Medicine & Health

For most of the 19th century, anyone could bottle a mixture, give it a name and sell it as a cure for almost anything. No law required the label to say what was inside, and many of these patent medicines were mostly alcohol, with a dose of opium or cocaine for good measure.

The business was huge, and it paid for a great deal of the advertising in American newspapers and magazines. The medicine makers were pioneers of mass marketing. They used trade cards, almanacs, testimonials from satisfied customers and traveling medicine shows with music and comedy to draw a crowd.

The change came in the first years of the 20th century. Journalists began investigating the industry, and Collier's magazine ran a famous series by Samuel Hopkins Adams in 1905 called The Great American Fraud. The next year Congress passed the Pure Food and Drug Act of 1906, which required makers to list certain dangerous ingredients on the label. It was a modest law, but it marked the start of federal oversight of what Americans swallowed.

Health and beauty products make up most of this collection, and the line between them was blurry. Soaps promised clear skin, tonics promised strength, and hair restorers promised a full head of hair. Soap had its own long history. Procter & Gamble began in Cincinnati in 1837 as a maker of soap and candles, and its Ivory soap, sold from 1879, became famous for floating and for its claim of purity measured to 2 decimal places.

Worth noticing in the advertising is the artwork. Many of these trade cards and labels were printed by chromolithography in the 1870s through the 1890s, and they were collected and pasted into scrapbooks by the people who received them. That is why so many survive. Look too at the faces. The women and children in health advertising were meant to look glowing, and the printers worked hard at the pink cheeks.