History of the Comstock Patent Medicine Business and Dr. Morses Indian Root Pills

History of the Comstock Patent Medicine Business and Dr. Morse's Indian Root Pills

The Project Gutenberg EBook of History of the Comstock Patent Medicine
Business and Dr. Morse's Indian Root Pills, by Robert B. Shaw This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with almost no restrictions whatsoever. You may copy it, give it away or re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.net
Title: History of the Comstock Patent Medicine Business and Dr. Morse's Indian Root Pills
Author: Robert B. Shaw
Release Date: September 8, 2004 [EBook #13397]
Language: English
Character set encoding: ISO-8859-1
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HISTORY of the COMSTOCK PATENT MEDICINE BUSINESS and Dr. Morse's Indian Root Pills
by Robert B. Shaw Associate Professor, Accounting and History Clarkson College of Technology Potsdam, N.Y.
SMITHSONIAN STUDIES IN HISTORY AND TECHNOLOGY NUMBER 22
COVER: Changing methods of packaging Comstock remedies over the years.--Lower left: Original packaging of the Indian Root Pills in oval veneer boxes. Lower center: The glass bottles and cardboard and tin boxes. Lower right: The modern packaging during the final years of domestic manufacture. Upper left: The Indian Root Pills as they are still being packaged and distributed in Australia. Upper center: Dr. Howard's Electric Blood Builder Pills. Upper right: Comstock's Dead Shot Worm Pellets.
Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data
Shaw, Robert B., 1916--
History of the Comstock patent medicine business and of Dr. Morse's Indian Root Pills. (Smithsonian studies in history and technology, no. 22)
Bibliography: p.
1. Comstock (W.H.) Company. I. Title. II. Series: Smithsonian Institution. Smithsonian studies in history and technology, no. 22.
HD9666.9.C62S46 338.7'6'615886 76 39864
_Official publication date is handstamped in a limited number of initial copies and is recorded in the Institution's annual report_, Smithsonian Year.
For sale by the Superintendent of Documents, U.S. Government Printing Office Washington, D.C. 20402--Price 65 cents (paper cover) Stock Number 4700-0204
*History of the Comstock Patent Medicine Business and of Dr. Morse's Indian Root Pills*
For nearly a century a conspicuous feature of the small riverside village of Morristown, in northern New York State, was the W.H. Comstock factory, better known as the home of the celebrated Dr. Morse's Indian Root Pills. This business never grew to be more than a modest undertaking in modern industrial terms, and amid the congestion of any large city its few buildings straddling a branch railroad and its work force of several dozens at most would have been little noticed, but in its rural setting the enterprise occupied a prominent role in the economic life of the community for over ninety years. Aside from the omnipresent forest and dairy industries, it represented the only manufacturing activity for miles around and was easily the largest single employer in its village, as well as the chief recipient and shipper of freight at the adjacent railroad station. For some years, early in the present century, the company supplied a primitive electric service to the community, and the Comstock Hotel, until it was destroyed by fire, served as the principal village hostelry.
But the influence of this business was by no means strictly local. For decades thousands of boxes of pills and bottles of elixir, together with advertising circulars and almanacs in the millions, flowed out of this remote village to druggists in thousands of communities in the United States and Canada, in Latin America, and in the Orient. And Dr. Morse's Indian Root Pills and the other remedies must have been household names wherever people suffered aches and infirmities. Thus Morristown, notwithstanding its placid appearance, played an active role in commerce and industry throughout the colorful patent-medicine era.
Today, the Indian Root Pill factory stands abandoned and forlorn--its decline and demise brought on by an age of more precise medical diagnoses and the more stringent enforcement of various food and drug acts. After abandonment, the factory was ransacked by vandals; and records, documents, wrappers, advertising circulars, pills awaiting packaging, and other effects were thrown down from the shelves and scattered over the floors. This made it impossible to recover and examine the records systematically. The former proprietors of the business, however, had for some reason--perhaps sheer inertia--apparently preserved all of their records for over a century, storing them in the loft-like attic over the packaging building. Despite their careless treatment, enough records were recovered to reconstruct most of the history of the Comstock enterprise and to cast new light upon the patent-medicine industry of the United States during its heyday.
The Comstock business, of course, was far from unique. Hundreds of manufacturers of proprietary remedies flourished during the 1880s and 1890s the Druggists' Directory for 1895 lists approximately 1,500. The great majority of these factories were much smaller than Comstock; one suspects, in fact, that most of them were no more than