[QUACKERY] [ALCOHOLISM] [Haines, Dr. James Wilkins]

The National Curse: Drunkenness [cover title]. Dr. Haines' Golden Treatment for the Liquor Habit [running title]

[Cincinnati, Ohio]: [Golden Specific Company], n.d. (but early 1920s).

Stapled pamphlet, 4 x 5.75 inches, 24 pp., with chromolithographed wraps and full-page chromolithographed illustrations throughout. Rear wrap partially detached, with a small scrape and a tiny chip, but very good overall.

Haines (1849-1893) was a physician, educator, and sometime Quaker minister best known for this, his "cure" for alcoholism. The powder--consisting ostensibly of bichloride of gold, but actually composed of milk sugar, starch, capsicum, and trace amounts of ipecac--was marketed primarily to women, who were encouraged to clandestinely slip it into coffee cups to effectuate a painless cure upon their unsuspecting menfolk. The graphic and grisly color images (healthy vs. unhealthy stomachs, livers, kidneys, eyes, brains, and noses) culminate in a pair of family portraits, one happy (smiling, well-kempt, upwardly mobile), the other dour (listless, slatternly, sinking into despair), which provide an extra turn of the screw to the unhappy housewife or mother wavering at the point of sale. Undated, but testimonials at the rear of the pamphlet are dated as late as 1921, providing evidence that the American Medical Association's 1917 denunciation of the treatment as "a cruel humbug" had done little to curb the Golden Specific Company's marketing activities. OCLC locates one copy only, at Yale.

Item #19618

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