Dr. R.V. Pierce, Quack Extraordinaire

Dr. Quack, himself.

"Every family needs a common sense medical adviser," lectures the opening line of Dr. R.V. Pierce's 1895 edition of his life's work, which is called, conveniently, The People's Common Sense Medical Adviser.

Pierce goes on to claim that his book has been so popular, "the original electrotype plates from which it has heretofore been printed, have been completely worn out."

A pity this wasn't perceived as an omen, because it didn't stop subsequent printings nor the production of a profusion of pellets, palliatives, and nostrums that this nineteenth-century version of a social media influencer peddled to desperate cases.

I unearthed a copy of this book as I nosed about in  a local thrift store. I knew nothing about the man who would become known as "The Prince of Quacks," but I knew it would be ghoulish fun to peruse an old medical book. I remember spending many an hour as a kid reading the ancient medical book my mom had  on her bookshelf, a book so old that it predated the polio vaccine and abundantly fueled my hypochondriacal tendencies.

(Poor Mom, I don't know how often she had to convince me that the pain in my neck was not an early sign of infantile paralysis.)

"Dr. Pierce, I'm actually not delighted with
that tonic you sent me, nor, come to think of it,
am I at all pleased with  my hairdresser."

After turning the Medical Adviser's pages in stunned fascination, I decided to find out more about this guy.

Dr. Ray Vaughn Pierce (1840-1914) obtained his medical degree from an institute called the Eclectic Medical Institute of Cincinnati. Eclectical medicine was rooted in herbal medicine.

(Its philosophy was formalized by a man named Wooster Beach, which I mention only because I like to say "Wooster Beach." Mr. Beach's first medical institute, by the way, was shut down because locals were peeved that the staff indulged in grave-robbing to obtain cadavars for dissection.)

Despite the book's proclaimed assurance of its reliability as a medical adviser, anybody suffering from a rash or other ailment would be dead by the time they found some practical, common-sense information, as it's mainly stuffed way in the back of the book after reams of testimonials, advertising, descriptions of fatal maladies, and lectures on the bees that buzzed in Dr. Pierce's particular bonnet (most of which had to do with reproduction, sexuality, hygiene, moral behavior, and hateful notions about superior races).

You'll have to wait until page 878, for example, to find out what to do if somebody in the household has a bad cough.

Testimonials abound because Dr. Pierce was that quintessentially American late-1900s figure, the snake-oil salesman who traded in mysterious medicines. Pierce founded an Invalids' Hotel in Buffalo, NY, and dispensed an array of tinctures and potions that supposedly cured a multitude of afflictions.

Among his many concoctions were "Dr. Pierce's Pleasant Purgative Pellets," "Dr. Pierce's Anuric Tablets," "Dr. Pierce's Golden Medical Discovery," "Dr. Pierce's Nasal Douche,"and "Dr. Pierce's Favorite Prescription." The latter was an elixir he marketed "for Weak Women" to relieve them of "female illnesses."

The testimonials feature grim black-and-white portraits of severe-looking women, startled children, and bewhiskered men, many of whom sing the praises of Dr. Pierce and his concoctions. (Others rave about cures experienced at his hospital after surgery, which might actually be true--certainly, having a 62-pound tumor removed, as one woman attested, must surely have been a great relief.)

"Ten or twelve years ago I had a combination of diseases. Our family physician said I was bloodless and there was no hopes of my recovering," moans Mrs. Addie R. Knight of North Carolina. (Of course, if she truly were bloodless, that physician was spot-on.)

Another long-distance patient, a C. M. Niles of Maine, wrote to Dr. Pierce after years of declining health and (without ever having been examined by Dr. Pierce) was informed that he suffered from "indigestion, dyspepsia, catarrh, and spinal affection"--and that, of course, Dr. Pierce could cure him.

Not surprisingly, Pierce inveighed mightily against the establishment of the Pure Food and Drug Act of 1906. This legislation included the requirement that active ingredients in medications be listed on labels and standards of purity be maintained. No doubt Pierce had to partake of many handfuls of Pleasant Purgative Pellets at this prospect.

Just what was in Pierce's  Golden Medical Discovery and other products? It was alleged that various elixirs contained opium, alcohol, and digitalis, but the printed label for the Golden  Medical Discovery listed bloodroot, Oregon grape root, stone root, queen's root, sacred bark, black cherrybark, and cinchona bark.

He claimed that it could relieve dyspepsia, liver complaint, chronic diarrhea, skin diseases, coughs, blood diseases, chronic nasal catarrh, and nervous disability; it could also be used as a tonic and to strengthen weak lungs.

"Pleasant Pellets," boasted his ads, would make "weak women strong [and] sick women well by giving strength to the stomach, purity to the blood and life to lungs."

As for the guys, he had a tonic that would give them "an appetite like a cow-boy's and the digestion of an ostrich." (You read that right: an ostrich.)

Plants have indeed yielded many substances used in medicine (digitalis, quinine, morphine, taxol, capsaicin, scopolamine, salicylic acid a.k.a. aspirin, just to name a handful), but it's not admirable medical protocol to lump them randomly into pellets and powders, claim that they cure just about everything, and sell them without ever examining the patient.

Pierce was never run out of town on a rail, however (in fact, his offspring continued selling the products well into the twentieth century), although Collier's and Ladies Home Journal did have a go at him.  He blanketed the nation with newspaper and magazine ads, and barns across the countryside were painted with giant letters trumpeting his wares. If he'd had the Internet back then, you can bet he'd have websites, a Twitter feed, fake-news videos, and Facebook lackies galore to tout his miracle cures.

This guy is lymphatic. Don't be this guy.

In addition to the groveling testimonials and Pierce's own bragging, the Common Sense Medical Adviser contains curious references to ancient modes of thinking about the human body and its systems, such as the theory of four "bodily humors"--black bile, plhlegm, yellow bile, and blood--inherited from the ancient Greeks. Medicine continued to be dogged by this theory for much of the 1800s.

Pierce had his own take on the temperaments associated with the humors, which were traditionally characterized as melancholic, phlegmatic, choleric, and sanguine; his were lymphatic, sanguine, volitive, and encephalic. He believed these temperaments were created by the relative proportions of the brain's anatomy (which suggests a foray into phrenology as well).

Not surprisingly, this theory ties in with assorted baseless and racist observations by Pierce, which he often aims at Native Americans (whose dwindling numbers due to genocide he blindly likens to the disappearance of animal species).

He also offers up diagrams of skulls and chart of the "cranial capacity of human races," which as you might expect lists Caucasian races at the top and everybody else lower down. (Top marks go to Swedes, Anglo-Saxons, and Finns, with Anglo-Americans scoring lowest among whites.) Odious stuff.

Dr. Pierce's absurd skull diagram.

And although Pierce makes references to germs, notions about "bad air" pop up in his work. For example, he doesn't indicate that mosquitoes in swampy places are responsible for transmitting malaria; instead, he blames winds in damp areas for bringing "the poison of decayed vegetable matter from low lands" and claims that "the dampness of the leaves [in trees near homes] tends to attract  malaria" and encourages "unhealthy vapors."

On the other hand, he devotes many pages to the need for proper ventilation of schools, factories, workshops, and dwellings, which strikes me as pretty progressive for his time.

Overall, though, the book is peppered with convenient anecdotes trotted out by Doc Pierce to back up his viewpoint. One of my favorites is a tale that manages to combine superstitions about pregnant women with dotty "science" and condescension toward women all in one neat package:

"Dr. Pierce, please tell me,
where do babies come from?"

Anger or fear may transmute the mother's nourishing milk into a virulent poison....A carpenter fell into a quarrel with a soldier billeted in his house, and was set upon by the latter with his drawn sword. The wife of the carpenter at first trembled from fear and terror, and then suddenly threw herself between the combatants, wrested the sword from the solider's hand, broke it in pieces, and threw it away....

While in this state of strong excitement, the mother took up her child from the cradle, where it lay playing, and in the most perfect health, never having had a moment's illness; she gave it the breast, and in so doing sealed its fate. In a few minutes the infant left off sucking, became restless, panted, and sank dead upon the mother's bosom.

So, ladies, make sure you always remain mild mannered and genteel! Because...

...milk is sometimes poisoned by a fit of ill-temper, and the infant made sick and occasionally thrown into convulsions, which in some instances prove fatal.

But one doesn't have to squint much to see that Pierce has descendants a-plenty in our own day and age when it comes to fake news, pseudoscience, racism, and all the rest. So we can't feel too smug about the knowledge we've gained since his time.

Dr. Pierce's diagram for how to stop bleeding from a thigh
wound. I can't look at this image without thinking the poor
 fellow is trying to dress up as a triskelion for Halloween.

Here are some random bits from Pierce's book, for sheer amusement, in part from the florid writing popular in Piercie's time as well as his tome.

"Foreign bodies, such as beads, peas, coffee-grains, and small gravel-stones are occasionally introduced into the nostrils of children, becoming fastened there, and causing great anxiety and alarm."

"The Garden of Eden was no harem."

"Base ball, cricket, boxing, and fencing, are all manly exercises when practiced solely with a view to their hygienic advantages, and as such have our approval."

"Notwithstanding the fact that dancing has been perverted to the base purposes, has been made the fruitful source of dissipation, and has often laid the foundation for disease, it is yet capable of being made to minister to health and happiness."

"We were called not long ago, to see a young lady who had contracted a severe cold....In short, her legs were not kept warm, and she took cold by going out from warm rooms into a chilly atmosphere. A good pair of woolen leggings might have saved her much suffering."

"Living organisms are universally diffused over every part of the globe. The gentle zephyr wafts from flower to flower invisible, fructifying atoms, which quickens beauty and fragrance, giving the promise of a golden fruitage, to gladden and nourish a dependent world."

"In some cases in which the system is full of humors or impurities of the blood, the golden medical discovery tablets and pellets will bring the humors tho the surface and cause severe eruptions of pimples and blotches." (I'm sure Doc Pierce has some handy-dandy pills for that.)

Dr. Pierce's hospital was stuffed with machines that kneaded, rubbed,
oscillated, shook, vibrated, and massaged. This one looks a lot like
a Queens-Aid Slimming Machine, one of those 1950s devices like the
one my mom used to have in our basement that reputed to tone you
by shaking the bejesus out of you.

Holy Moley, Green Anole!

When did you first start learning science in school as a young child?

I don't recall ever having a science textbook in my hands during elementary school in the 1960s, despite this decade being the heyday of the Space Race after the 1957 launching of Sputnik.

Sure, we dabbled in science a little bit, at least in fifth and sixth grade, which was when I started public school.

I vaguely remember the eruption of Mt. Clay-and-Vinegar-and-Baking-Soda in the big sink of my sixth-grade classroom. A student had made it and brought it in as his science project, and I think the electrical circuit I built with my dad was part of this adventure, too.

As I recall, the teacher had told us all to go home and find a science project to do. I'm sure many a parent quaked then as they do today when the kid comes home and says it's time to get a trifold board because the science fair is coming up.

But my dad was an aeronautical engineer as well as a very capable carpenter, electrician, and fixer-of-things, so he was more than thrilled to throw himself into helping with this project.

I was in Catholic school for first grade through fourth grade, however, and there was even less science education going on. (Which is odd considering how Catholics are not biblical fundamentalists, and the Church, for example, doesn't reject the theory of evolution.)

My entire science education in those four years consisted of...a chameleon.

Yes. A single lizard. And actually, it wasn't even a chameleon. That's how poor our science education was. The little reptile was really a green anole--often called a chameleon in America, but a species distinction that would be pointed out by a teacher teaching science.

But the anole wasn't even used to do that. It just sat on a rock in a little terrarium for a month. Sometimes we were allowed to look at it. It looked back. Then it was given away to a lucky kid at the end of the month, and that was that for science.

Oh. Wait. No. I think the planting of the corn seeds must've been science, too.

We all brought in some dirt, put it in an empty half-pint milk container, stuck a corn seed in it, and set it on the window ledge.

Except for Bernadette.

Bernadette forgot dirt, so she used clay. Our seeds grew. Hers didn't. She looked ashamed and we glared at her as if she'd murdered a kitten.

Sum total of science learned in grades 1-4:

1. Chameleon. 
2. Grow plants in dirt, not clay.

It's a start.

This all changed when I entered the brand-spanking-new junior high school building constructed just an eight-minute walk from our house.

Thank you, Robert Bunsen!

Seventh-grade science and beyond was a dedicated class, held in spacious classrooms with long, sleek, black countertops equipped with sinks and glass jets (and Bunsen burners!).

We covered topics ranging from asteroids to zygotes. It was short on ecosystems, habitats, and animals, but otherwise absolutely, smashingly splendid.

Since those heady days (plus a few marvelous science classes in college, a training program to become a zoo docent, and a course for teachers of science taught at a local university), my acquaintance with science education lies mainly in writing books and articles on science topics for children, parents, and teachers.

Oh, that and helping my child with the dreaded trifold boards at science fairs.

Wiki commons photo

Watching my child learn science at school was an eye-opener, especially as I became curious about how science has been taught at the elementary level over the past hundred years or so.

If it barely ranked as a subject in my elementary school--a good public school on Long Island in a community packed with Grumman engineers--how was it treated in earlier decades?

For my daughter, science existed as a distinct school subject from her earliest elementary years. I still have one of her dedicated science notebooks buried around here in a box somewhere. I recall seeing little aquariums and terrariums sitting in the center of a cluster of kindergarten desks.

Nonfiction books are thriving in the elementary classroom. Kids are becoming citizen scientists. Science is properly part and parcel of their education and their lives.

Now, STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics) is the acronym of the day. With a daughter who's going into a technical vocational field, I'm pleased that kids are learning how science applies to everyday life and that it's not some arcane realm of little relevance to their lives.

But as a reader and writer with a great fondness for natural-history writing of the past that reveled in the sheer wonder of nature, I sometimes wonder if perhaps we might err too much on the side of emphasizing science's utility. As if we're hustling kids to hurry up and get past that fascinating mammoth diorama on the field trip because we have to catch the bus.

I don't know if this concern has any validity. I only started wondering about it several years ago as my child entered high school. We visited the school during an open-house event and marveled at the lab rooms, the equipment, the artifacts. We wished we were students again as we heard about the biotech and maritime academies.

But when we asked one teacher about the biotech program, he resolutely refused to answer specific questions.

Arms crossed, looking across the room without making eye contact, he maintained that he taught science and taught kids to be interested in and thrilled by science. He was implicitly telling us that he wasn't a big fan of teaching science only as something you do as a career step.

So my goal now is not only to learn more about how science was taught to elementary school kids in the past, but also to find out more about what teachers think of today's focus.

Which means I have two-thirds of my trifold board started!

(This is Part 1 of an "I'm not sure how many parts there will be" series, but I can tell you that I have picked up some interesting old science textbooks at thrift stores and that there are also some Very Funny Bits in some of them, so please stay tuned.)

Yes, That IS a String of Cheetos Hanging From the Eaves. It's SCIENCE.

Let it not be said that the residents of our household do not have Inquiring Minds. Science: It's what's for breakfast. And for sleepover snackses.

For the past three weeks we've had a rain-chain of Cheetos hanging from the front eave of the house. It was draped there by a gaggle of girls whom the Resident Teen had invited over for a sleepover (though to be precise it was more of a movie-over, or a feast-over, or something, with  lots of texting mixed in). 

It came to my attention when I wandered into the living room, which was momentarily the only quiet place in the house, and saw this weird apparition bobbing outside the window, backlit by the streetlights. 

Amazing, how quickly the brain works: "What is THAT? Oh, of course. It's Cheetos tied to a string. Suspended from the eave."

A request was made not to disturb the Cheeto-chain because the science squad wanted to see how long it would take for birds to eat the snacks. Sure, fine, whatever. 

(Never mind that I can cause my offspring terrible embarrassment merely by being seen at school, or by breathing too loudly, or by blinking too rapidly. Apparently decorating one's house with snack foods is perfectly acceptable.)

I assumed the crows would make off with the cheese puffs in no time. I've seen them wolfing down Cheetos in parks and playgrounds, after all, and here they were getting them served up virtually on a silver platter. Barring that, the little orange squiggles would surely grow moldy and disintegrate. (Talk about shabby-chic decor for your home!)

Well, that was the hypothesis. Much to our surprise, the crows did not gobble up the experiment. Nor did the snacks grow moldy. They lost volume as they dried out (the Resident Teen noted that they'd gotten pretty tough), and didn't regain any size even when they grew spongy with rain. 

Get thee behind me, Doodles!

Otherwise, I think they may have persisted in the environment for a very, very long time (except that the teenage scientist finally and unceremoniously yanked the Cheeto-chain off the house and threw it away). The secret to eternal life probably lies in the preservatives used to ensure a long shelf life for cheese puffs. 

OK, I know full well that snack foods like this are the opposite of kale chips. I have come a long way from craving the Cheez Doodles I loved so much as a kid. 

And I know that one should be suspicious of foods that come in bags that warn you to keep them out of the light. (I can't recall what brand of cheesy snacks required darkness--or should I say "cheezy snax," as weird spelling seems to be required when describing cheese-flavored cornmeal puffs).

But don't let a bag of them anywhere near me because I can still hear their siren song....

Curious to find out more about the latest in cheese-puff science, I went a-Googlin', and was newly amazed by the creative capacity of my fellow human beings (and in some cases astonished by just how much time can be wasted, and--to go for a trifecta of adjectives beginning with A--appalled by  just how bad bad taste can be, and we're not talking about the taste of the cheese puffs).

This is a cheetah, not a Cheeto. Couresty Wikipedia.

There is a blog that covers an entire summer's worth of Cheeto science experimentation. You can find out just what's in a Cheeto here. There are people who make artworks out of Cheetos: one woman made an entire Cheeto room complete with furniture and people, and another artist uses that neon orange dust that collects at the bottom of a Cheetos bag to make portraits, such as a cheesy one of Elvis on black velvet. There are teachers who have little children eat Cheetos in order to teach them about pollination. (I kid you not. I suppose the next unit in their science classes is Nutrition.)

There are also lots of chickens, corn snakes, orange-tabby cats, hamsters, and other animals named Cheeto. (I have even personally met one of these animals, and  he is said to be a good rat-catcher.) 

Other fun cheese-puff facts for those seeking to snack on junk-food trivia: 

Cheese puffs were apparently discovered by accident in the 1930s as a worker making flaked corn for cattle feed noticed that damp cornmeal heated by a flaking machine's motor caused the cornmeal to be extruded in long threads. Add flavoring to extruded, damp, warm cattle feed, and voila! A snack sensation is born!

Cheetos were the first American snack food to be produced and distributed in China (in 1994). According to Wikipedia, taste tests were performed first, with "ranch dressing, North Sea crab, smoked octopus and caramel being passed up for two flavors: Savory American Cream and Zesty Japanese Steak."

Django watched the Cheeto-chain for HOURS.

Wise snack-food company makes cheese puffs that look like crocodiles.

There are apparently people who will pay $35.18 to purchase Cheetos on ebay that purport to resemble Michael Jackson  moonwalking.

Wotsits are the UK's version of cheese puffs, and you can get them in prawn-cocktail flavor. They also once made a product called "Mealtime Potato Shapes," which shows that they really desperately needed a marketing department.

Right, that's quite enough of that. Onward. What science projects do you have hanging around your house, literally or figuratively (not counting the ones we all have lurking in the back of the refrigerator in mysterious food-storage containers)?