00:04:18.920So the American medicine show has its roots in medieval Europe.
00:04:22.920At the height of the Roman Empire, there was a ton of work for entertainers for like jugglers and for tumblers and for commedia dell'arte.
00:04:33.580But at the decline of the Roman Empire, that work kind of dried up, particularly because the Catholic Church went on to ban theater and circus.
00:04:45.740Continuing the Catholic Church's tradition of just like anything that is fun, just define it as a sin and ban it.
00:06:17.980So these became so popular in England.0.98
00:06:20.560This is a fully a thousand years later in 1511 that England became the first nation to start banning, quote unquote, quackery.
00:06:29.920Oh, that ban didn't work because, you know, that work continued to flourish for hundreds of years in large part because medicine itself was, and I quote,
00:06:39.600a hotbed of medical malpractice in England at the time.
00:10:37.500Yeah, here's a quote from one of the medicine shows.
00:10:40.060one of the medicine showmen would say, a doctor will cut out your umbiculus and remove your
00:10:46.620tweedium. 100% made up words that sound sort of vaguely sciencey. And people would be like,
00:10:53.560he sounds like he knows what he's talking about. That's great. I was just saying this morning,
00:10:57.540I spent too much time on the tweedium. So I agree. I agree with this.0.60
00:11:02.380Medicine shows in the US are a huge deal from about 1800 through to the 1950s.
00:11:08.300I think it's important to note, and this was really surprising to me in this research, that medicine shows were sort of about the product, but mostly they were like the only entertainment that was available at the time, especially in small towns and rural communities.
00:11:22.720Yeah, before TV, there's just not a lot to do in the evenings.
00:11:26.500Totally. So you go see a medicine show and there are tumblers and there are actors and there's all this stuff, right? So medicine shows become sort of like the preeminent form of entertainment.
00:12:02.620It's, like, a pretty perfect comparison.
00:12:05.340So I would say in a lot of ways, he's the archetypal sort of medicine showman and was sort of like the velvet underground of medicine showman.
00:12:14.560Not everybody saw him, but everyone who did started their own medicine show.
00:12:21.840Freak shows, Wild West shows, all of that kind of stuff.
00:12:24.420His Wild West shows were immensely popular.
00:12:27.520In those Wild West shows, white people could come see indigenous people on display.
00:12:31.620But while he was running those Wild West shows, he publicly wrote pages and pages and pages of like wildly racist screeds about the very tribal members who were making him rich.1.00
00:12:46.620It made him impossibly rich. He was so rich.1.00
00:12:50.540See, I would describe him using an obscure Italian word, charlatano. I don't know if you know about that. I've known about it for almost six minutes now.
00:12:58.780I will say his early medicine show, he sort of pulled it together with a partner
00:13:04.060who was from Germany. They sold bear grease, which they said would regrow hair.
00:13:09.640Okay, so bear grease sounds like something like snake oil, where it sounds pretty expensive to
00:13:15.480gather. I don't know what the bear grease was actually made out of, but it sounds like a lot
00:13:19.280of trouble. What was the actual bear grease?
00:19:27.840ignorance of the causes of disease and workings of the body made for some appalling conditions
00:19:33.600there was no sanitation because there was no perceived need for it sewage was dumped into
00:19:39.640the streets sometimes right onto the heads of unfortunate passers-by what didn't flow into
00:19:45.320the gutters was consumed by swine which were in turn consumed by people nice on farms outhouses
00:19:51.860were located near wells, and clothing was caked with manure and worn until it fell apart.
00:19:57.860Even the beds of the wealthy were infested with vermin. Bathing was considered an eccentricity.
00:20:03.980Night air was thought to be poison. Almost everyone, even children, drank oceans of liquor.
00:20:11.520Sickness was thought to be unavoidable. Even when vaccinations were available,
00:20:15.880many farmers rejected them as contrary to the will of God.0.88
00:20:19.560It is amazing that people manage to have sex in these conditions.0.53
00:20:23.700This was a time when the birth rate in America was like nine children for every woman, which means people are having sex at least nine times in their like vermin infested, poop caked coats.0.68
00:20:51.480So you can see how like in this time, right, when like just everything related to health and wellness is pretty broken, you can understand how somebody like rolling into town who sounds confident and makes definitive claims that like their thing will help you, you'd be like, yeah, sure, sign me up.
00:21:19.620So medicine shows would also employ all kinds of like extremely garbage tactics to sell their stuff.
00:21:26.420So, for example, one medicine showman who was pretty famous at the time, Thomas Kelly, would set up his stage and line the edge of the stage with jars of pickled tapeworms.
00:26:25.980Patent medicines, if we talk about sort of what was in patent medicines, some of them were herbal, but most of them are substances that are pretty heavily regulated today.
00:27:46.440This was really, really fascinating to me. There are a bunch of things that we use today that started as patent medicines. Listerine, patent medicine, founded in 1879. Bayer aspirin, patent medicine, 1899. Milk of Magnesia, 1880. Exlax, 1905. And Richardson's croup and pneumonia cure salve, created in the 1890s, it's now known as Vicks VapoRub.
00:28:22.500I would say it's also worth noting that at this time, because trust in medicine is so low, because these are being advertised so heavily, right, there's sort of this opening for thinking and talking about different kinds of medicine, right?
00:28:37.180Like, more white folks in the U.S. seemed to be at the time more open to cures and treatments that were developed by people who weren't white, particularly indigenous remedies at the time.
00:28:51.120So, like, tribal members in sort of what is now the U.S. had, like, developed these remedies that were often more effective than white folks' remedies, right?
00:29:00.020Right. This goes back to our conceptions now of like Chinese medicine and this sort of othering of exotic cultures that know things that we don't. But there's no real interest in those cultures or where that medicine comes from or anything else. It's just like this very superficial engagement.
00:29:16.460Yeah, absolutely. So this is sort of like, there's this tie between like, popular conceptions of indigenous medicine start to sort of be on the come up as the genocide of indigenous peoples starts to be sort of like more and more completed, right?
00:29:31.820As indigenous people become less of a perceived threat to white folks, they're sort of like,
00:29:36.720oh, look at these native people who are sort of at one with nature, and they've figured
00:30:22.920There's something so interesting about how you're able to fetishize a culture and also
00:30:28.000attempt to destroy it at the same time.0.55
00:30:29.800This is sort of the beginnings of a lot of how non-Indigenous people talk about Indigenous folks in the U.S. now, which is like, they're gone now, and we can revere them.0.99
00:30:42.140These medicine shows, and particularly Indian medicine companies, there was an Oregon Indian medicine company, side note, the first company of record to offer a money-back guarantee.1.00
00:30:54.420That seems like a marketing ploy, though, because if they're moving on to a different town, how would you even take them up on that?