Swaim's Panacea – Historic Print
(Originally scanned by the Library of Congress. Each image is professionally and digitally cleaned of artifacts such as color bars and extra borders prior to printing.)
Description
A window into the past: Swaim's Panacea, preserved in this antique engraving. The original is held by the Library of Congress, so what you hang is a true record of its time.
Choose the framed print, ready to hang the day it arrives, or the unframed print for a frame of your own. A conversation-starting piece for home, office, or as a meaningful gift. Free shipping in the lower 48 states. Snapshots of the Past has been bringing history to the wall since 2001, for tens of thousands of customers worldwide.
Swaim's Panacea
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Swaim's Panacea, a Philadelphia patent medicine, is named in bold type across this engraved label. Draper & Co. of Philadelphia made the print, which carries a copyright notice in Swaim's name. Patent medicines of this period were sold without government review and often claimed to cure nearly every complaint, so eye-catching labels like this one did much of the selling. The piece shows how commercial printing and health claims went hand in hand before federal drug regulation arrived in the early 1900s.
| Created / published | c1846. |
|---|---|
| Medium | 1 print : engraving. |
| Genre | Labels 1840-1850.Engravings 1840-1850. |
| Notes | By Draper & Co., Phila. Copyright by James Swaim. Published in: Eyes of the nation : a visual history of the United States / Vincent Virga and curators of the Library of Congress ; historical commentary by Alan Brinkley. New York : Knopf, 1997. |
| Subjects | Patent medicines--1840-1850. |
| Source | Library of Congress, Prints and Photographs Division |
| Original scan | 1,169 × 1,473 px · prints to 4 × 5 in at 300 dpi |
| Reference | AMZ-SOTP-HPA-218414 |
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