You'll Feel Like a Million Bucks

by Evan Ratliff, Art by Patrick Guarino & Corey Scherrer

Just west of Highway 101 near Geyserville, California, from the side of a dilapidated gray barn, a long-dead man named Dr. Pierce hawks his wares to passing cars. In head-high white block letters, he beckons drivers to greater health from the grave: “FOR YOUR BLOOD: DR. PIERCE’S MEDICAL DISCOVERY.”

There he is too, on a barn in Cottage Grove, Oregon, with a remedy “FOR YOUR LIVER: Dr. PIERCE’S PLEASANT PELLETS.” In Cache Valley, Utah, framed by mountains north of Salt Lake City, the good doctor proffers “THE WOMAN’S TONIC: DR. PIERCE’s FAVORITE PRESCRIPTION.” On a barn in Toledo, Washington, he suggests this Favorite Prescription is especially apt “FOR WEAK WOMEN,” and a few hundred miles east, he’s got something “for your KIDNEYS: Dr. PIERCE’s ANURIC.”

People like to take photos of Dr. Pierce’s barn-side ephemera. I’ve found dozens of them posted online, from all around the country. A Dr. Pierce ad will often serve as a local landmark, as in Geyserville, where it’s listed as a wine tour stop on the town’s website. Something about Dr. Pierce’s insistent capitalization, his grandiose claims aimed at a more credulous time, seem alluring enough to stop the car for a moment and ponder the source.

In fact, Ray Vaughn Pierce was once one of the best-known doctors in America. His sales of mail-order “patent medicines” made him a vast fortune, as did the world-renowned sanatorium he built to dispense them. He wrote a home-diagnosis manual that stayed in print for decades, selling over four million copies. He served in Congress. President Garfield is reported to have called Pierce “one of the best men in the world, at the head of one of the best medical institutions in the world.”

But if Dr. Pierce had one singular quality, it was not medical talent, but gall. An unparalleled huckster—a pioneer in praying on the public’s scientific ignorance and desire for longevity—he knew the value of the Big Sell. Dr. Pierce was bold enough to offer not just a tonic for some of your ills, but a one-stop cure for all of them.

I first encountered Dr. Pierce—a squat, bearded man with tufts of hair blowing backward around his balding crown—in the photo archives of the Apalachicola Times, the newspaper of the Florida town where my parents live. He’d gained local fame for having owned St. Vincent, a small, swampy island just offshore, which he bought toward the end of his career to use as a winter home. He built a small compound and in 1908 turned the rest into a game preserve stocked with exotic animals. (Their descendants live there still, on what is now a federal preserve.)

Born in 1840, Dr. Pierce was only in his early 20s when he set up his first practice in Titusville, Pennsylvania, claiming he’d earned a degree from Philadelphia University of Medicine and Surgery. “In fact he did not,” Ohio University Medical Historian

Norman Gevitz wrote in a 1990 examination of Pierce’s life. “Undoubtedly, the diploma was purchased.”

But lack of formal medical education didn’t hold Pierce back from quickly developing what would become his most lucrative invention: a liquorice-flavored tonic he dubbed “Dr. Pierce’s Golden Medical Discovery.” Designed to cure multiple chronic diseases from thin blood to stomach upset to TB, the contents and nature of the discovery were proprietary, but it was advertised as giving “men an appetite like a cow-boy’s and the digestion of an ostrich.”

Pierce moved his operation to Buffalo in the late 1860s, and added “Dr. Pierce’s Favorite Prescription” (for “female complaints”) to a growing treatment arsenal of pellets and tonics: “blood cleaners” and “Smart Weed” and “Vaginal Tablets.” He seeded the nations great newspapers with advertising—the barn billboards would come late—promising to cure every ill under the sun, and sales began to take off.

Paging through Dr. Pierce’s ads can make one yearn for a more literary time, when even a huckster’s wares had to compete on the playing field of words. Each ad’s artfully crafted copy is unique, full of scientific-sounding terms like “rich red corpuscles,” and “bronchial affections.” Pierce understood the importance of a captivating opener. “The mystery of life and death has puzzled many a wise man,” one ad begins. Another commences, “The wolf of starvation howls at the doors of thousands of men who are well to do and surrounded by plenty.” Dr. Pierce could be direct or elliptical, unfurling elaborately strange metaphors or straightforwardly announcing, “Nowadays there is not much to admire about the average man from a physical standpoint.”

Pierce, too, was a pioneer in the art of the testimonial. He layered his advertisements with glowing reviews from supposedly real folk, often accompanied by sketches to prove their veracity: “‘I must say that Dr. Pierce’s Golden Medical Discovery is the most wonderful medicine I ever used,’ writes Geo S. Henderson, Esq. of Denaud, Florida. ‘I had a bad bruise on my right ear and my blood was badly out of order … From the first bottle I began to feel better.”

Dr. Pierce’s singularly brilliant hustle, however, came not in telling people which illness to fear, but in selling them a way to discover entirely new fears on their own. He did it by writing a self-treatment manual for the general public, akin to the medical advice websites of today. “It is the interest of every person,” he writes in the beginning of The People’s Common Sense Medical Adviser in Plain English, “to know what remedies should be employed for the alleviation of the common ailments of life.” That those remedies were often made by Dr. Pierce himself, well, that was just a quirk of scientific discovery. “No one,” he went on, “would expect, with only a dish of hot water and a stew kettle, to equal in pharmaceutical skill the learned chemist.”

First published in 1875 to glowing reviews in The New York Times and papers across the land, the book sold four and a half million copies and went through more than 100 printings. You can find it on Google Books today, in all of its pseudoscientific glory. Reasonable lessons on the known physiology and biology of the day are intermixed with discourses on already long-discredited nonsense like phrenology.

Dr. Pierce took particular interest in disorders of a sexual nature. He was, as one historian puts it, “an anti-masturbation crusader,” prescribing liberal doses of his Golden Medical Discovery as cures for spermatorrhea—“a loss of semen without copulation”—and impotency. (On the former subject, however, he seemed of two minds, evidenced by a device described in The People’s Common Sense Manual. Called the Manipulator, it was a mechanical contraption designed by Pierce and complete with a number of “rubbing attachments,” including the “rock-shaft” and the “double-rubber,” which were designed to “present a rubbing surface in all four directions” to “any intermediate part of the body.”)

At the height of his empire, Pierce was reported to be raking in over $1 million a year on international sales of his books, pellets, and tonics. He built a six-story manufacturing facility in Buffalo and dubbed it the “World’s Dispensary Medical Association.” Down the street he constructed a luxury hotel and sanatorium with a staff of a dozen doctors, reportedly visited by the Sundance Kid for treatment while he was on the lam. He was an aficionado of gadgets and medical devices, from bottle washers to one of the earliest electric elevators. “There were electric generators, ozone generator, and an X-ray equipment,” one Pierce scholar wrote of his Buffalo empire. “The hotel featured electric lighting and a fire sprinkler system. His use of this technology exposed many influential people to the possibilities of new technologies and science.”

Three years after his book came out, Pierce won a seat in the New York State Legislature. A year after that he was elected to Congress as a Republican. He resigned a year later due to, the papers said, ill health.

All success brings backbiters and naysayers, of course, and Dr. Pierce was no exception. The Buffalo medical establishment shunned him, and by the late 1800s public doubters began to challenge his credentials and the efficacy of his concoctions. One rival accused him of never having attended medical school at all, labeling him “the Prince of Quacks.” Another referred to him in print as “a most arrogant impostor,” even “a swindler.”

In The Common Sense Medical Adviser, Pierce had anticipated just this kind of criticism, which he dismissed as “modern twaddle,” and “the poorest kind of trash…expressing and inculcating more errors and whims than it does common sense.” He was the People’s doctor, and what did the specifics of credentials mean in the context of the millions of people to whom he brought comfort? The advent of muckraking journalism in the early 1900s, however, brought a greater challenge. Investigations by Collier’s and Ladies’ Home Journal declared the palliative powers of Dr. Pierce’s “Favorite Prescription” to be largely fueled by opium and alcohol. Dr. Pierce went on the offensive again, suing Collier’s for libel and winning. Sales recovered, and R.V. Pierce soon handed off control to his son, Valentine Mott Pierce, who ran the business until his own death in the 1940s.

Dr. Pierce’s concoctions continued to be sold, in various forms, into the 1970s.

In some ways, it’s surprising not to find them on the shelves still. After all, if Dr. Pierce scanned our ubiquitous health food stores today, stocked with Echinacea and bee pollen, what might he say? What would he think of acai smoothies or vitamin regimens long discredited by modern science? It’s tempting to look back at Dr. Pierce with a snicker at his racket, at the gullibility of his millions of customers. But if Dr. Pierce were here today, he’d be the one snickering. The great longevity chase remains afoot, and there are still fortunes being made in urging us all on.

In 1914, Ray Vaughn Pierce died at age 76 on St. Vincent Island, after several months of paralysis and having lost part of his fortune in a wayward gold mining venture in California. Lost to history is whether he dosed himself with his own concoctions, believing to his dying day in the power of his Golden Medical Discovery and his Favorite Prescription. Or if, as he lay there unmoving, the words of his own 1898 advertisement rattled through his head. “The imbecility of some men,” it began, “is always inviting the embrace of death.”