Warner’s Safe Cure: Yellow Fever

When you and I think about patent medicine from the 19th Century, most of us shake our heads and think what a bunch of dopes people were to believe the claims made by the likes of Warner’s Safe Cure. After all, who would think that a couple of bottles of anything could cure you of diabetes or kidney disease. What you have to keep in mind is that the state of medical education was in its infancy. Most Americans did not have a family doctor or access to a doctor at all and were on their own when it came to dealing with disease. A perfect atmosphere for selling patent medicine.

The enormous downside to the whole patent medicine industry, which takes it out of the realm of quaint history, was that genuinely ill people undoubtely purchased this stuff and relied upon it to their detriment. One recent example that I found dealt with the various serious Yellow Fever virus. This virus sickened and killed thousands, until it was isolated and a vaccine was developed through the efforts of Carlos Finlay (above right) and Walter Reed (above left), among others. Although we usually associate it with tropical regions, Yellow Fever cropped up in places like Philadelphia and the District of Columbia. A Warner’s Safe Cure ad running in the National Republican in 1880 actually claimed to prevent Yellow Fever:

 The ad asserts the widely believed notion that viruses like Yellow Fever were the result of breathing bad air (mal-aria) and not the result of transmission by insect bite. This notion dated back centuries and was ultimately laid to rest by the study of infectious diseases. The ad makes a second, and equally false, leap of faith that bad air poisons the blood. This claim flows directly into Warner’s tried and true theme that almost all disease was the result of  impurities in the blood.

For those who actually contracted Yellow Fever in 1880 and  had consumed Warner’s Safe Kidney & Liver Cure in hopes that it would prevent their suffering, one can only hope that they recovered notwithstanding the medicine. It was claims like this one, to cure Yellow Fever, that justifiably gave rise to the  Pure Food & Drug Act and ultimately, what we know today as the Food & Drug Administration.

 

Warner’s Safe Cure: Victorian Newspaper Ads

 

In many of my posts,  I’ve talked about the various forms of advertising used by H. H. Warner to sell his miraculous cures. Warner clearly knew the power of advertising and rarely missed an opportunity to get his brand before the public. From trade cards to almanacs to a wide variety of premium items like his dominoes or his prize map, Warner bombarded the Victorian public with his brand and was rewarded by an ever-swelling demand.  I’m sure that if radio and television had existed at that time, he would have run commercials touting the value of his Safe Cures.

I’m certain that in the back of my mind, I expected that he must have engaged in extensive newspaper advertising and,  from time to time, I had seen a copy of the occasional Warner’s Safe Cure ad. However,  access to that genre of advertising seemed virtually impossible absent a willingness to sit in front of a microfilm reader and scroll randomly through newspapers of the day in hopes of finding the occasional Safe Cure ad.

Recently, and almost by accident, I stumbled across the access that had, for so long, eluded me. I was engaging in my other passion, genealogical research, when I learned about online access to vintage newspapers. More important though than just access was the ability to search them by names and subjects. Holy cow, I thought, if this will work for family surnames, I wonder if it will work for advertising?  To my delight, it did. My searches for Warner’s Safe Cure yielded enumerable results. While my searches turned up every mention of Safe Cure, many of which were included in countless testimonials (a topic for another day), a significant number of hits were ads taken out by Warner hawking his Safe Cure and Tippecanoe.

In this and future posts, I hope to unveil some of these ads as yet another facet of the Warner Safe Cure empire. Before doing so, I would be remiss if I did not credit the folks at Footnote.  Footnote is a web based search engine that allows you to access original documents through partnerships with the National Archives and the Library of Congress among others.  There is a membership fee, but it is modest considering the time and effort that is saved by searching document collections from the comfort of your home rather than planted in front of a microfilm viewer in the library. Let me also give the disclaimer that most, if not all, of the newspaper images I will be posting are long out of copyright and are subject to fair use. Now, having said all that, let me throw a few gems your way. First, this ad appeared in the Chicago Tribune on December 7, 1902:

This is a great ad and vintage Safe Cure. Like most all of Warner’s advertising for Safe Cure, it attributes all bodily problems to the malfunction of the kidneys. It also incorporates a tried and true device of Warner and other advertisers of the period, the testimonial.  If Safe Cure can help 92-year old Rebecca Smith, it will do wonders for you. It also offers the reader a free trial bottle. How can you lose?  Let me throw another your way as a teaser. In future post, I will talk more about these wonderful tidbits of Warner history. This ad appeared in the Fort Wayne Sentinel on February 16, 1883:

This ad resembles text that appears in some of Warner’s Safe Cure almanacs and strikes a familiar Warner theme – “Beware of Fraud.” The wonderful thing about these ads is that they appear, even now, among the news items that people of that era were reading. Indeed, many of the ads I came across were designed to look like news stories to enhance their credibility. I hope you will enjoy these ads as much as I have.

Warner’s Safe Cure: The Native Gatherer Revisited

In April, 2008, I did a post on one of the trademarks of Warner’s Safe Cure, the Native Gatherer. This icon appeared early in Warner’s advertising campaign to highlight the fact that his remedies were the result of a combination of rare herbs gathered from distant lands. This symbol appeared on Warner’s  Safe Cure proprietary stamps and in early Warner’s almanacs. Recently, I found that the image was also used in newspaper ads placed by Warner in the early  1880′s. Below are a few of those  ads:

The first ad appeared in the Fort Wayne Sentinel on July 6, 1882 and the second in the Atlanta Constitution on November 22, 1881. Although the text of both ads differs slightly, the message is unmistakeable.  Warner’s Safe Cure is the key to good health.