THE BOERUM HILL SNAKE-OIL MAN (1885)
******************************************************************************************************************************** Brownstone Detectives investigates the history of our clients’ homes. The story you are about to read was composed from research conducted in the course of one of those investigations. Do you know the history of YOUR house? ******************************************************************************************************************************** If you climbed to the third floor of 375 Pacific Street in 1885, two floors above its stable, and you passed through “several mysterious little doors,” you might find “a little room where seven girls were busily engaged” in filling and labeling numerous clear bottles. And if you thought, while climbing the thin stairway and passing through the oddly small doors, that perhaps you were entering upon the quarters of a crime syndicate or those of a mafia den, you would not have been too very far from the truth. MAKING, BOTTLING, AND SELLING THE CURE Years before the Pure Food and Drug Act was signed into law in 1906, patent medicine salesmen were plying the U.S. mails with great success. Although their “cures” brought their clients considerably less success, their hopes were still strong and snake oil continued to sell at a good clip. Patent medicine salesmen were everywhere, advertising everywhere, and came from a number of professions – failed doctors, teachers, tinsmiths, and even wood engravers. What a wood engraver might have known about medicine was probably never in dispute – all he needed to know was how to sell a product – what was in dispute was the fact that his “cure” did nothing other than make the […]
