Quacks Pretend To Cure Other Men’s Disorders But Rarely Find A Cure For Their Own – Part Sixty Two
James Munroe Munyon (1848 – 1918)
If you have failed to make your mark in the fields of education, law, social work, publishing and song writing, where do you try your hand next? Well, quackery, of course. This was the career path of James M Munyon who founded his homeopathic company, the Homeopathic Home Remedy Company, in the early 1890s in the States. It thrived and in 1897 he was able to open a head office in London and a depot in Liverpool.
Munyon was anything but bashful and many of his remedies were contained in a purpose-built metal counter display case which featured a picture of our hero, holding his right index finger aloft, and a banner which claimed that he “would rather preserve the health of the nation than be its ruler.” Along the side of the display case were slogans which read “The World’s best known remedies for over a quarter of a century” and “A separate Munyon Remedy for each disease.” A typical display case would contain remedies for constipation, hay fever, catarrh, cold and coughs, female problems, general debility, blood and bladder disorders, grippe, problems with the principal organs, neuralgia, headaches, fevers – you get the picture. Whatever problem you had, Munyon had a solution for it.
In Britain Munyon launched a major advertising campaign challenging the Brits to test the efficacy of his remedies and offering free vials of the tinctures to anyone who responded. So successful did Munyon become that the Philadelphia Times wrote that “Professor Munyon is to medicine what Professor Edison is to electricity.” In 1900 Munyon donated two million dollars to establish an industrial school for fatherless girls near his home in Philadelphia and his policy was to donate at least 10 per cent of his profits to charitable good causes each year. He even bought an island, soon to be known as Munyon Island, and built a hotel there named after the Greek goddess of health, Hygeia which opened in 1903 and catered for wealthy Americans who sought some Floridian winter sun. It burnt down in 1917.
Laudable and enterprising as all this was, the main questions to be asked of Munyon were; What was in his remedies? And Did they work? For many a quack the passing of the Pure Food and Drug Act in 1906 proved a challenge and the money-making machine that was Munyon soon came under the microscope of the authorities. In 1907 analysis of his Kidney Cure showed that it consisted purely of sugar. The same was true of his Blood Cure and Special Catarrh Cure while the Asthma cure was a mix of sugar and alcohol. Munyon’s Special Liquid Blood Cure was a mix of sugar, potassium iodide and corrosive sublimate whilst the Catarrh Cure was a tasty blend of sodium bicarbonate, salt, borax, phenol and gum. Perhaps more worryingly, the Grippe Remedy contained a heady mix of sugar and arsenic whilst the Pile Ointment was just a farthing’s worth of soft paraffin. Even his best-selling Paw-Paw Elixir turned out to be mainly fermented papaya juice. The high concentration of sugar meant that they must have tasted nice but they wouldn’t cure you.
Munyon was repeatedly hauled up in front of the beak, fined and in 1911 was ordered to remove all reference to curing from his products. But he carried on trading and long after his death – from apoplexy while at lunch –batches of his stuff were still being impounded, as late as the 1940s by which time the Paw-Paw Elixir contained strychnine.
A small footnote – one of the chemists Munyon employed in London was Dr Hawley Harvey Crippen. Now, there’s another story.
Filed under: Culture, History Tagged: Dr Crippen, Homeopathic Home Remedy Company, James Munroe Munyon, Medical quacks, Munyon Island, Munyon's Paw-Paw Elixir, Pure Food and Drug Act
