Dr. Towns casts out the Demon Epilepsy

It's odd how some stories unfold over many years.  In the curious tale of the Dr. W. Towns Medicine company my starting and ending points are separated by more than three decades!

I have been interested in archaeology and local history for many years, and "back in the day" we used to excavate trash pits and privies from the 19th century.  Circa 1987 I dug up this bottle in my town of Chippewa Falls.  

It is a nice item,  which by style and by other items found seems to be from the 1880s, although  occasionally older items would kick around a while before being discarded.   At the time I was probably the leading expert on 19th century patent medicines from Wisconsin and I'd never seen one of these.  In fact, I've also not seen one since.  But Dr. W. Towns was fairly well known for his other products, with assorted Epilepsy medicines being the main business of his company.  It's quite the tale, and only now in 2021 am I getting closer to a definitive history.

Wyman Towns appears to have been born in 1837.  The 1860 census lists him as being 27 years old and residing in Oasis Township, Waushara County Wisconsin. * There are only a few hundred people living in this isolated township today, and in pioneer days it must have been even fewer.  So his early life is obscure.  The next trace of him is found in this news article/ad from the Wisconsin State Journal (Madison) of 08 July 1875:

This appears to near the beginning of his patent medicine career, as it refers to introducing his "Celebrated Vegetable Blood Purifier".   George Schlotthauer incidentally, ran the Barber Shop and Bathing Establishment at the Park Hotel in Madison in 1871.  This might have been renamed The Lake House by '75, as his 1886 obituary mentions him as the proprietor of The Lake City House.  In my next post I'll talk about Towns' epilepsy medicines at length.  Oddly baths turn up there as well....

In any event, by 1875 W. Towns has moved to Fond du Lac, Wisconsin and has started what would be a distinctive feature in his career, holding office hours at various hotels.

The 1875 reference while quite specific, is just about all I know about Wyman Towns for the next 15 years.  The 1880 census has him living in Fond du Lac.  And he is known to have a couple of sons including a Wyman Jr. born in 1878.  The next traces of him historically begin circa 1890, and interestingly link him to Chippewa Falls.

From my survey of available period newspapers it appears that 1890 was about when Dr. Towns began aggressively traveling to pitch his medicines, and that Chippewa Falls was one of his earliest stops.  (nearby Menomonie was also noted in 1890 articles).  Eventually his network of stops for personal consultations grew across the Midwest.

So far it seems fairly benign, and in keeping with what many other practitioners were doing.  Dr. Towns is described in 1896 as "..an elderly gentleman of good appearance".  But there was a disquieting side to this business venture, one that was not apparent to casual scrutiny.

Although his company would soon focus on epilepsy treatments it's earlier incarnation was oriented towards "chronic disease" and blood purification.  This was often code for venereal diseases real and imagined.  And a bit of this carried over past the turn of the century when the Dr.  W. Towns Medical Company (incorporated 1905) switched over to a largely mail order concern.  I've had a chance to peruse one of their questionnaires from 1906, and it is rather creepy.  There are plenty of questions about odd colors to your tongue and whether you have bad breath, but the query that is given the largest blank space for answers is:

STATE WHETHER OR NOT INDISCRETIONS (SELF ABUSE) HAVE EVER BEEN PRACTICED IN YOUTH?  MIDDLE AGE OR ADVANCE AGE?

You wonder if Dr. Towns was just a nosey voyeur, but if his response to one such questionnaire is representative he did have a kind of pompous sincerity about him.  

"I am no longer a young man.  My years have been spent in the treatment of this one disorder.  What the future holds in the way of reward or punishment I cannot know - but this is certain - I have too honorable a name in the world to cloud it with deceptive or dishonorable practices.  If I have been fortunate in securing my share of this world's goods it has been solely because I have been successful in curing the most stubborn and chronic cases of epilepsy....I have never taken a dollar that I have not honestly earned.  I never shall so long as I live."

In the first few years of the 20th century the Dr. Towns Medical Company went nationwide.  It's ads turn up in papers everywhere.  And the above sentiments aside, its business practices seem to have had a nasty streak to them.  Like all such outfits they accumulated customer lists.  These poor souls, suffering from epilepsy - which had considerable stigma back then - or whatever other maladies were hinted at; had their names later sold to other charlatan firms once the Towns company was done with them.  And you thought this sort of thing was only invented in the Internet Age!

But the prevailing cultural winds were against them.  1906, only a year after the company was incorporated, saw the passage of the first Pure Food and Drug Act.  This was landmark legislation, that demanded publication of things like alcohol and opioid content, and banned the use of some words like "Cure".  

This had been building for a while.  The Pure Food part of it was inspired by Upton Sinclair's novel The Jungle (1906) that documented horrendous conditions in the meatpacking industry.  And the sections that eventually destroyed the patent medicine industry were a direct result of the exposes of journalists such as Samuel Hopkins Adams, who published a series of articles in 1905 called The Great American Fraud, laying bare many of the shocking abuses of both business models and products in the quack medicine world.

Then the American Medical Association weighed in.  For years they had been publishing articles in their Journal that documented the abuses of the patent medicine industry.  These articles were collected in pamphlet form, then eventually in a two volume set called Nostrums and Quackery, published in 1912 and 1921.  It is encyclopedic and scathing.  And it has much to say on the W. Towns firm.

(Note, I am including some information that exists only in the original files at the AMA Headquarters; I made a brief visit there years ago while my family went up to the top of the Sears Tower!)

In 1910 a letter from the Fond du Lac Medical Society to the AMA states that "Wyman Towns has no medical education, is not licensed, has no place in the American Medical Directory and has gone to Baltimore, Maryland, where he goes about from town to town as a street faker claiming to cure fits".  Ouch.

The Epilepsy Cure had been downgraded to a Treatment by then, and was analyzed on several occasions.  It was found to contain ammonium bromide, salt water and small amounts of alcohol and flavorings.  Ammonium bromide actually does have some efficacy at treating seizures, but has a very narrow window between control and nasty side effects.  One of which incidentally was impotence, so perhaps that whole Indiscretions problem got cured to boot.**  Barbiturates, the first really effective seizure control medication, came along in 1912, and were probably included in later recipes of the Towns medication.

Wyman Towns passed away in 1915.  He seems to have been held in such low repute that he does not merit an obituary in Fond du Lac where he is buried.  The company implausibly soldiered on until the late 1930s.  With it being exclusively a mail order business by then it is hard to track its actual location, as mentioned it had moved from Fond du Lac to Baltimore.  It then moved back to Milwaukee, but appears to have also had a presence in Puerto Rico.  I suspect the latter location was something of a dodge to evade the tightening regulatory environment Stateside.

One of the last traces of the company I've found interestingly loops it back to the beginning of our story.  

It's a humble little ad in the Chippewa Herald Telegram from 5 March 1931.  It is the usual stuff, but interestingly makes the claim that a citizen of Chippewa Falls took a single dose of Dr. Town's Epilepsy Cure - oh, I mean Treatment! - in 1874 and had not had a seizure in the subsequent 50 years!  Clearly there was some connection between Wyman Towns and my home town.  Perhaps he had friends or relatives up this way but given the enigmatic character of the bearded old faker I'll never know more than that this seems to have been an early market for him.  Perhaps this accounts for the presence of the Blood Purifier bottle, which dates from the days of his initial foray into patent medicines.

Next time, we'll look at more bottles and graphics from Dr. Towns.

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* In an earlier article on Wyman Towns I speculated that he had emigrated from Canada.  With the benefit of new information I can say that this seems to be incorrect.  There were additional men with this name in Winnipeg and in Grand Forks Dakota Territory (now of course North Dakota).  An unusual name that is not as uncommon as you'd think.

** In the Second World War soldiers would mutter darkly about bromides being added to their wine ration so that their time on leave would be less fun and they'd be less likely to go AWOL.  Obviously we're talking about the French Army here.

On a less racy note, because bromide compounds cause one to be a bit slow and sedated, a foolish, simplistic statement has come to be called "a bromide", as it is the sort of thing somebody might say when dosed up on them!