Pennsylvania’s Nostrum Kings

During the early 19th century in Pennsylvania,  a new wave of  entrepreneurship was breaking with the past. In small hamlets and villages, those who had been feeling under the weather typically relied on home remedies they purchased from neighbors or friends, but now a new breed was coming to center stage. These men held larger dreams than the local peddlers, with plans to market their healing potions not just in Pennsylvania but throughout the entire United States; some even exported their patent medicines across the Atlantic to Europe.

The successful patent medicine manufacturer Thomas W. Dyott had this oil-on-canvas portrait painted by Philadelphia artist John Neagle, c. 1836.
Courtesy National Gallery of Art, Washington, DC

Thomas W. Dyott and His Patent Medicine Empire

Sometime in the mid-1790s Thomas W. Dyott (1771–1861), a druggist’s apprentice, sailed from England to America. Settling in Philadelphia, he engaged in the trade of bootblack, not much of a step up from his previous career. But he was savvy about what advertising could do for business, and so he placed himself prominently in the window of his shop to catch the eyes of passersby as he polished boots. Industrious, he was soon selling his surplus polish to the public.

Before long Dyott acquired enough money to set aside his polish and turn to a more lucrative business — patent medicines. His experience as a druggist’s apprentice would serve him well. Opening a store, he soon added a warehouse. Then, outgrowing that, he moved operations to an even larger building. He called his new venture the American Dispensatory, in which he manufactured patent medicines under his own brand. This turned out to be a crafty move.

Wasting little time, he branched out, selling countless healing remedies in bottles. To heighten his medical currency, he embraced the illusory persona of Dr. Robertson from Edinburgh, whose name graced the labels of his line of nostrums. When confronted with the fact that there hadn’t been a Dr. Robertson for the better part of two centuries in Edinburgh, he just shrugged it off. Unabashedly, he claimed to be a physician who had practiced in London, the West Indies, and his home city of Philadelphia. To sell his catholicons he relied on advertisements in dailies in the Eastern cities, as well as smaller rural publications. He chose for his company logo a large Conestoga wagon being loaded with boxes, presumably full of his nostrums. With business brisk, Dyott established offices in several major U.S. cities. He was happy to also sell English patent medicines and those of his American rivals to garner more profits and expand his own product line.

As sales of his products increased, Dyott found himself in need of bottles by the thousands, so he acquired a large glass factory on the Delaware River, near Philadelphia. With this new enterprise, he not only produced bottles for less than the British imports but also went a step beyond, molding the best bottle glass in America.

He didn’t stop there. He also molded his factory complex into his vision of a bucolic community that he named Dyottville, where his apprentices both worked and lived. They were afforded a free education, but strict regulations were imparted against profanity, gambling and fighting. Although his potions packed an alcoholic punch, his employees were forbidden to consume any spirituous drink.

Dyott was never modest about promoting his own image. On a glass flask he displayed his own portrait, along with Benjamin Franklin’s, as one of the two famous adopted sons of Philadelphia. Dressed in eccentric fashion, he drove about in an elegant English coach drawn by four matching horses, flanked by an entourage consisting of several outriders. Success suited him well. By the 1830s Dyott’s income was $25,000 per year and the value of his estate was $250,000.

This Dyottville Glass Works pint flask featuring Benjamin Franklin’s portrait on one side and Dyott’s own image on the reverse was unearthed during a recent archaeological excavation of the factory site at Richmond and Dyott streets in Philadelphia.
Pennsylvania Department of Transportation and AECOM/Photo by Chester Cunanan

Traditional doctors who looked upon Dyott as a charlatan or snake oil salesman unintentionally aided him by bleeding and purging patients and giving them excessive doses of calomel (mercury). This regimen left the patients in worse condition than before treatment. It’s no wonder people turned to the easier fixes offered by patent medicines. The nostrum salesmen denounced the traditional physicians’ overuse of mercury. Their advertising listed “mercurial disease” to a long list of maladies their restoratives would alleviate. The pleasant taste of many curatives had it all over anything the doctor might prescribe. And increasing literacy among the population created a wider market for those who could now read the testimonials for Dyott’s elixirs.

Dyott incorporated these factors to his advantage and translated them into success. He stood above the miscellaneous other nostrum sellers. Where they plodded along on the local level, Dyott experienced unprecedented growth. He was the first American manufacturer to grasp the benefits of a national market, understanding what people wanted and gearing his advertising to take advantage of it.

But giants eventually fall. Flush with success, Dyott again attempted to divide his efforts; this time it was the banking business. He avowed “to give to the meritorious working man the full legal interest which he ought always to obtain for his savings.” But as with the best laid plans the inauguration of his new enterprise coincided with the financial panic of 1837, and his bank went bust. In efforts to salvage his holdings, he turned to bankruptcy, but not before assigning his various financial holdings to relatives. His creditors bristled at this fraudulent move and turned to the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania to sue him.

The state’s prosecution summed up Dyott’s efforts as “systematic wholesale cheating.” Found guilty, he was sentenced to one to seven years at hard labor, a stiff penalty for a man in his 60s. He was pardoned, however, before the completion of his term, and he returned to what he knew best, manufacturing patent medicines. He never did reach the heights he had achieved earlier in his life as a nostrum king, but he did manage to secure another fortune, albeit a lesser one, by the time of his death at 89.

William Swaim began manufacturing Swaim’s Panacea in Philadelphia in 1820.
U.S. National Library of Medicine

William Swaim and His Panacea

Dyott was not the only large player in the nostrum business in Pennsylvania. William Swaim (1781–1846) also fit the mold. Swaim, originally from New York, was drawn into the field of cure-alls after contracting an illness. Under the care of the aptly named Dr. N. J. Quackinboss, he was prescribed a remedy that relieved his symptoms. Impressed with these results, Swaim set about securing the recipe for the restorative elixir, eventually discovering the formula in a medical journal. With that in hand, he moved to Philadelphia and in 1820 began manufacturing his new physic, which he named Swaim’s Panacea.

For his company trademark, Swaim chose the mythological hero Hercules combating the multiheaded serpent Hydra, symbolizing the many ills that could be defeated by the Herculean power of his Panacea.

In 1822 Swaim issued a series of small tomes touting the merits of his product. Published in Philadelphia, his A Treatise on Swaim’s Panacea; Being a Recent Discovery, for the Cure of Scrofula, or King’s Evil, Mercurial Disease, Deep-Seated Syphilis, Rheumatism, and All Disorders Arising from a Contaminated or Impure State of the Blood contained persuasive text with pages of successful case histories, but the book’s heavy hitting came from testimonials offered by a number of America’s learned physicians, including Dr. Nathaniel Chapman (1780–1853).

Chapman was no lightweight, having studied at the side of Benjamin Rush. He was trained in the science of medicine in Edinburgh and London, authored medical texts, and was professor of the institutes and practice of physic at the University of Pennsylvania. Chapman opined in 1823 that he “had an opportunity of seeing several cases of very inveterate ulcers, which having resisted previously the regular modes of treatment, were healed by the use of Mr. Swaim’s PANACEA.” He went on to say, “I do believe . . . it will prove an important remedy in scrofulous, venereal and mercurial diseases.”

Nancy Linton was featured in numerous ads for Swaim’s Panacea in the 1830s as one of the beneficiaries of its curative powers. This hand-colored lithograph by William Henry Kearney, showing Linton after she had been cured, supposedly by Panacea, oddly emphasizes the effects of her disease. An 1833 treatise by Swaim notes that Linton had been suffering from scrofula since the age of 12.
Phildelphia Museum of Art (The William H. Heldfand Collection, 2004-99-11)

One of Chapman’s colleagues, Dr. William Gibson (1788–1868), also delivered glowing reports, but he didn’t stop there. He brought two patients who had been afflicted with “frightful ulcerations” to a lecture hall filled with medical students. Gibson informed those present that it wasn’t regular medical treatment that restored the patients’ health, it was Swaim’s Panacea.

These two statements of approbation were sincere, as were others. Swaim’s Panacea had gained such favor in the medical field that it was used in the Philadelphia Hospital. With all the great press accorded Swaim’s Panacea, it’s no wonder he was doing a brisk business, even at $3 a bottle. But such success lured imitators.

Why would conventional physicians acclaim the curing powers of Panacea? One of the ingredients of the formula was syrup of sarsaparilla. Sarsaparilla was extracted from the roots of certain plants native to Latin America and was imported into Europe. Its preference as a remedy for venereal diseases ebbed and flowed throughout the 16th and 17th centuries. Its use as a curative was on a strong upswing when it reached America sometime near the second decade of the 19th century. By the time Swaim had discovered the formula and started to market Panacea, sarsaparilla was already accepted by the mainstream American medical practitioners.

In an effort to make his recipe stand alone as his creation, Swaim substituted oil of wintergreen in place of sassafras, which was in the original formula. With this change, he now claimed that his Panacea was the cure-all for a wider range of ills. It was this claim that helped the sale of Panacea reach new heights, and it certainly did not hurt sales that the wintergreen gladdened the taste buds.

Swaim irked some in the medical profession when he stated that the doctors who had praised his Panacea had done so without fearing “the oblique censure which their more fastidious brethren might choose to cast upon them.” His statement, aimed at physicians who disclaimed Panacea, seemed foolhardy; it was akin to poking a snake with a stick. In 1827 the Medical Society of the City of New York created the Committee on Quack Remedies. Soon, the Philadelphia Medical Society followed suit, targeting Swaim. But the consensus among doctors was that sarsaparilla was still as good as any other medicine in treating any number of disorders. Making even more sweeping claims about the success of his formula, Swaim now included cancer, gout and hepatitis as ailments that Panacea could treat. Swaim kept part of his formula a mystery and that worked with the public, but to many physicians it was disquieting.

The portrait on this label for Panacea is probably of William Swaim, who died in 1846, the year the label was registered for copyright. Swaim’s son James and son-in-law Franklin Stewart had taken over the business upon Swaim’s death.
Library of Congress

Although Swaim had been championed by Philadelphia’s foremost physicians, the opinions were about to change. Putting Swaim under the microscope brought some revelations to light. Upon closer scrutiny the committee found the “cures were either nature’s work or else not cures at all.” The physicians were especially disturbed with Swaim’s claim that his Panacea might “be administered to the tenderest infant.” To the contrary, Panacea was possibly the cause of some infant deaths. The committee also discovered that Swaim’s cure-all was not of uniform quality; the ingredients were combined haphazardly. Further, the committee learned that Panacea’s secret ingredient was corrosive sublimate — the strongest medical form of mercury. This was especially farcical, as Swaim had attested that his elixir was a cure for mercurial poisoning.

Swaim had out-and-out lied. It was proven when three separate pharmacists discovered the mercury in his Panacea. This indisputable evidence left many Philadelphia doctors with red faces. Recanting his previous testimonials, Nathaniel Chapman admitted to overstating the value of the Panacea. With this retraction he was also voicing the sentiments of his duped colleagues. In the committee’s 37-page report, they concluded Swaim’s Panacea was “on the same footing with all quack medicines.”

That should have been the end of Swaim’s Panacea, but it wasn’t. He unabashedly attacked the medical profession, likening himself to a biblical prophet condemned by the Pharisees. He continued to use the very testimonials that the Philadelphia physicians had retracted.

Swaim continued to prosper. In the face of competition from imitators, he discounted the price of his Panacea and his sales increased. By the time he died he was worth half a million dollars. Panacea even outlived Swaim. Decades after his death, Swaim’s Panacea was still ringing the cash registers.

Dr. Henry T. Helmbold and His Extract of Buchu

By 1850 patent medicines were an intrinsic part of everyday life. Posters hawking all forms of curatives hallooed from fences, street corners, and walls of buildings. One nostrum king who never left a blank wall vacant was Dr. (self-proclaimed) Henry T. Helmbold (1826-92). As a young man living in Philadelphia during the mid-19th century, he understood that dealing in patent medicine was a lucrative business.

A bottle of Helmbold’s Buchu sits on a table beside a wounded Civil War soldier in this painting by Philadelphia artist James Fuller Queen (c. 1821–1886) for the sheet music cover design of what would be published as “A Message from the Battlefield,” a song by German-born Philadelphia composer Mark Hassler (1834–1906). The design includes the note “respectfully dedicated to H. T. Helmbold, chemist, manufacturer of Helmbold Extract Buchu.” Library of Congress

Just as Panacea carried Swaim to fame and fortune, the leaves of the buchu plant elicited the same for Helmbold. The exotic novelty of a medicinal plant grown among the “Hottentots” (Khoikhoi) in the region of the Cape of Good Hope was not wasted on the public. These indigenes of South Africa not only ingested the plant, they applied it topically, rubbing the powdered leaves on their skin, leaving the smell of peppermint. In the 1820s buchu made its way to apothecaries in Europe. Two decades later, it was accepted by the orthodox medical society in America. Helmbold developed his own formula, Extract of Buchu, adding cubebs, licorice, caramel and molasses, as well as a large quantity of alcohol. Finally, the infusion of peppermint added flavor to his decidedly watered-down version.

Traditional medicine had prescribed buchu for a variety of ailments, many to do with the bladder, urethra and prostate. Helmbold went further with his Extract of Buchu, bespeaking it as a cure for venereal diseases. He understood peoples’ fears and preyed on them. In 1860, through Helmbold’s Medical Depot, he published a tract by George W. Morton entitled The Patients Guide: A Treatise on Diseases of the Sexual Organs. The pamphlet describes in graphic detail the dreadful results of venereal diseases. Helmbold circulated this and other imprints in hotels and public toilets. His bulletins described danger signs: heaviness of eyelids, black spots before the eyes, and restlessness. If these symptoms were ignored, one bulletin warned, “loss of power, fatuity, and epileptic fits often close the scene, in one of which the patient may expire.”

A listing of illnesses curable through use of Helmbold’s Buchu fill out this late 19th-century ad.
The State Museum of Pennsylvania

Helmbold pressed on, broadening his advertising and medical claims, adding diabetes and rheumatism to his list of maladies remedied by his Extract of Buchu. He flooded top-shelf publications such as Harpers Weekly with advertisements, and he continued to bill post any open exterior wall space.

Helmbold left Philadelphia and moved operations to New York, where he created the Temple of Pharmacy with a price tag of more than $250,000. He attached himself to the gaudiest of lifestyles, commissioning a bust of himself carved from some exotic wood. Later in life he suffered a number of mental reversals, causing him to be institutionalized more than once. But like Swaim and Panacea, Extract of Buchu outlived Helmbold for years.

David Hostetter’s portrait appears on this late 19th-century ad for Hostetter’s Celebrated Stomach Bitters. At this point, operations had spread out from Pittsburgh to New York and San Francisco.
The State Museum of Pennsylvania

David Hostetter and His Celebrated Stomach Bitters

In 1850 Lancaster County storekeeper David Hostetter (1819-88) succumbed to gold fever. Leaving his dry goods store in the hands of his partner, he trekked west to San Francisco. Coming up snake eyes in the gold panning business, he turned to what he knew best and opened a grocery. Within a month a fire swept through the store and burned him out. Returning to Pennsylvania, he discovered his partner had disappeared with their store’s funds. Now broke, he took a job as a paymaster for a construction company installing the Pennsylvania Railroad lines at the Horseshoe Curve. It was there he met George Smith. Hostetter held one important asset: a formula concocted by his father, Dr. Jacob Hostetter, to ease his patients’ ills. With this in hand, Hostetter decided to put forth all his labors into manufacturing the tonic. In 1853, with Smith’s financial help, the pair began to market Hostetter’s Celebrated Stomach Bitters in Pittsburgh.

Within four short years, the bitters became so successful the partners had to secure a larger venue. By the early 1860s the bitters were being sold throughout the country. The trademark label featuring St. George slaying the dragon appeared on every bottle, suggesting that the bitters could destroy many threatening ailments. In one of their vehicles for marketing the bitters, Hostetter’s Illustrated United States Almanac, several of these ailments were listed in a poem — dyspepsia, agues, colics, dysenteric pains, diarrhea and nervous prostration — with this concluding verse: “For these, though Mineral nostrums fail / Means of relief at last we hail / HOSTETTER’S BITTERS — medicine sure / Not to prevent, alone, but cure.” This patent-medicine almanac hung on a nail in thousands of homes, each issue to be read and reread for decades with “Hostetter’s” emboldened on each cover.

Hostetter’s Illustrated United States Almanac, featuring the Hostetter’s company logo of St. George slaying the dragon, included useful information for farmers, merchants, miners and mechanics but was also riddled with articles promoting Hostetter’s Celebrated Stomach Bitters. State Library of Pennsylvania

As the purging and bleeding of patients fell into decline, certain restoratives and tonics were gaining favor. Hostetter’s bitters fit right in with this new regimen. Where Swaim’s Panacea was safe for the “tenderest infant,” Hostetter’s bitters were “as harmless as water from the mountain spring.” Years later, in 1883, the bitters were tested by the Department of Agriculture and found to contain a mere 4 percent of his multiherbal concoction. The remainder was 64 percent water and 32 percent pure alcohol. Hostetter didn’t shy away from this analysis, stating his bitters remedy received “its extraordinary and unequalled potency” from the alcohol that was needed to deliver the herbal mixture to combat the dreaded diseases. This begged the question whether the bitters should be sold at the local apothecary or in a saloon. Whether spirits or medicine, it translated into success. From 1862 to 1883, annual sales topped $1 million.

As with other nostrum kings, Hostetter branched out. His wealth enhanced his status within the Pittsburgh business community. He had a hand in establishing a bank, building railroads, and starting an oil pipeline. Unlike some of his peers, Hostetter not only managed to retain his wealth but increased it dramatically. When he died in 1888, he left a huge fortune of $18 million. But that was not the end of Hosetter’s Celebrated Stomach Bitters. Hostetter’s son, David Herbert, took the helm and would spend most of his years battling the temperance movement, slugging it out with endless imitators and competitors, and defending the company from the Commissioner of Internal Revenue and the American Pharmaceutical Association.

***

The health dangers and financial burdens of these patent medicines became increasingly apparent toward the end of the 19th century. Still the American public continued to contribute to the breadth of the quackery by proceeding to purchase untold numbers of these worthless, sometimes harmful patent medicines. Despite all the advice from the orthodox medical field, sales continued at an even higher rate for many years.

David McCormick is a freelance writer of American history whose work has appeared in Naval History, America’s Civil War, Wild West, Army Magazine and Michigan History. His previous article for Pennsylvania Heritage was “From Wilkes-Barre to the Wild West: Pennsylvania’s Indian Painter,” about artist George Catlin, published in the Winter 2014 edition.