My family knows I’m into food history, so for Christmas I received Food and Life: Eat Right and Be Normal, a book from 1917.
Food and Life is something of a cross between a cookbook and a book of menus. It doesn’t have an author listed, mainly because this was a “product” much more than a “book”: it was intended to be sold by pharmacies to their customers, and the copy I received had a Toledo, Ohio, pharmacy’s name stamped on the front cover.
Much of the book is menus for people suffering from different health conditions. There are menus for overweight and underweight people; sufferers of tuberculosis, diabetes, and kidney disorders; and for young people and pregnant women. Pretty much anyone with a health condition could find out what they were supposed to eat.
In looking through the book, though, what really intrigues me are the advertisements, and there are lots of them. Most of the last half of the book is page after page of full-page advertisements for different products sold at pharmacies.
The advertisements intrigue me because many of them are for such strange products. Clysmic was “A sparkling table water–corrective in all acidosis conditions of the stomach and system.” Schratz’s Oriental Deodorant was “A destroyer for all disagreeable body odors. A harmless, refreshing deodorant, stainless and greaseless.” Odo-Ro-No was “The toilet water for excessive perspiration.” Vaucaire Galega Tablets were advertised as a “Bust Developer, Flesh Builder and Tonic for thin, nervous, undeveloped women.” Listerated gum was advertised as having “an odd flavor that delights and satisfies.” What was the copywriter thinking when he wrote that line?
A couple of things strike me in looking through the advertisements. First of all, many of the products are for problems that are either solved today by prescription medicine, or that aren’t consider problems anymore. Celere-Fo-Mo was “The World’s Bracer,” the “Only preparation of its kind, of merit that does not contain a heart drug.” I’m not quite sure what a bracer is, nor do I have any idea why a bracer would contain a heart medicine to begin with. Lots of the products advertised are like this.
The second thing I’m struck by is how regional the products are. The book was sold by a chain of pharmacies in Toledo, Ohio, and while many of the advertisers were from New York City or Chicago, many others were companies from smaller cities or towns. Dr. R. A. Armistead’s Famous Ague Tonic was produced by the W. M. Akin Medicine Co, in Evansville, Indiana while Rubifoam, which seem to have been some sort of toothpaste, was produced by E. W. Hoyt & Co., in Lowell, Massachusetts. Marshalltown, Iowa; Fond du Lac, Wisconsin; Rupert, Vermont; and Irondequoit, New York all had companies producing products sold in pharmacies. How many of those towns have any sort of manufacturing at all any more?
In some way, all of this parallels what happened in the world of food during the twentieth century. As American businesses got bigger in the twentieth century, drug and chemical companies merged together, so the only companies around today operate on a national, rather than regional scale. Also, as our knowledge of medicine increased, and as advertisers’ knowledge of how to sell standardized products increased, these strange products that used to be sold in drugstores across the country gradually fell off the shelves in favor of products produced by only a few big companies.
Today, the shelves of CVS and Walgreens lack a certain something the old pharmacy shelves had. Rubifoam sounds so much more exciting than Crest, and Dr. R. A. Armistead’s Famous Ague Tonic sounds so much more exciting than, I don’t know, whatever modern product it was similar to, maybe DayQuil or liquid Tylenol or either of those mixed with several shots of whiskey. All I know is that with standardization and medical knowledge came a sort of blandness that replaced the Wild West kind of feeling there was on pharmacy shelves back in the day.