ca.1871, the shape of which was the pattern used for for the wooden collar patent. [Note: The fourth panel was unembossed for placement of the label, which bore the main product name, Dr. Fitzgerald's Invigorator.] (author's collection; photo by Daniel G. Lakatos.)](https://static.wixstatic.com/media/7441e9_d94ccadd0bf54c1a97e4fcec4164d96b~mv2.png/v1/fill/w_980,h_1364,al_c,q_90,usm_0.66_1.00_0.01,enc_avif,quality_auto/7441e9_d94ccadd0bf54c1a97e4fcec4164d96b~mv2.png)
Dr. Fitzgerald usually drove a four-horse team in single file with harnesses that matched their coloring so closely they looked almost unconnected to each other and the carriage: the black horse had a black harness; the spotted horse had a harness with spots that match the horse’s coat perfectly, and so on with the white horse and the chestnut-colored sorrel horse. Other times he had his uniformed Black coachman drove a team of four white or four black horses with gold-embellished harnesses. He also owned a splendid carriage with a calliope installed, making music as the horses moved along, “and such a spectacle was certain to attract the whole community. As an advertising genius the State of Maine has never seen his equal.” In 1871 an advance team for President Ulysees Grant scouted out the best hotels and restaurants to accommodate the nation’s leader when he was scheduled to tour the state and the came to Orrin Fitzgerald to ask for the use of his carriage and horse team. The doctor’s treasured carriage and team were polished and groomed for the president’s arrival. Cannons were fired when President Grant’s train arrived at the Bangor, Maine, train station. In ceremonial fashion, the doctor stepped out of his magnificent carriage as the war hero approached it, walking between rows of uniformed soldiers. A newspaper poignantly observed, “Aesculapius evacuated and Mars occupied. All the time of the Presidential stay did the high official ride in state, [while] the owner of all the elegance, on foot and undisguised, mingled with the common herd.”
![DR. FITZGERALD'S // IMPROVED // INVIGORATOR, ca. 1880. [Note that the "Z" in the doctor's name is reversed.] (Collection of Wyatt E. Brumfield II)](https://static.wixstatic.com/media/7441e9_aab15a555ce84a8a9476dd2fc0b76cda~mv2.png/v1/fill/w_331,h_760,al_c,q_85,enc_avif,quality_auto/7441e9_aab15a555ce84a8a9476dd2fc0b76cda~mv2.png)
People were thrilled when Dr. Fitzgerald arrived in town; word spread quickly. He was an empresario of flash and brass, shining brightest in the spotlight; a one-man traveling sensation. A Belfast, Maine, newspaper reported, “When the doctor drives out in his elegant barouche … all the town is agog with excitement, admiration, and wonder.”
The Face of Success
His advertising was as pretentiously unique and memorable as his clothing and transportation. Several of his newspaper ads were big and bold with his face prominently featured; it was his trademark, for all intents and purposes. One newspaper reporter called him “one of the best-looking men in the State.” He kept his face in the public eye everywhere – in his product packaging, newspaper ads, trade cards, and handbills:
His handbills are scattered as the snowflakes, and his strikingly handsome portraiture which adorns them has thus become as familiar as household words through the paper proclamations which bear healing on their wings. Printing ink has done much for the doctor …
Two of the doctor’s advertising trade cards still exist in quantities that hint at their prolific distribution. An octagonal trade card with his face imprinted in the center was used to promote his arrival in town in about 1892. Surviving examples of the card are always printed on brightly colored stock – yellow or orange. Among the vast array of rectangular cards with bucolic scenes and childlike humor, these octagonal placards were startling and arresting to the public and the army of picture-card collectors. Dr. Fitzgerald was ahead of his time: in the 1920s, brightly colored octagonal road signs stopped travelers in their tracks; just like these cards had been designed to do to potential customers some thirty years earlier.
The other surviving trade card, from 1880, was equally notable and unique in its own way. Its purpose was to announce Dr. Fitzgerald’s Improved Invigorator. It was executed in cartoon format with speech balloons, the front side showing the classic before-and-after images of an emaciated sick man, leaning on his cane, envying the robust, healthy man to his right who is enjoying a stroll with his lovely lady; his walking stick is held as a social marker rather than a crutch. The sick man asks the healthy one how he came to be so healthy, to which the healthy man tells him to go see his friend, Dr. Fitzgerald and get his Improved Invigorator. His lady friend chimes in, telling the reader to turn the card over to find Dr. Fitzgerald. (Ironically, behind the sidewalk banter there is a subliminal scene of a four-horse chaise being ridden by the doctor and driven by his driver, with spectators on the far side erupting in cheers for the vaunted clairvoyant healer.)
The reader is now irresistibly drawn to the other side of the card to find out the rest of Dr. Fitzgerald’s story. Here we see the mustached doctor under a tree, standing next to an emaciated, sickly man who is seated at the edge of his friend’s grave. His own coffin, labeled “WAITING,” lies nearby, but he won’t be needing it because he avoided death by half an hour! His friend died on June 2nd, 1880, at 11:45 PM, but the health of the seated man began to improve just minutes after his friend’s death, on June 3rd, 1880, at 12:15 AM. Seems that the clairvoyant doctor had improved his invigorator in time to save the seated man, but too late for the dead one – even the clairvoyant healer, with all his supernatural skills, couldn’t bring the dead back to life. This specific date and time may mark the actual moment that Orrin Fitzgerald finished improving his invigorator; if so, it may be the most specific record of a product’s creation in patent medicine history.
![Fitzgerald House still stands in Dexter Maine. [Note: home is privately owned.] (Photo from Google Maps.)](https://static.wixstatic.com/media/7441e9_28a1f550327846e5ae95214e600c9a5d~mv2.png/v1/fill/w_450,h_265,al_c,q_85,enc_avif,quality_auto/7441e9_28a1f550327846e5ae95214e600c9a5d~mv2.png)
In an amusing display of gallows humor, the dead man is reanimated, poking his head out of his coffin and saying to the gravedigger, “Say old sexton, I wish Fitzgerald had improved his invigorator half an hour sooner.” The gravedigger, looking tired of digging graves, replies unsympathetically, “Oh! Close the box.”
Once again the background paints a subliminal scene, first of the doctor’s fine carriage, horse team, and driver (without the doctor, who is now under the tree consulting with his patient); then up the hill are his mansion and the stables beyond. It is clearly identified as the “RESIDENCE OF DR. O. FITGERALD, DEXTER, ME.,” but the subliminal message was about the grandeur and success that his estate displays. The foreground scene of the doctor, patient, and cadaver were all about announcing his Improved Invigorator, but the addition of his estate and riding team in the background was all about his greatness. Pure pomposity. And he wasn’t close to done.
Nothing But the Best
When the traveling healers and clairvoyants arrived in town, they took up lodgings they could afford, which often meant seedy rooms in dodgy hotels, but not so for Orrin Fitzgerald. He booked himself in some of the best hotels the host towns offered; not only did he enjoy its creature comforts, but as the rooms he rented served as both his lodging and his place of business while in town, it was important to him that his clientele were suitably impressed that the handsome, popular, well-dressed doctor was staying in the kind of place befitting his public image.
On his frequent visits to Skowhegan, Maine, he stayed at the Hotel Heselton, one of its finest hotels. On his visits to Lynn, Massachusetts, he would be found at its popular Sagamore House, and in Bangor, he frequented the Bangor House where President Grant stayed during his visit. When in Boston he was a guest at the landmark Revere House, where the cream of society floated, like author Charles Dickens, poet Walt Whitman, singer Jenny Lind, four U.S. Presidents, the king of England, the emperor of Brazil, and the grand duke of Russia. And he was so enamored of the Elmwood Hotel in Waterville, Maine, he became its proprietor.
![Header of a sheet of letterhead for The Medical Home, Dr. Orrin Fitzgerald, Proprietor, Chief Examining and Consulting Physician. [Note: Handwritten letter below this header is signed by Orrin Fitzgerald and dated 29 August 1888 .] (author's collection)](https://static.wixstatic.com/media/7441e9_02b181b705e24849a7d656d239a1c807~mv2.jpg/v1/fill/w_980,h_597,al_c,q_85,usm_0.66_1.00_0.01,enc_avif,quality_auto/7441e9_02b181b705e24849a7d656d239a1c807~mv2.jpg)
The fashionable, comfortable, powerful life of Dr. Fitzgerald was made possible by a combination of many sales of his one-dollar medicines and his doctoring and surgical fees. “His fees in many cases have been enormous,” reported his obituary, like those paid him by the governor, “and scores of other rich men paid equally as well,” but he was generous to the poor and many patients receive free treatment along with a ten-dollar bill slipped into their hand as they left the doctor. He had also sold a half-interest in his original Life Invigorator medicine back in 1873 to Noyes P. Whittemore, an ambitious livery stable owner in Nashua, New Hampshire and in 1891 he put out his third medicine, Fitzgerald’s Membrane Cure for lung disease, hay fever, and deafness. But “had he the disposition to save,” his obituary continued, “he might have been a multimillionaire long ago.” Instead, he embellished his image and empire by elegantly finishing his home estate and buying and updating other impressive properties with fine furnishings, as well as tip generously and quietly donate to impoverished patients.
The doctor’s house in Dexter was often referred to as a mansion and one of the finest homes in the state. It had two sets of ornately carved mahogany front entrance doors with exquisitely etched glass windows; murals were painted on interior walls and chandeliers hung from 12-foot-high ceilings of copper and steel. A half-dozen marble fireplaces and mahogany woodwork spread throughout the house and elaborate gingerbread laced the exterior. Even the stable was grand and beautiful, exceeding the craftsmanship of most houses. A small army of Black servants maintained his house, stables, and prize horses.
He also owned a newspaper, the Eastern State, which he used largely for self-promotion, printed in yet another of his buildings, the Fitzgerald Building in Dexter. One of its advertisements featured another of his new enterprises, a building in Allston, west of Boston, that he named the Massachusetts Medical Home. It was a sanitorium for the wealthy, complete with elegant rooms, hot and cold water, electric bells, baths, modern appliances, and expansive lawns.
His last purchase was the estate along the Merrimack River in Tyngsboro, Massachusetts that he named Colonial Hall. The place cost him $80,000 ($2.75 million in 2024 USD), then he spent much more to beautify the grounds, build structures, create a trotting racecourse and generally turn the place into one of the finest estates in eastern Massachusetts.
Taking the Blindfold Off
Understanding Orrin Fitzgerald’s success seems an impossible task. He made a lot of money on the basis of his alleged clairvoyance and he spent it with the swagger of someone who was certain the money would continue to flow in – he was either truly psychic, a business genius, or very lucky – maybe it was a little of all three. He was definitely more complicated than just another blindfolded healer wowing onlookers by peeling away a tumor as if it was a banana. His inventive turn of mind had him devising a protective device for bottles, a capsulized form of anesthetic; and of all things, an invention to protect train passengers from smoke inhalation and accompanying cinders and sparks from coming into their cabins.
The smoke and spark conveyer invention, patented in 1887, was extraordinary, in some ways, far ahead of his time. Fitzgerald’s redesigned locomotive looked every inch like a futuristic invention from a Jules Verne novel. He bent the engine’s smokestack backwards at a rakish 45-degree angle and extended it by a series of pipes, clamps, and braces that predicted the automobile exhaust engine of the 20th century. While the invention’s design came from a mechanically-oriented engineering mind, the reason for its creation clearly came from the health-conscious heart of a doctor:
The great discomfort and inconvenience in traveling by rail arises from the smoke and cinders which come from the locomotive. The vast cloud of smoke which is always pouring from the smokestack often obscures the landscape, and the cinders, from the same source, enter the cars at every crevice, and almost fill the eyes, ears and mouths of the passengers. The cars must be closed even on the hottest and most sultry days, on account of this nuisance.
As far away as Tahlequah, Cherokee Nation, Indian Territory, the newspaper Cherokee Advocate bubbled over with enthusiasm about Dr. Fitzgerald’s train exhaust improvement:
Railroad men all over the country have evinced great interest in the matter, and Dr. Fitgerald has received many offers for an interest in his great invention. There can be no doubt that in a short time it will be applied to every passenger train in the civilized world, and travel upon the railroad will be shorn of its greatest inconvenience and discomfort.
Theoretically, redesigning a train’s exhaust system was no more complicated than removing a cancerous tumor or reattaching a toe, but I just have the feeling that while the healer worked in the dark, the inventor wasn’t wearing a blindfold.
The Secret of Health
The back of Fitzgerald’s unusual octagonal trade card proclaimed “THE SECRET of Health is in Fitzgerald! Who is Fitzgerald?” It was both a great philosophical and practical question. Was he truly a clairvoyant or a charlatan? Did he perform baffling cures or skillful tricks?
Fitzgerald himself admitted he was not a qualified physician in the traditional sense, but insisted that his clairvoyance was even more valuable the regular doctor’s tools:
The Dr. has never graduated at any Medical School, neither has he diplomas from any institution of Science, yet in the SUPERIOR CONDITION [in the clairvoyant state] – the human system is transparent as Glass. … by the peculiar gift bestowed upon me … I am enabled to discover the source of diseases hidden from the eye of the common practitioner.
The debate between believers and non-believers continued to rage throughout his life and likely upon the completion of each surgery or performance, as the case may be. An adamant believer insisted he was cured by the clairvoyance of Dr. Fitzgerald and tried his best to convince others that Fitzgerald presented himself to be.
Now, readers, what can I say of Dr. Orrin Fitzgerald? Is he a fraud? Is he a quack? Or has he ability? Some of my friends advise me not to see him! [But] where would I have been, had I not seen him? I consider myself free from this terrible cancer and am a living witness of the most wonderful and successful physician living.
A newspaper reporter who knew Fitzgerald well and followed him closely shared a rare personal glimpse of the man behind the blindfold after his death:
At heart, the doctor was an entirely different man than what the casual observer judged him. His outward appearance was rather a game of bluff while he read the emotions of those with whom he came in contact and admired or despised them according to his standard of measurement. Those who knew him well realized this fully. [emphasis added]
As the newspapers told the story, wherever he went, the people came, crowding his hotel room and parlors, sometimes waiting all day without getting to see the popular doctor. They followed the clairvoyant healer like devoted disciples following their biblical savior. And why not? He really seemed to be performing miracles.
He gave me a singular-tasting medicine and made an application to the cancer for ten days which entirely separated it from the flesh and left the leg in a perfectly healthy condition. After enduring what I had, this process and result was marvelous to me. It seemed as natural as the separating of the banana from its peeling. I can describe it in no other way.
He performed another medical miracle, so the story goes, in front of everyone at a busy train station … in just two minutes … with his eyes closed:
The doctor was about to depart when a team drove up frantically conveying a lady who had not time to consult him during his stay in town. It was a case of a tumor on the eyelid or the eye itself, tradition in this instance not being fully explicit. The doctor asked for the train to be held two minutes, got out a knife, SHUT HIS EYES, and proceeded to operate. The growth was removed and the patient afterwards stated she felt little pain during the operation. [emphasis in original]
It was either a breathtaking demonstration of courage, clairvoyance, and skill or a fabulously staged hoax to increase his legend – you be the judge.
Orrin Fitzgerald, clairvoyant healer of thousands, died of cancer at age 55, in 1897. Even after his death, non-believers criticized the clairvoyant for his inability to detect his own illness or to get cured by his Clairvoyant Discovery, the Improved Invigorator ...
But then again, maybe he did see the prophetic writing on the wall about his impending end. His advertising always stated, “He will undertake no cases that he cannot cure.” – perhaps he applied that rule to himself as well – "THE SECRET of Health" in Orrin Fitzgerald may actually have been that he didn't have it - he was dying of cancer and he chose not to let anyone know until the end. Instead he decided to spend every dollar as soon as he earned it and enjoy every moment of life he had left. After all, life is short, even for a clairvoyant healer.
Lynn Massachusetts history - History of medicine - 19th-Century Health Remedies - Vintage Medical Ephemera - 19th-century medicine
Updated: Jan 16
The inventor of a hair tonic, an electric plaster & a window lock ... he was plagued by success.
Everything Reuben P. Hall needed to know about business was covered in Aesop’s fable, “The Goose that Laid the Golden Eggs.”
But he didn’t learn.
Too bad. So sad.
If he had taken the children’s fable a little more seriously, his life story could have been hoisted up as one of America’s all-time success stories. Patent medicine royalty. Lots of people thought he was an entrepreneurial giant, but Reuben P. Hall wasn’t the success who was standing behind his own name.
Okay, let me crack open this scrambled story for you.
Brick Dust and the Destitute Italian Sailor
Reuben P. Hall started out his life like most people in New Hampshire in the early 1800s – one of many children in a farmer’s large family. Nothing was getting handed to him – he was destined to live only by the sweat of his brow. When he married Betsy Barrett in 1844 they started their lives together next to her parents’ farm, probably on land her parents had gifted or rented to them. Reuben and Betsy lost their first two babies but in census year 1850, they had 6-month-old Loretta with them. Reuben’s work life began with the physically demanding job of making bricks; with the town’s poor house just a dozen buildings away, the young father and husband was daily reminded that any work was better than none at all.
Three more babies arrived over the next decade and by 1860, Reuben had left brickmaking in the dust and turned to farming. But his farm was one of the lowest valued in the area and the Hall’s only sure crop seemed to be babies, with yet two more sprouting in 1861 and 1862. Having become the breadwinner for a family of eight in twelve years, Reuben was increasingly concerned about relying on nature and weather to yield a cash crop; so he bid his wife and six little ones adieu and disappeared down the country road, a 44-year-old peddler.
Peddling was a standard form of selling goods around the countryside in those days, providing the advantage of the store coming to the house, especially important in the rural states of northern New England. As the story goes, somewhere along his travels, Reuben Hall, peddler, crossed paths with an Italian sailor. Reuben might have come across the old salt in his travels to Salem, Massachusetts, some 50 miles from his home, where census records show there were a few Italian sailors knocking about the port town in 1860 and 1865, or less likely if his peddling peregrinations took him to Searsport, Maine, 200 miles from home, where there was a single Italian sailor during that time (there were no Italian sailors in all of New Hampshire or Vermont during these years). Harder to fathom, perhaps, was why this seafarer was carrying a hair tonic formula in his otherwise empty pockets. But the sailor was described as “destitute,” apparently synonymous with desperate, so the money-strapped peddler bought the formula from the stone-broke sailor. The chance encounter was about to change the trajectory of Reuben Hall’s life.
To modern ears, the sailor’s curious formula read like a recipe from Arsenic and Old Lace: sage and raspberry leaves were to be steeped in water and mixed with tea; then the brew became sinister: mix in oil of citronella, glycerin, milk of sulfur, and white sugar of lead and presto, it was ready for use on hair that for one reason or another had had the audacity to go gray or white. Lead was the magic in the medicine that turned light hair dark; the more frequently used, the darker the hair would get, like 100,000 tiny barometers of lead poisoning. Lead is a neurotoxin that can cause memory problems, muscle pain, headaches, constipation, and high blood pressure, and if the system absorbs enough of it, it could bring about seizures, comas, kidney failure, and death. But let’s not be unfair by judging Reuben too harshly; after all, it wasn’t until 2022, over 150 years later, that the federal government decided to take the lead out of hair products. Like the “help” Aunts Abby and Martha thought they were giving “suffering” old bachelors, Reuben thought he was selling the people what they wanted.
He called his medicine Hall’s Vegetable Sicilian Hair Renewer, the addition of “Sicilian” being an allusion to the Italian sailor who sold him the formula. Make-believe origin stories were created all the time for patent medicines because they were part of the standard medicine advertising pitch, getting waved on the same flagpole with the equally dramatic promises of cures. But while the name hinted at its Italian sailor beginning, this origin story never appeared in the advertisements, trade cards, or booklets. If it was a fiction, it was entirely underutilized. It was more likely true but not a tale that Hall cared to share. The truth sounded too concocted and make-believe, like a storybook beginning that flowed out of an advertiser’s pen, and Reuben Hall was much more pragmatic and deliberate than that. He knew his hair renewer was darkening hair and bringing back moisture to dry scalps and that was the story he wanted customers to hear. So he peddled the stuff from his wagon as fast as he could, one door at a time.
Gangrenous Greed
Like his cart on the bumpy backroads, sale of his hair renewer was slow going. His modest manufacturing operation was taxed at only $10, the same amount he was taxed for the combination of his gold watch and the piano his wife and children had to entertain themselves during his long absences. His remedy needed an infusion of cash if it was to succeed, and he found that in Charles A. Gillis, the well-heeled son of a wealthy father. Reuben brought on Gillis as a partner, turning over to him a controlling share of the company; by June 1865 Gillis bought the entire company for $30,000 ($697,791 in 2023 USD). The deal had made Reuben a wealthy man but in the process he had sold his soul: the deal had not only made Gillis the sole owner of the company, but in so doing stripped away Reuben’s rights to the secret formula for the hair renewer, the rights to make and sell it, and the exclusive right to use the product and company names – his own name – from there on out.
Gillis set up a manufacturing facility in Nashua, New Hampshire, and immediately invested heavily in advertising. Before Gillis came on board, Reuben was only able to afford advertising in a single Vermont newspaper. In the next year he had increased that to four states; but when Gillis took the reins in 1865, newspaper advertising of Hall’s Vegetable Sicilian Hair Renewer swelled to 23 states and by 1870 it was being broadcast across 30 of the 37 states then in existence. In court, Gillis admitted to making an annual profit of $50,000 to $60,000; Reuben had estimated it to be closer to $80,000 and standing on the outside looking in, he felt he deserved much more than what now seemed like a paltry $30,000 that he had accepted five years earlier. So despite his contract with Gillis, he started to make and sell the same medicine from a different location in Nashua. He called it R. P. Hall’s Improved Preparation for Restoring the Hair.
In July 1870 Reuben’s clandestine company was brought to court for having engaged in the secret manufacture and sale of the now-famous Hall’s Vegetable Sicilian Hair Renewer and using a facsimile of the trademark; they were arraigned upon the charge of “counterfeiting wrappers or labels with intent to cheat and defraud.” In the 1870 court case of Gillis v. Hall, Gillis, the plaintiff, claimed Reuben had broken every covenant of their contract, by commencing the manufacture of Hall’s Vegetable Sicilian Hair Renewer at another location in Nashua, under the same firm name, R. P. Hall & Co., and endorsing the bottles with a trade-mark which was “a palpable imitation” of the one in use by Gillis’s company. Gillis brought the signed contract before the judge, which showed Reuben Hall had covenanted:
He would not use or allow his named to be used in the preparation of any similar article;
He would not engage in the manufacture thereof;
He would not impart to anyone his secret or recipe for the manufacture thereof;
He would not engage in the manufacture of any article similar to this;
He would allow the plaintiff the free, uninterrupted and exclusive use of his name in the manufacture and sale of said preparation.
Defendant Reuben P. Hall claimed there was another document that restored his rights; but he couldn’t produce it, so the final judgement was predictable. The judge ruled that Reuben could make hair preparations or any other product he wished, but he wasn’t allowed to make or sell Hall’s Vegetable Sicilian Hair Renewer and he couldn’t use “the name Hall, or R P. Hall, or Reuben P. Hall, …upon any such preparation, and from making or using any trade-mark, label, or wrapper in imitation by those now in use by plaintiff.” Over the decades to come, millions of trade cards and newspaper advertisements would be made to promote the hair tonic named Hall’s and tell the world that it was made by the R. P. Hall & Co. of Nashua, New Hampshire; unfortunately the future success and legacy would no longer have anything to do with its creator and namesake, Reuben P. Hall. He no longer had any rights or privileges to his hair product, its trademark, name, or face on the tax stamp. He probably wasn’t even allowed in the company’s door. For 30,000 pieces of silver, he had lost himself.
Green-Eyed Monsters
Before he could catch his breath over his staggering losses of fame and fortune, he was about to lose something even more precious.
Reuben and Betsy had moved their family down to Vineland in southern New Jersey during the spring of 1870. When Reuben returned to New Hampshire for his arraignment on making counterfeit hair renewer, his 20-year-old daughter, Angela, met and began a relationship with an older man: 38-year-old Dr. Edward Sharp, a successful physician and the son of prominent and wealthy parents. The papers would later describe him as “well-connected and in good practice” and young Angela “was beautiful and well-to-do … nothing seemed wanting to a perfect matrimonial condition. But soon a cloud arose.”
Reeling from his losses in New Hampshire, Reuben returned to his family in Vineland and learned that after a whirlwind 4-month courtship, Angela and Dr. Sharp were going to get married. On that fateful wedding day, 21 September 1870, Reuben and Betsy went to the posh residence of Dr. Sharp’s attorney, ready to celebrate their daughter’s wedding, but Angela took her father’s breath away with the doubly-shocking news that she was pregnant and Dr. Sharp was demanding that Reuben provide his daughter a $20,000 marriage gift or else Sharp wouldn’t marry her and she would forever be identified as a ruined, “fallen woman”. It was extortion, pure and simple. And what made it even worse was that Angela was the one badgering her father to pay. About an hour before the wedding ceremony, Reuben signed a bond (conveniently drawn up by the attorney and wedding host), agreeing to pay his daughter as Sharp had demanded. But it turned out that Angela was not pregnant (in fact, Angela never had any children during their subsequent 57-year marriage).
Reuben consequently refused to pay as the bond required. It was fraud, he said; a conspiracy on the part of his daughter and Dr. Sharp to rob him of a large sum of money. In 1873, over two years after their wedding day, Dr. & Mrs. Sharp took Reuben to court over the bond he had voluntarily signed but refused to pay and the newspapers frothed, “there was much hard swearing, and great bitterness of feeling between the parents and their daughter was displayed at the trial”; it was “a first-class piece of scandal ….” In what seems to me to be a gross miscarriage of justice, the coercive daughter and her swindling husband won their lawsuit; Reuben had lost his second major court case and the relationship with his daughter had probably been irreparably ruined.
Trouble on a Chain
His past having gone up in smoke, Reuben could only move forward. In 1874 he and his son Philip were back in Nashua, setting up a new company to manufacture Reuben’s newest product idea: galvanic electric plasters. Regardless of how effective or ineffective it might prove to be, Reuben’s product (see my previous blog, “Hall’s Galvanic Gizmo,” 18 December 2024) was admirably inventive, combining the century-old use of electricity for health improvement with the medicinal application of plasters. Plasters and electrical devices had existed before and would continue long after Hall’s Galvano-Electric Plaster, but it may have been a unique invention that combined both forms of medicine; unique enough that he wanted to get it patented. Consequently, Reuben offered a very comprehensive and scientific-sounding justification for his invention in the patent application he submitted to the patent examiners, but his advertising for the plaster was simplified in order to appeal to the common man,
“STOP PAIN AS IF BY MAGIC. THEY REALLY PERFORM MIRACLES.”
There were plenty of galvanic batteries on the market and lots of medicated plasters too, but Reuben thought of combining the two in one, allowing the plaster’s medication to soak into the body while low-grade electrical current traveled through body sweat completing the electrical circuit begun by the battery embedded in his plaster. And like any worthwhile patent medicine of the 19th century, the plaster-electricity combo promised to cure all sorts of pains: rheumatism, neuralgia, sciatica, headache, sprains, spinal difficulty, nervous diseases, and female weakness.
Reuben tried to promote his new plasters the way that his old partner had done, by advertising the hair renewer in newspapers. Hall’s plaster advertising ran across nine states in 1874, but the number of states kept diminishing each year thereafter. The one bright spot seemed to be the Bell Mann & Co., a Chicago-based perfume distributor who had become one of the sales agents for the plasters shortly after their introduction in late 1874. In 1876 Reuben was listed in the Chicago city directory as a “plasterer” boarding at the Clifton House. (The directory publishers didn’t seem to know what to do with this rather unusual man who was making medicated plasters; so they added him under the Plasterer grouping with several other men who actually plastered walls.) The Clifton House was just a block away from the Bell Mann company on 163 Wabash Avenue; more importantly, however, Bell Man was now the proprietor of his plasters. Trouble had followed Reuben Hall to Chicago; actually, it had gotten to the point in his life that it seemed like he was just dragging trouble along with him wherever he went.
In January 1877, attorneys for Mr. Bell Mann were explaining to a judge that Reuben Hall had transferred the right to manufacture and sell Hall’s Galvano-Electric Plasters to a Milwaukee dentist for a royalty based on the number of Hall’s plasters the dentist made. But the dentist in turn transferred his manufacturing rights to Bell Mann, who then got the patent rights assigned to his company. Not seeing this coming, Reuben had also assigned a half-interest in the patent to another group of businessmen, (Hall seemed to have a franchise model of business in mind for his plaster), but Mr. Mann took them to court, insisting he had the patent rights and the court should require the defendants to assign their part over to him. There was more electricity coursing through the courtroom than was ever generated by Hall’s plasters. The result was that Bell Mann owned the trademark, patent, and manufacturing rights to Hall’s Galvano-Electric Plasters, leaving Reuben once again with nothing.
In November of the same year, the Chicago Tribune included a mention of a fire that had engulfed a one-story frame building at 4 Hubbard Court, about a mile away from the Bell Mann company; the newspaper noted that the burned building had been used by Reuben Hall as an electric plaster factory. It’s unclear whether it was an act of arson or accident, but either way, Reuben’s effort to counterfeit his own medical product had once again been stopped for good. The newspaper also reported that he couldn’t be found, so he had probably already gone back to his family in New Jersey; there was no future for him in Chicago.
Things then get quiet for Reuben over the next decade. He had retired by the time the census taker came by in 1880; the 62-year-old lived with his wife and sons Philip, 24, and Blanchard, 17, in Landis, New Jersey; Philip was a farmer and Blanchard worked in a shoe shop. In the years after Hall had lost his court case in Nashua, the massive J. C. Ayer Company had bought the rights to Hall’s Vegetable Sicilian Hair Renewer and reinvigorated the product’s promotion in newspapers and trade cards on a scale that only the Ayer company could do (in 1885, advertisements appeared in newspapers of 45 American states and territories). The Hall name still reached across the country, selling the hair renewer and on a much smaller scale, the plaster, but no longer because of the one man who had started it all.
Out of the limelight and the courtroom, Reuben quietly focused on his next big idea. He was more of a visionary and inventor than anything else. He never claimed to be a doctor, although some of his apologists claimed that distinction for him. And constantly trying – and failing – to break deals he had made, he definitely was not a businessman. He got his hair formula from an impoverished Italian sailor but others made it a nationwide success. His patent application for the galvanic-electric plaster looked at the human body as part of a mechanical process.
His last invention – a lock to secure windows and shutters – was as logical and pragmatic as the plaster. In 1886, at age 68, he secured a patent for his “Fastener for Windows and Shutters,” a remarkably detailed mechanism that would fasten windows closed and keep shutters open. And perhaps best of all, no one tried to lock him out from his own invention or patent rights.
