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
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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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COMSTOCK PATENT MEDICINE ***

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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