Advertising Health to the People

William H. Helfand

Collector

This essay was originally published in the Library Company of Philadelphia exhibition Every Man His Own Doctor.

By 1870, five years after the end of the Civil War, America was awash in advertising. Announcements were ubiquitous. Not only were they prominent in newspapers and magazines, but posters and broadsides, many in full color, blazoned from the walls of buildings in city locations from where they could be seen at considerable distances. Advertising might certainly be expected in the thousands of newspapers and magazines, many of which had commenced their operations at the war's end, but it was the unusual venues which added to the continual barrage. Almanacs were piled on druggists' counters for customers to pick up. Notices were painted on rocks or the sides of country barns, inside retail shops and offices, and on the outsides of public transportation. On the streets of large cities sandwich men were seen, at times in groups, with each carrying individual letters which spelled out the name of a product. Banners were strung across streets. There were "drummers" too, for the profession of traveling salesman had only recently been introduced. This overabundance of promotion had raised complaints since at least the 1840s, but the frenzied activity brought about by the war's conclusion attracted increased attention.

Newspapers

Patent, or as they are more properly termed since they were rarely patented, proprietary medicines, were responsible for much of this advertising. They had been a mainstay of newspapers since 1708, when an advertisement appeared in the Boston News-Letter for Daffy's Elixir Salutis at the fairly stiff price of four shillings six pence a half pint bottle. Philadelphia's first newspaper, The American Weekly Mercury, was begun in 1719, and in its issue of March 30, 1721, are two advertisements showing that there was already rivalry in the proprietary medicine trade. In the first advertisement, Elizabeth Wartnaby claims to be the "Original and First Promoter" of the "Right and Genuine Spirit of Venice Treacle," which is "truly and only prepared by her in Philadelphia" and is still for sale at her shop. In the second advertisement, a few lines below, the daughter of the recently deceased Mary Banister claims to "rightly" prepare the same medicine and authorizes only two particular druggists to sell it.

Advertisements in colonial newspapers and magazines demanded a certain level of literacy on the part of the reader. Before street numbers were introduced, shop signs on the facades of apothecary shops, such as Evan Jones's Head of Paracelsus in early Philadelphia, were advertisements which even illiterates could decipher. There were many of these shop signs; eighteenth-century listings report the existence of The Golden Mortar, The Unicorn, The Looking-Glass and Druggist-Pot, The Sign of the Golden Spectacles, and the heads of Hippocrates, Cullen, and Boerhaave, among others.