Genealogists are familiar with many types of records,
including vital (birth, marriage, death), church, court, and land documents.
But the medical testimonial is a new one for me. Here is an example:
 |
| Patent Medicine
"Elixir of Life" ad, c. 1901, Infrogmation 15:49, 9 May 2008, Wikimedia. |
The Wikipedia definition of a “medical testimonial” is:
“…a testimonial or show consists
of a person's written or spoken statement extolling the virtue of a product. The term "testimonial" most
commonly applies to the sales-pitches attributed to ordinary
citizens….” 1
TheFreedictionary.com adds to the above definition that these
testimonials
“…consist… of individual
personal accounts of healing without statistics or controlled scientific
experiments.” 2
All records have a purpose. Let’s see what the impetus was
for medical testimonials that became wildly popular in late eighteenth and
nineteenth century America when the advantages of modern medicine were lacking.
 |
Broussais
instructs a nurse
to carry on bleeding a
blood-besmeared patient.
Wellcome
Library no. 16372i, Wkimedia.
|
So many ailments and diseases that in the past could make your life very
uncomfortable or might even kill you, nowadays are controlled by early
detection and/or effective medical interventions. But our ancestors, who lived
in America up until the early twentieth century, did not have access to the
medical knowledge and treatment available today.
Medical knowledge and care was not very developed in America
in the 1800s. The average person had a healthy suspicion of the chances for
getting better under a doctor’s care because so many did not. People often
treated themselves with the herbs and later patent medicines that became necessities for nearly every home partly due to the rise and spread
of advertising and medical testimonials in newspapers from the mid-19th
century.
 |
Kilmer's
Swamp Root (a patent medicine),
Edmonds Historical Museum,
|
What was
medical education like in America in the 1800s? I consulted the online article,
Gale Encyclopedia of US History: Medical Education. From this site, I learned that medical
schools were sparse in 19th century America. They were simply
businesses, and those who ran them were in it for the student fees. Courses
were short, and there were no labs or opportunities to work with patients.
Why was it important for patent medicine hawkers to have ads
and testimonials? Patent medicines, like any product, need recognition by the
public for sales to occur.
Although several brands of patent medicines had been
available in England and America since the 1600s, it wasn’t until the middle of the nineteenth century that this industry could
say its products were found in almost every American home. And this happened
for three reasons (rise in literacy rates, spread of newspapers and with them
newspaper advertising) which Peggy M. Baker, Director & Librarian, Pilgrim Society & Pilgrim Hall Museum, explains in her article, “PATENT MEDICINE: Cures & Quacks”:
 |
Dr. Miles'
Anti-Pain Pills, Edmonds
Historical Museum,
Edmonds, Washington,
Joe Mabel, 30 April 2009, Wikimedia. |
“The expansion of public elementary
schools meant that everyone could read newspaper ads that promised (unproved)
cures and provided (unreliable) testimonials. The craving for news from the
front during the Civil War meant that more Americans read more newspapers,
giving patent medicine manufacturers access to more customers.
The discovery of cheap wood pulp paper and improvements in the printing process meant that advertising volume could grow by leaps and bounds. Newspapers became filled with ads promising quick, easy, inexpensive and sure cures for diseases both dreadful and mundane.”
.jpg) |
Oregon Paper
Mill, “…piles of pulp… made from wood and
which…will be made into great rolls
of paper.”
OSU Special Collections & Archives, 10 July 2009, Wikimedia.
The discovery of cheap wood pulp paper and improvements in the printing process meant that advertising volume could grow by leaps and bounds. Newspapers became filled with ads promising quick, easy, inexpensive and sure cures for diseases both dreadful and mundane.”
But what does all this have to do with genealogy? Medical
testimonials are actually a unique genealogical record group, one that I never
came across before finding one through GenealogyBank.com by one of my ancestors.
Many of you are familiar with GenealogyBank and already have used its huge
newspaper database. For those who haven’t yet mined this vast resource, this is
how a Wikipedia entry describes the company:
 |
| Logo used by permission of GenealogyBank |
“GenealogyBank.com is a commercial genealogy website housing a database that contains over one billion digitized records from U.S. newspapers and historical documents for researching family history online.” 3
I was doing a search on my cohort families in GenealogyBank. In my years of searching
databases, I have learned a few techniques to make the search more focused,
such as using quotation marks around the target name or phrase.
When you log in
to GenealogyBank, you see a simple search screen. But I wanted to limit my
search to Illinois newspapers, so I scrolled down to “Historical Newspapers”
and clicked on “Newspaper Archives.” The screen that appeared had a list of
states in which to search and I checked “Illinois.” But you can “drill down”
even further. When you double click on “Illinois,” you will see a listing of
cities/towns. I clicked on “Chicago.” (note: Many times you will not want to
limit a search, especially at the beginning. Putting too many limits may result
in your missing an important article.)
Next, I filled in the search box fields:
Ancestor's
Last Name: “Cosgrove”
First
Name: “Matthew”
Include
Keywords: “Chicago”
Exclude
Keywords
Date
Range: 1850-1880
Date
Date
I clicked on “Begin Search” and the initial results screen
appeared:
Date: Sunday,
June 24, 1888
Location: Chicago,
Illinois
Paper: Daily
Inter Ocean
Article type:
Ad/Classified
When I clicked on “Ad/Classified,” the second results
screen appeared. At the top of the page, GenealogyBank gives you source
information, including the type of newspaper article, the date, the name of the
newspaper, the volume, issue, section and page. For my Cosgrove search this is
what came up:
Advertisement
Date: Sunday, June 24, 1888 Paper: Daily Inter Ocean (Chicago,
IL) Volume: XVII Issue: 96 Section: Part 3
Page: 20
Below this citation is the actual article. And what a
surprise it was!! GenealogyBank highlights your search terms in yellow, so I
scrolled down the page, looking for “Matthew Cosgrove.” This jumped out at me:
“Miss Katie Frances Cosgrove is the 13-year-old daughter
of Mr. and Mrs. Matthew Cosgrove, whose residence is at No. 303 South
Desplaines street, this city.”
What a treasure trove in the first sentence – names and addresses! And the details fit my
research into the Cosgrove family in Chicago city directories and federal
census documents.
As I scrolled down, I came to a line drawing of Katie –
perhaps the only existing depiction of her.
In the text, we read that according to her mother, Mrs.
Cosgrove, “Ever since Katie was 6 or 7 years old she has been troubled with
catarrh…and though we tried many things, nothing seemed to do her any good.”
Next is the point of the testimonial, for this is where
the reason for this whole story in
the advertisement comes out:
Again in the words of Mrs. Cosgrove, “We heard of some of the remarkable cures of chronic catarrh by Dr. J.G. Carroll, now at No. 96 State Street. Several months ago I took Katie to the doctor’s office for the first time….She took the doctor’s treatment at once and one month afterward she was very much better. She has continued to improve right along ever since, and now feels and looks better than she had for years.”
And the testimony does not stop with Mrs. Cosgrove. Katie
herself is also called upon to praise Dr. Carroll:
“The doctor’s treatment cleared my head at once, and made
it feel as if nothing had ever stopped it up.”
After discovering this document on GenealogyBank, I wondered
how the Cosgrove family came to be featured in a newspaper. They were an
ordinary family with no renown or fame. That’s when I began researching medical
testimonials and found how prevalent this type of advertising was at this time.
But how were these “testifiers” located? How were they persuaded to testify?
As early as 1849, the American Medical Association (AMA) was
warning the public of the dangers of “quack remedies and nostrums.” In 1911, the AMA published several articles investigating the
fraudulent use of medical testimonials under the title Nostrums and quackery. It appears that enterprising entrepreneurs
realized the value of the personal touch in building trust of would be
customers of patent medicines or doctors who provided quick cures. Often
inventors of the products would pursue advertising themselves but as the field
grew, they would seek partners.
According to one of the articles in the set mentioned above, a whole new job was created by the industry
called “medical testimonial gatherers,” and men were solicited through
newspapers to fill the jobs as reported in the American Medical Association
articles mentioned above. These gatherers would offer small remuneration or
even photos to perspective testifiers.
.jpg) |
Still from
the American silent film Traveling Salesman (1921),
from page 60 of the July 1921 Photoplay magazine, Wikimedia.
|
The American public remained avid users of patent medicines
and quack cures pedaled by “doctors” through advertising and were unaware of
the actual ingredients that were in these products into the early twentieth
century. As explained in a Wikipedia web page on patent medicines, it wasn’t
until the First Food and Drug Act of 1906 that the industry faced its first
regulation:
“This statute did not ban the alcohol, narcotics, and
stimulants in the medicines; it required them to be labeled as such, and curbed
some of the more misleading, overstated, or fraudulent claims
that appeared on the labels.”4
 |
| Harvey Washington
Wiley, "Father of the Pure Food and Drugs Act, ” Ca. 1900, DCPL Commons, Wikimedia. |
But it would be another 32 years, until 1938, when the
statute would be amended to ban patent medicines.
Footnotes
- Testimonial, from Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia, online < http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Testimonial>, downloaded March 2014.
- Detoxification, TheFreeDictionary, online <http://medical-dictionary.thefreedictionary.com/Detoxification>, downloaded March 2014.
- Genealogybank.com, from Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia, online < http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GenealogyBank.com >, downloaded March 2014.
- Patent medicine, from Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia, online <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Patent_medicine>, downloaded March 2014.
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