DISEASE & DISTRACTION
“Sore Eyes”
Disease drives us to distraction. A scratch on a pinky finger can occupy us for days. Nineteenth-century sensationalism harnessed this feature of the body. They started with the eyes.
Spectacles, ca. 1848-1898
With the increased consumption of small print, nineteenth-century eyesight deteriorated. In the Enlightenment, vision was a symbol of clear and direct understanding. No longer: the nineteenth-century eye was re-imagined as diseased, blurred, and sore. New medicines and devices promised to correct and replace this failing human sense.
A testimonial in The People’s Illustrated Almanac (1850) touting the benefits of Dr. Townsend's Sarsaparilla as a cure for sore eyes, among other affilictions.
Stereograph of a back wound (1865)
19th century Holmes stereoscope
Human sight is bifocal. Each eye creates an image. Then, the mind combines the images to create a feeling of depth. The stereoscope performs the same trick. The stereoscopic viewer overlays two photos to create a 3-D impression.
The stereoscope introduced a new kind of virtual reality. By the mid-1800s, stereoscopes were as popular as TVs are today. The device could be found in most American homes.
However, if you introduce a new visual technology, people panic. Today, people worry about how screens affect eyesight. In the 1800s, people worried about stereoscopes.
Watch out! If you spend too much time peering into those artificial depths, as the cartoon below suggests, you will go cross-eyed!
“Steroscopic Slides” from Harper’s New Monthly Magazine (October 1860)
“Steroscopic Slides” from Harper’s New Monthly Magazine (October 1860)
“The Spectre in Our Streets”
Disease was a popular theme in nineteenth-century media. In this “Yellow Fever” graphic, a terrified crowd stampedes away from a young woman who has fainted in a train. She is sweating. Her hand droops over the handrest. Her other hand feebly grasps her handkerchief.
“Scene on a Refugee Train in Florida—A Case of Yellow Fever: The Stampede” (Sept. 29, 1888)
In the “Street Cleaning” graphic below, a skeleton emerges from a filth heap, grasping at the skirt of a grim, determined mother, who holds a baby to her chest. A skull billows in the clouds.
“The Spectre in Our Streets” from the Apr. 14, 1873 issue of The Daily Graphic
Sensational coverage often trafficked in idealized figures of white women. This representation vacillates between identification and desire. It also reveals that medical advertising, and health writing, was principally marketed to a white, female audience.
Who is the imagined “public” in this world of “public health”? Whose bodies, and whose sensations, are made to matter?
“Burning Tortures”
Advertisement for C.I Hood and Co.’s Tooth Powder (1884)
Advertisment for medicines based on weather signals from Dr. J. C. Ayer and Co. (1888)
Medical ads made the reader’s body a news event unto itself. Ad makers manipulated the fears, pains, and desires of their embodied audience. With a dispassionate gaze onto the suffering human body, medical ads constructed and enforced a reader’s body, full of feeling.
Containers for Regular Strength Tylenol, Higgins Aspirin, and Dr. A. W. Chase’s Nerve Pills (ca. 20th c.)
The ads in this section tempt you to purchase a product. They take advantage of our preoccupation with our own bodies. Their visceral language opens a space for the reader to project their own suffering body. It is an embodiment located somewhere between lived experience and literary imagination.
Patent-medicne almanacs like this one were issued annually by companies to advertise their proprietary remedies, but the remedies were secret rather than actually patented.
Almanacs like this one, advertising Scheetz’s Bitter Cordial, were handed out free of charge to customers by drug stores.
Patent medicines promise a world where disease is predictable and preventable. They promise rosy cheeks and healthy bodies. They challenge even the inevitability of death. The almanac above reads:
“Why be you here in sickness, sadness, sorrow and affliction, when you can be cured of all your affliction by the use of SCHEETZ’S CELEBRATED HERB CORDIAL? With these facts before you, I say, why will ye die?”
Looking at these ads, don’t you feel an itch on your throat, behind your ear? Don’t you notice a burning, pimply, itchy, or otherwise painful part of your own soft skin, that you had forgotten about until just this moment? Maybe it’s contagious...
Advertisement in an 1886 issue of Harper’s Weekly for a cure for “Humiliating Eruptions” and “Burning Tortures”
“Sudden Cure! Miraculous Cure!”
Nineteenth-century media often mocked itself, responding to the ad-fueled health craze with a strong dose of sober criticism. The three cartoons in this section satirize the patent medicine industry. They skewer the industry’s voracious fearmongering, its addictive promises of health, and its often-disastrous effects on the human body.
“Patent-Medicines” (Puck: Sept. 14, 1881)
At the bottom left of the above cartoon, a healthy young man, with firm hands and thick hair, clutches several bottles of patent medicines. After drinking them, the man is green, stretched, and gaunt, with curled, bony fingers and scraggly tufts of hair.
The notorious patent medicine industry became a cultural metaphor for other kinds of fraud and swindle. The two cartoons below compare the sickening, self-interested success of the patent medicine industry to two political targets: the Prohibition movement, and President Hayes’s Reconstruction policies.
“The Prohibition Movement—The Drug Store of the Future” (Puck: Sept. 20, 1882)
“The Quack Doctor’s Last Dose” (Puck: Feb. 9, 1881)