Allan Appel Photo
She has the wings of an angel, the long reclining body of a goddess of comfort, and a banderole with a message of Christian hope, and she’s holding a lozenge as big as a Bible.
It might be hard for us to swallow this huckstery advertisement for “pitch lozenge” based on a special compound of one aptly named “Dr. Devine,” but that’s what emerged in one issue of the New Haven Morning Journal Courier on Oct. 28, 1852. On the latest episode of WNHH’s “This Day in New Haven History,” we time-travel back to it.
Yes, it sounds exaggerated and unscientific to us. But it must have been heard — or read — as a ray of hope in an era when tuberculosis was killing one in seven people and the only cure was getting out into the clean air of the country.
That option was not available to most people, and certainly not to working New Haveners in the mid-19th century; it’s no wonder after reading this advertisement, which even by the standards of exaggerated prose of the era strikes me as way over the top, folks might indeed flock to apothecaries such as “D. Smith at the corner of Chapel and Church sts.”
One of the more remarkable “testimonies” to the effectiveness and safety of the compound is that the traveling agent for the drug, who placed the advertisement in the paper, says “nor is this a Remedy sent into market without a thorough trial, and has proved beyond a doubt that what has been asserted can be done.”
To listen to the episode, click on the audio above, or find it available for free download on Soundcloud, iTunes or any podcatcher under “WNHH Community Radio.”