KTWU Sunflower Journeys 2002 - 1509A - Patent Medicine
Produced by Jim Kelly
K. Allen Greiner, M.D., K.U. Medical Center: Well, patent medicines originally came out of England. And in the 1600's and 1700's occasionally manufacturers of medications could petition the king or queen to provide them with a patent, some sort of protection of their products so they could market it and sell it without somebody copying it and duplicating it. Now when those medications transferred over to colonies and then when American producers started to produce those medicines, they would occasionally also get patents from the government, but rarely were those patents granted and usually, they just used the term as a way to sort of suggest that their product was special in some so that it had some unique or secret formula that only they knew the origins and exact formulation for. K. Allen Greiner: And so people would try those patent remedies because they were cheap and because they could be easily sent to them by rail or another method. And they were mass produced maybe on the east coast or in a place like Chicago and shipped out all across the country to places where physicians just weren't available or where people couldn't afford physicians. And that was certainly true in Kansas. Narrator: A wide variety of patent medicines were available. All guaranteed to cure your ills. Some of the products may have had real medicinal value, but this wasn't always the case.
K. Allen Greiner: Certainly products that were marketed as gastro-intestinal enhancers or agents to clean out the intestines or the gut probably had some value. There were a lot of products that had aloe. There were a lot of products that had high fiber content. And then there were a lot of other products that were supposedly useful for various types of problems, say chronic cough or irritability in a child. And those products tended to have some sort of sedative function. Either a large content of alcohol or a content that had morphine, occasionally cocaine as well. All those things were fairly freely available in the late 1800's and early 1900's and they were just included in these medicines and often not listed as part of the remedy. Terry Tietjens, Owner Seelye Mansion and Patent Medicine Museum, Abilene: It was actually founded and established in 1890. And the building that we're actually in right now was his second laboratory which we had to rebuild a building. But there was a laboratory on this location in 1896. And then in 1900 they bought the big opera house, the Bonebreak Opera House and that became the final large laboratory for the company.
Terry Tietjens: We were very lucky to still in the old Seelye building downtown from a hundred years ago or more than a hundred years ago, that many of the original archives still remained and there are drawers full of labels. In fact we had many hundreds of thousands of original labels that date back to a hundred years. But even the cabinet, the machines, the bottles still full of liquid, still from those early days. Narrator: Between 1890 and the 1950'S, The Seelye Company produced over one hundred different products. This included patent medicines, sewing machine oil, insecticides, hair gel and a number of flavored extracts. All of these products were sold door-to-door. Terry Tietjens: Mostly, at least in the early day, by horse and carriage, traveling in fact, fourteen states. Very poor roads were in Kansas and in the rural areas, one hundred, one hundred-ten years ago. But we do know that Dr. Seelye traveled fourteen states door to door and four to five-hundred salesmen with their horses and carriages. They sold a great deal of product. In the top years, the biggest years of the company would have been in the early 1900's. And our records show that several million bottles were sold during those years. Narrator: And apparently Dr. Seelye did quite well. in 1905 he able to build what is known as the seelye mansion, in abilene. but by 1910, the decline of the patent medicine industry had begun. This was due, in part, to federal drug laws and the growing number of trained physicians. But possibly the greatest factor was the rise of the large pharmaceutical companies. Many of which started out making patent medicines. K. Allen Greiner: And then what those mainline houses do is they really align with physicians, you know, between 1900 and 1920. And once they start aligning with physicians they also start to talk about how quackery's bad and patent medicines are bad and self treatment by individuals trying to determine what they need to take is a bad idea. And so what happens is the whole spectrum of treatment options, pharmaceutically, sort of moves over into the realm of physician activity and only physicians can decide what's proper and correct. And that's when you really start to see the patent medication business drop off. Narrator: But have patent medicines really disappeared? Some, especially herbal products, seem to be making a comeback. Terry Tietjens: We are actually going back to many of these herbs, but herbs were one of the basics in many of the original medicines. In fact, I've had two people working on their PhDs in the field of pharmacy and they can not believe what Dr. Seelye actually was working with in his college work back one hundred to one hundred-twenty years ago. And we're actually revisiting those herbs as they used them in their medicines. K. Allen Greiner: There are some that survived all the way through to today. Alka Seltzer's an example of a patent medicine. If you look at the old packaging from the 20's, it's the same. It's actually the same now, the type script on the modern product as it was back then. But most of them didn't make it all the way through. They just sort of changed form and came through it in some other way. I think we've seen a recent rise in the use of sort of self-treatment using a variety of product, whether they're alternative medical practitioners or alternative medical products. There's been a recent resurgence of that, but some of that survived all the way through so that it could come back in vogue. This transcript is from KTWU's Sunflower Journeys 2002 season. A production of: |
