The Japanese Journal of American Studies, No. 21 (2010)

America’s Shadow: Americanization ofFood and Therapeutic Diets in Victorian London

Takahiro UEYAMA*INTRODUCTION
Food can stand as a symbol for our lifestyles, our behaviors, and ourbeliefs about how we want to live. The kind of foods we choose and areallowed to eat in a society can represent our group identity. Even when
the selection of diet is left to individual preference, what we eat stilllargely communicates collective similarity, familiarity, and intimacy.
We may say that through agreement about the “right” foods a community is able to demonstrate a cohesive sense of itself. In this essay, by
focusing on patent medicines, health-related foods, and therapeutic
regimes that were widely commercialized in late Victorian London, I
provide a glimpse of how British society began to be inﬁltrated byAmerica in the form of heavy advertising, market-oriented entrepreneurship, and therapeutic ideology.
Discussing Americanization in ﬁn-de-siècle Britain may sound strange.
“Americanization” as a term has tended to be associated with the distinct presence of the United States after World War II. We can easily
recognize America’s overpowering inﬂuence at that time, not only in theeconomic and political spheres of Europe, but also in popular cultures,such as food, jazz music, cinema, and the other ways that the American
Copyright © 2010 Takahiro Ueyama. All rights reserved. This work may be used, withthis notice included, for noncommercial purposes. No copies of this work may be distributed, electronically or otherwise, in whole or in part, without permission from the author.
*Professor, Sophia University

139

140

TAKAHIRO UEYAMA

lifestyle imposed itself all over the world. To envision Americanization in
the Victorian period in London, however, it is good to start with thesituation in Britain in the 1880s and ’90s, when urban life was enteringa stage of hypercommercialized hypercapitalism with captivating advertising and rough-and-tumble business competition. At the same time,modern market mechanisms were beginning to be inﬂuential. Like themegacities that were emerging rapidly and widely in the United States,
Victorian London was also one of the most advanced cities in the world.
Speciﬁcally, medicine and therapeutics emerged as an arena in which
entrepreneurs joined in integrated corporate entities to seek dominancein enlarging markets. Behind this phenomenon was a growing health culture and burgeoning popular interest in having healthy bodies and minds.
Late Victorian society witnessed a dramatic increase in neurotic complaints such as neurasthenia and nervous prostration both in men andwomen. The commercialization and industrialization of society threw
people into stressful workplaces, while at the same time the decline ofBritain’s hegemony in the world economy, because of emerging countries like Germany and the United States, led to a fear that the British
population was degenerating with mental and nervous disorders. The
proliferating medical literature of the time focused on various forms of
nervous debility and the neurotic diminishment of mental and physicalenergies. New types of urban white-collar labor and deskwork exposed
more people to competition, stress, and other emotional anguish that led
them to search for quasimedical release.
In the 1880s and ’90s, this trend toward market capitalism in the ﬁeldof health was often decried as “Americanization”—an intrusion of a particularly American brand of commercialism. Despite Britons’ traditional
aversion to open competition and the overt pursuit of private beneﬁt, thisnineteenth-century version of American-style globalization penetrated
deeply into Londoners’ lives. When discussing early Americanization in
the form of health culture, it is important to explore the consumer movement of therapeutics in the historical context of Victorian society. However, for want of space, this essay can only be suggestive rather thancomprehensive on the subject of these movements.1
In this article, I ﬁrst discuss the marketing strategy of late Victorian
British advertising agencies, whose business style was inﬂuenced byAmerican practices. Second, I look at the desire for therapeutic commodities in London. Third, I cover the globalization of health-related
entrepreneurship. And, ﬁnally, I examine the therapeutic ideology ofAMERICA’S SHADOW

141

having a robust body and perfect health, also a result of the inﬂuence ofAmerican health culture.
ADVERTISING STRATEGIES AND MODERN CONSUMERISM
The proprietary medicine trade around the turn of the century was
unprecedented. It was said that the market had as many as ten thousand
vendors employing at least nineteen thousand people.2 Sales of patent
medicines in Britain rose from £600,000 in 1860 to £3 million in 1891and £5 million by 1914.3 A. J. White Ltd. sold its famous Mother Siegel’s
Syrup. Coleman & Co. was the proprietor of the blood-enriching wine,
Wincarnis. Hall’s Wine, Daisy Powders, and Dr. Willam’s Pink Pill for
Pale People were other widely known patent medicines. Blood puriﬁers;
nerve tonics; and pills and wafers for indigestion, dyspepsia, and biliousness were extensively advertised. Indeed, proprietary medicine wasappropriating an ever larger share of the market for medical products.
The ways in which late Victorian Londoners sought these patent
medicines and therapeutic commodities mirror what was happening in
America. Before discussing that further, however, I would like to ﬁrst
note that the marketing strategies of drug manufacturers were inﬂuenced
by the ﬁrst advertising agencies, which were developing in large cities
in the United States.
The advertising strategy of proprietary traders of patent medicines wasvery striking. The famous Victorian quack pill vendor, Thomas Halloway, who founded the Royal Holloway College for women with the proceeds from his vastly proﬁtable patent medicine business, had a genius
for recognizing the potential of advertising.4 His expenditure on advertising his pills rose steadily from £5,000 a year in 1842 to over £50,000
by the time of his death. An enormous amount of this money was spenton inserting advertisements for patent medicines in newspapers and periodicals and for pushing promotional pamphlets, diaries, and almanacs
under the front doors of homes. Similarly, the comparatively small-time
proprietors of Daisy Powders spent £3,000 a year during this period on
advertising, while the much larger Coleman & Co. had an annual advertising budget of £50,000, which enabled them to employ thirty to forty
people in its advertising department.5 Indeed, in Britain the total annual
expenditure of all patent medicine companies on advertising was estimated to be as much as £2,000,000.6

142

TAKAHIRO UEYAMA

Another notable example of advertising as a market strategy was thenotorious patent medicine dealer, Thomas Beecham, who invested a considerable amount of money in advertising his laxative pills in newspapers and other venues under the popular slogan “worth a guinea a box.”
His son, Joseph Beecham, went on to build a business empire throughhis innovative advertising strategies, which included buying advertising
space on billboards and railway fences. It was said that the younger
Beecham spent as much as £100,000 on advertising Beecham’s pill in
1912.7 It soon became impossible to travel in either Britain or the UnitedStates without seeing Beecham’s advertisements along roads and railways. Beecham’s advertising method was very audacious: the advertisement often contained his own picture, a strong reliable face with side
whiskers, accompanied by a bold statement such as “THE WORLD’SFAMILY MEDICINE. A family Medicine is a necessity. The human bodyis an intricate piece of machinery which is easily put out of order.” Heeven exploited hymn books by circulating them at low prices to working-class families before Christmas, perhaps in the hope that congregations might sing the advertised words of celebration for Beecham’s pills:“Hark! the herald angels sing, Beecham’s pills are just the thing. Peaceon earth and mercy mild. Two for man and one for child.”8
The advertising of these manufacturers was genuinely revolutionary,and it is important to stress that behind their activities, the strong inﬂuence of the style of marketing already developed in America is clear. In
the early 1800s, there were very few daily newspapers in London. Eachnewspaper only ran one or two advertisements, which, in turn, were notfreely printed because of restrictions ranging from censorship to stamp
taxes and paper duties. Even well into the middle of the nineteenth century, advertisements were printed in black and white with no pictorial
illustrations. It is perhaps better to characterize these advertisements as
printed announcements about certain products that were presented withsimple repetition, basic headlines, and small emblems. Even though
there were a few advertising agencies, they were little more than intermediaries between mercantile clients and printing presses, with theirwork being mainly that of placing announcements with a newspaper ormagazine publisher. The merchant himself or his clerks generally prepared the actual advertising copy with little thought given to catchphrases or other such hallmarks of modern advertising.
From the mid-1880s, however, old-style advertisements using a few
lines of “copy” in narrow columns began to be replaced by bombastic

AMERICA’S SHADOW

143

pictorial advertising with attractive illustrations, used in part to overcome
consumers’ skepticism, indifference, prejudice, and procrastination.9
Soon advertisements stopped being merely misguided sensationalism,
as professional advertising agencies rapidly emerged. Beginning in the1870s, men with expert knowledge of the media began to recruit educated people to form the respectable profession of advertising.10 According to social historians Dianna and Geoffrey Hindley, the developmentof these agencies was a part of the Americanization of English society.
Traditionally, British businessmen regarded advertising as undigniﬁed
and a waste of money, but a new “scientiﬁc” style of sales promotion
and advertising came from the United States, where full-service agencies, such as N. W. Ayer in Philadelphia, began large-scale advertisement campaigns on a national basis. British agencies were eager to learn
new techniques from the American advertising industry, hoping to establish their own professional identities as advertisers.
Many large agencies, such as Smith’s Manual Advertising Agency
and T. B. Browne, Ltd., with their ofﬁces in central London, began tocopy the modern American style of advertising, using technically advanced pictorial illustrations and photographs, producing serial pamphlets or handbills, and employing psychological consultants. Their
companies comprised many specialized divisions, such as design departments that employed numerous artists to create the pictures to be printed
in advertisements; in some cases, they hired psychologists to make theircatchphrases more persuasive. The Graphic and the Illustrated London
News were representative of periodicals that had copious advertising thatused innovative drawing and painting. But even smaller publications
began to include many illustrated advertisements. According to the list
where Smith’s agency advertised, there were about seventeen weekly
and biweekly periodicals published in London. Established in 1891,
Science Shifting, for example, was a chatty journal about scientiﬁc inventions and discoveries, and health. It sold 32,000 copies a day. MechanicalWorld, which provided practical information to users of machinery andelectricity, was established in 1876 and had a circulation of 22,000.
Another journal dealing with mechanics was English Mechanic, which
was established in 1895 and sold 20,000 copies per week.11 Represented
by the popular agency, Moody’s Printing, these advertising agencies oftenbought bulk page space from the media at discount prices and then resold
the divided space to clients at the standard rate. They even published theirown pamphlets, full-scale annual handbooks, and regular circulars.

144

TAKAHIRO UEYAMA

Initially, pictorial illustrations for advertising were mainly run in inexpensive papers and journals whose readers were mostly of the working
class. Illustrated advertisements were slower to make their way into publications directed at the middle-class because of the long-standing belief
that such advertisements consisted of fraudulent statements to promote
products of poor quality. The middle-class publishers feared that suchgraphic advertising would disturb the respectable tone of their publications. But by the 1880s even the most respectable publishers had begun
to insert some form of elegantly captioned illustrations. “Pictorial advertising is the most popular form of advertisement,” William Stead at T.
B. Browne advertising agency wrote in The Art of Advertising in 1899.
“A picture appeals to all classes of the community, whether educated or
uneducated. Anyone can understand a picture.”12 Meanwhile, a professional standard of advertising was gradually established and accepted inlate Victorian society. The respectable publishers came to admit thatadvertising pictures, even though exaggerated, conveyed indispensable
information about products, a commercial message to the public, and thepossibility that one could beneﬁt from using the advertised products. In
a sense, advertisements gradually changed from being mere descriptionsof goods for sale to providing the fantasy and entertainment associatedwith the commodities themselves.
Furthermore, advertising agencies’ tactics of “attractive display orillustration, especially the latter, if apt and à propos, by gratifying theeye and pleasing the mind” were not intended merely to manipulate consumers’ minds; their deeper purpose was to cultivate their hedonistic
desires.13 New-style advertisements were said to have the most effect,“not by what they say, but what they imply or leave to be inferred.
Advertisements of this nature skillfully drawn often lead a reader to view
the article advertised in a more favourable light than that in which eventhe advertiser himself could portray it in actual words.” As Smith’s advertising agency commented, “The mind of the reader has unconsciously
assimilated the things implied over and beyond the things said and as thepower of imagination is great, the result conduces to the advertiser’s
interest.”14 Consumer desire, agencies clearly understood, was not apreexisting emotion to be exposed, but rather was constructed in theexchange between consumers’ imaginations and the realities theyencountered. Therefore, it was along the interstices between fantasy andreality that agencies sought to locate their advertising to inculcate favorable impressions toward the commodities they marketed.

AMERICA’S SHADOW

145

Advertising agencies were fully aware of and often stressed theirprofession’s development as “a new method of a Democratic age.”15
William Stead wrote that the advertising agent “gauges the taste of the
public he has to address, and then chooses his means in accordance withwhat he knows will be the best way to interest it.” In response to thesteady change from political democracy to material democracy, Steademphasized that advertising also needed to be a consumer-oriented business. “The Advertising Agent is the nerve-centre of modern industry,”
he went on to say. “He is the ﬁrst to feel every inﬂuence which affects
industry, whether for good or ill. He keeps, as it were, his ﬁnger upon
the commercial pulse of the world, counts his beats, and adjusts themethod and quantity of advertising accordingly.”16 To that end, professional knowledge, marketing research on public psychology, and longexperience were deﬁnitely requirements for the successful advertising
agent. Phillip Smith, head of another big agency, emphatically warned
advertisers not to return to the outmoded excessive approach, writingthat “the day of successful claptrap and vulgarity, still more the day of
exaggeration and deceptive misrepresentation, is quickly passing
away.”17 “The truth should look like truth,” Smith added. “An advertisement should look to be so genuine that there is no need to make any
special claim of genuineness . . . the whole truth, and nothing but thetruth; and that is frankness.”18 Advertising agencies frequently recommended to advertisers that “one of the great essentials of security is thatyou should endeavour to give as much as you possibly can to your customers” to gain their support.19
Overall, however, advertising and marketing strategy were considered
to be un-British. The new managerial style of advertisements, the marketing business appealing to the masses, and the market-oriented approach to selling health-related regimens were novel in Britain. The
British apparently learned these new methods from the United States.
QUEST FOR THERAPEUTIC COMMODITIES AND THE “AMERICANDISEASE” IN LONDON
Patent medicines in late Victorian society became a genuinely big
business. What did people expect to get when they bought patent medicines? And what was the main public role that these health-related
preparations played? Proprietary drugs were, of course, sold for medicinal purposes. In reality, however, as the form and language of patent

146

TAKAHIRO UEYAMA

medicine advertisements show, consumers saw patent medicines ﬁrst
and foremost as commodities, rather than as purely remedial medications.
My examination suggests that purely medicinal preparations were frequently not advertised. For example, in the “Patent Medicine” boxes of
the John Johnson Collection at the Bodleian Library (a magniﬁcent collection of printed ephemera, handbills, and newspaper cuttings) cancer
remedies and consumption cures only accounted for 1.7 percent of all
advertisements.20 What indeed did people expect when they bought
patent medicines? What was the main public role played by these healthinducing preparations? As far as the listed medicinal virtues in the advertisements are concerned, these “drugs” were demanded as pleasures andaccessories for everyday life. Sagacious consumers of patent medicinesvery likely understood the underlying message behind the medicinal
announcements. In 1900 Andrew Wilson, a doctor of preventative medicine, observed that “this is a pill-swallowing age and a potion-loving
generation.”21 The public bought patent medicines, not because they
were actually sick, but because pills and portions were sold as therapeuticcommodities.
Manufacturers of patent medicines targeted people who had physicalor psychic loss of energy, nervous prostration, loss of appetite, irritability, nausea, palpitations, weakness, and so on. Voguish words like “nervous,” “lost energy,” and “impure blood” in the advertisements aroused
consumer interest by associating products with imaginary states of wellbeing and fueled desires for the more animated life required by a rapidly
industrializing society, which seemed to demand more energy than urban
constitutions were able to supply. These complaints were often regarded
as symptoms of the “American disease,” which was prevalent in thehighly advanced technological and industrial cities in the United States.
“It is not a question of absolute illness,” Andrew Wilson wrote, “butrather one of ‘little health.’ We are not exactly ill, and we are not precisely well.” He went on to highlight why the public needed these new
types of medicines:
Our brain-cells to-day are doing ten times the work of those which belonged
to our forefathers, and as a result they rebel the sooner, and the more frequently against the stain to which they are subjected. The busy man or woman
to-day is essentially a “neurotic” subject. I do not mean to imply that we areinvalids, or even that we are incapacitated from duty, but we are certainly as

AMERICA’S SHADOW

147

a race more subject to nervous ills than were our parents, and the life of today has nothing at all in common with the slow, peaceful existence led byour grandparents.22

For this loss of nervous energy, there were many kinds of tablets andpowders that were claimed to contain the “constituents of the Gastric ordigestive juice.”23 In other words, patent medicine vendors were notexactly dealing in materia medica but rather were selling healthenhancers. For example, Guy’s Tonic, one of the more widely advertised
pick-me-ups, proclaimed in its advertisements: “Good Appetite—Good
Health!” With this tonic, the advertisements promised, “the digestive
functions of the Stomach are so invigorated, their powers are so much
ampliﬁed, and healthy peptones of good are formed, [which] penetrate
through the walls of the Stomach and travel by their own routes to the
Blood.”24 Lactopeptine, which claimed to provide “much additional gastric juice,” was recommended for the “Common-sense Management of
the Stomach.”25 The three ingredients of Lactopeptine were advertisedas ptyalin for dissolving the starchy matters, pepsin for ﬂeshy matters,
and pancreatine for fatty matters. “It is really absurd nowadays to let
indigestion terrorise you and shut you out from the good things of thetable. Instead of surrendering to it, ﬁght it, ﬁght it with Lactopeptine.”26
It is hard to classify these preparations as medicines at all. Pepsalia
was advertised as a cure for indigestion and called itself “not a medicine,
but a Table Condiment. A pleasant, appetising, and agreeable substitutefor Table Salt.”27 Hood’s Sarsaparilla, which was claimed to be extracted
from sarsaparilla root, was similarly advertised.
AFTER DINNER

To prevent that feeling of fullness anddistress, aid digestion and assimilationof food, cure headache and biliousness
TAKE HOOD’S PILLS28

These sound like medicinally tinctured “pick-me-ups” to be taken daily
in order to feel better. Consumers were free to choose from numerous
preparations whose slogans promised the same effects for disorders suchas indigestion: Cooper’s Tonic & Pills, Beecham’s Pills, Bile Beans for
Biliousness, and Page Woodcock’s Pills.

148

TAKAHIRO UEYAMA“Nerve tonic” was a favorite term used by patent medicine manufacturers. Patent medicine manufacturers were aware that nervous ailments
such as nervous prostration and mental depression were socially createddiseases for which doctors could not supply a remedy. Physicians generally recommended that patients take a vacation from work, perhaps
following Silas Weir Mitchell’s famous “rest cure.” But the advice ofprofessional doctors did not accord with the entrepreneurial businessideology of the day, which often emphasized a therapeutic ethos of energetic health. As an effective method to mitigate the stressful effects ofmodern urban life, neurologists and other doctors in this period tended
to prescribe Mitchell’s rest cure and suggested patients stay in bed witha fatty diet for several weeks to increase their body’s supply of “fat andblood.”
Silas Weir Mitchell was an American neurologist who focused on
women’s nervous diseases. He prescribed total isolation of patients, with
bed rest and good diet. In his successful 1877 book Fat and Blood: andHow to Make Them, Mitchell explained that successful treatment lay in“certain methods of renewing the vitality of feeble people by a combination of entire rest and of excessive feeding, made possible by passive
exercise obtained through the steady use of massage and electricity.”29
He is probably best known today for the tragic result of his treating theAmerican feminist Charlotte Perkins Gilman, who was psychologicallytorn between the still strong “domestic role” of Victorian women andher rejection of these values and who late killed herself. Mitchell recommended Gilman have total bed rest and isolation from her entire
family and all social activities. Gilman’s novel, The Yellow Wallpaper,
published in the United States in 1877, was said to have been written tosuggest to Mitchell that his therapy was trapped in the dominant gender
morality of women’s domestic and submissive role and that Gilman
hoped Mitchell might change his method after reading it. Mitchell’s booksoon acquired in Britain and parts of continental Europe medical admirers who had treated, particularly in women patients, mental disorders
with such symptoms as nervous exhaustion, hysteria, anemia, and extreme thinness, and so on.
The person who introduced Mitchell’s treatment into Britain was
William S. Playfair, a professor of obstetric medicine at King’s College
and an obstetric physician at King’s College Hospital. By the 1880s, both
American and British neurological writers began to identify neurotic
women from their hysteric, restless, self-starved, and undernourishedAMERICA’S SHADOW

149

conditions. By applying Mitchell’s rest cure to his own patients, Playfair
quickly became Mitchell’s most enthusiastic and persistent promoter in
Britain. In his 1883 book The Systematic Treatment of Nerve Prostrationand Hysteria, Playfair found this new therapeutic technique, combinedwith massage and electrical stimulation, to be well adapted for treating
the functional disorders of neurotic women.30 His typical patient was “theworn and wasted, often bedridden woman, who has broken down, either
from some sudden shock” or from some other cause, and who may haveexperienced “coincident with this . . . the total loss of appetite, the profound anaemia, and the consequent wasting of the tissues.”31
Along with this “Mitchell-Playfair method” another important component of treating nervous maladies was the American neurologist
George Beard’s all-inclusive concept of neurasthenia.32 Neurasthenia
was not only a new name for nervous breakdown, collapse, and prostration, but also a new attempt by doctors in the early and mid-Victorianperiod to create a coherent contemporary medical terminology. Before
the 1880s, a great number of dispersed terms, observations, and etiologies were given for widely known phenomena such as mental depression, loss of nervous energy, and other nervous disorders. Physical andmental symptoms earlier associated with melancholy, hysteria, andhypochondriasis had a variety of causal explanations in the past. Fromthe eighteenth century through the middle of the nineteenth century,“hypochondria” (a term originating in ancient Greek medicine meaning“health phobia”) described any nervous disorder involving loss ofenergy. Psychiatrists such as Henry Maudsley, one of the most famous“mad-doctors” in Victorian England, used terms like “exhaustion” or“prostration” to argue that a person’s amount of nervous energy was supplied from the central nervous system, consumed in intellectual activities, and was of “a deﬁnite and not inexhaustible quantity.”33
Given the past jumble of terms and ideas about mental disorder, thenew diagnostic term of “neurasthenia” was welcomed by the British
medical establishment as a more clinically speciﬁc term. Traditionalist
authorities such as Sir Andrew Clark, a notable Scottish physician andpathologist, lamented the adoption of this new terminology, even accusing it of “violat[ing] a fundamental canon in the framing of a scientiﬁcnomenclature, and is, in the order of science, an unpardonable sin.”34
Nonetheless, “neurasthenia” was to be found in the headings of mostbooks on nervous disorders from the 1880s until the early twentieth century.

150

TAKAHIRO UEYAMA

The concept of neurasthenia was most applicable to the mental disorders of city dwellers. Beard’s deﬁnition of neurasthenia as a “deﬁcientquantity and impaired quality of nerve force” or as “the impoverishmentof nervous force resulting from imperfect metamorphosis of nerve tissue” was actually based on the commonly shared notion among late nineteenth-century physicians that human nervous energy was limited andexhaustible.35 The mental manifestations of neurasthenia, they believed,
appeared when the consumption of the “nerve force” surpassed the
supply from the central nervous system. Because nervous force was consumed not by physical exercise but by activities of the brain, neurasthenia was considered a disease of civilized rather than savage or backward
people. Attributing its extrinsic cause to modern city life characterized
by stressful and unremitting brain work and the forced repression of theemotions, Beard and other medical writers tended to root the appearanceof neurasthenia in the forces of evolution.36
Moreover, Beard argued, “if we know what a nation eats, we knowwhat a nation is or may become.” Thus, in his view, people at the top of
the hierarchy on human races should “diminish the quantity of cereals
and fruits, which are far below him on the scale of evolution, and increase
the quantity of animal food, which is nearly related to him in the scaleof evolution.”37 Although Beard termed neurasthenia the “American
Disease,” signaling his view of American society as the most technologically evolved civilization, British doctors viewed the United States
not so much as an evolutionary frontrunner but as a place where brutal
competition existed in manufacturing and commercial circles. The“desire to ‘get up higher,’ not alone for their own sakes, but for one’s
descendants” and “the fear of political, ﬁnancial, and commercial crises,” German neurologist H. V. Ziemssen argued, was generating thisdisease nowhere “on so extensive a scale as in the United States.”38 Even
in Europe, the nineteenth century was seen by the prominent British
physician Thomas Cliford Allbutt as “a century of stress and of unsatisﬁed desires” in which “the struggle for life has revealed itself in naked
and brutish forms.”39 Beard’s characterization of the disorder as rooted
in the most stressful and nervous aspects of the United States soon proved
to apply to other countries. But it was Britain where this concept wasmost prevalent in the medical vocabulary, and late Victorian society was
the place where it was most accepted.

AMERICA’S SHADOW

151

THE SPREAD OF HEALTH-RELATED ENTREPRENEURSHIP
It is true that patent medicine ﬂourished in late Victorian England, but
it is important to realize that this was not simply a regional boom but amanifestation of entrepreneurial expansion, mainly in the Atlantic rim.
Although there were many proprietary regimens advertised in Britain,
many of the associated commodities were sold by American manufacturers or immigrant druggists from the United States. Since Victorian
London was full of urban dwellers who were becoming very enthusiastic about “health culture,” a considerable number of entrepreneurs fromthe new continent were eager to enter this market. During the 1880s themost promising opportunity for doing so was in connection with theInternational Health Exhibition held in London in 1884.
Reﬂecting Londoners’ growing interest in positive health and nutritious foods, this exhibition attracted the public’s enthusiastic attention.40
Illustrating all the elements presumed to contribute to a healthy life, theexhibition provided a “Sanitary Show” of health commodities to the public.41 In booth after booth in its Health Section, numerous foods, articles
of clothing, a newly patented drainage system, and hygienic types ofdwellings were vividly brought before the public eye. The exhibition
provided various kinds of amusements to make it as popular an event as
possible. Inside the exhibition hall, military bands performed daily,
amusing “visitors whose desire to be entertained [was] greater than theirinterest in sanitary and hygiene questions.”42 But the primary purpose of
the health exhibition was didactic. In a speech given on opening day, thePrince of Wales noted that “for scientiﬁc and educational purposes the
public at large may derive even greater beneﬁt from it than they can getby merely coming here to enjoy the Exhibition as a place of recreation.”43
The exhibition’s Education Section highlighted recently invented educational tools, arts, and handicrafts. Given that “the public themselves
should consider, much more than they do, the utility and the means ofmaintaining their own health,” the exhibition was presented as a pedagogical place where all classes could gather and be immersed in the newhealth culture.44
By its very nature, however, the exhibition was doomed primarily to
be a spectacular display of objects.45 Even though the International
Health Exhibition was intended to demonstrate a semiotic concept ofhealth, such conceptualization was made possible only by displaying

152

TAKAHIRO UEYAMA

commodities that were estimated to have value for a healthy life. For theexhibitors, who numbered more than three thousand, the exhibition wasa golden opportunity to advertise their manufactured objects. Capitalistic
interests inevitably permeated the organization and displays at the exhibition, where entrepreneurial manufacturers could demonstrate how todevelop an ideal healthy body through use of their commodities.
All along the “great central avenue” of the exhibition was the Food
Section. Collected from all around world, the health-giving foods in thispart of the exhibition ranged from unprepared items like vegetables andfruits, which were displayed through paper and clay facsimiles, to a number of newly manufactured foods such as “compressed food,” “regimen
bread,” liquid nutrition, and other artiﬁcial substances, which were said
to have various medicinal virtues (ﬁgure 1). It is no small wonder that
there arose a concern that in this main gallery “the commercial interest
was mainly predominant.”46 Ernest Hart, a member of the Executive
Council of the exhibition, was bewildered by his role as promoter of boththe exhibition and patent medicines, because he, as an editor of the
British Medical Journal, had been eager to campaign to restrict medicine-like patented foods. In a lecture before the Society of the Exhibition,
Hart expressed his deep anxiety that consumers’ high demand for cheapand simpliﬁed foods had promoted the “introduction of articles called’substitutes’ ” by manufacturers. Afraid that the Health Exhibition might
boost food adulteration, Hart could only have faith that the Health
Exhibition’s International Jury “has, we trust, done something towards
putting a stop to a trade which, while it enriches the unscrupulous trade,places the honest manufacturer in an awkward position.”47
After conducting “a considerable number of tests and analyses” thejurors awarded 200 diplomas of honor to selected exhibitors, 270 gold
medals, 580 silver medals, 670 bronze medals, and 100 special letters of
thanks.48 But such awards were not entirely impartial. Jurors had been
selected with the “most scrupulous care to meet the view of the Exhibitors themselves.” Although the Executive Council actually selected
the jury, the exhibitors were requested to list their preferences as to the“three gentlemen to be recommended as Jurors.” To select the ﬁnal jurors
from the list, the Council “endeavoured to give full weight to the opinions expressed by Exhibitors” so that “awards will be satisfactory aliketo the Exhibitors and public.”49 Despite council member Hart’s concerns,
manufacturers had a strong hand in the awards process, and their participation in the exhibition turned out to be a boon to themselves in termsof advertising.

AMERICA’S SHADOW

Figure 1

The International Health Exhibition, London, 1884
The Illustrated London News, June 28, 1884

153

154

TAKAHIRO UEYAMA

Patent foods claiming to have medicinal effects jostled with one
another in the displays along the central avenue of the exhibition. For
example, an American manufacturer, Murdock Liquid Food Company,
displayed “a raw extract of beef, mutton, and fruits, condensed manifold,” which was said to be used in American hospitals for men andwomen with chronic illnesses.50 Mellins, which was most frequently
advertised as an artiﬁcial food for infants and invalids, claimed to havea “high degree of alkalinity, in order to neutralise the acidity of cow’s
milk and that of the cereals.” Its inventor, G. Mellin, also displayed his
Lacto-Glycose, “a substitute for the natural food of very young children.”51 Many other substitutes were also exhibited, such as Crawford’s“amylaceous food,” Mottershead’s “peptonised food,” and Benger’s“liquor pancreaticus.” There was also Dr. Druitt’s remedy for nervous
exhaustion, as well as Loeﬂund’s Pure Hordeum and Barf & Wire’s
Krechyle, which were respectively displayed as medicinal beef and malt
extracts.52
Turning our eyes to the market in general, about half of the patent medicines colorfully advertised called themselves patent foods, nutritious
substitutes, medicinal drinks, or meat or vegetable extracts. Cod liver oil
was a frequently promoted natural regimen. In the early 1870s, Dr. deJongh’s Light-Brown Cod Liver Oil was put on the market for “prostration and emaciation, where the vital forces are reduced, and where life
appears to be even at its lowest ebb.”53 Similarly, Allen & Hanbury ﬁrst
became world famous for its successful sale of BYNIN, a mixture of malt
extract and cod liver oil. The company also sold, as “a Speciﬁc for NEURALGIA” or “TONGA,” a medicinal ﬂuid extracted from the “Barkes,
Roots, and Leaves of several plants.”54 Cod liver oil was often sold as
an emulsion. “Scott’s Emulsion,” one advertisement proclaimed, “is a
NET GAIN. In thousands of cases, ordinary food, even if digested, is notenough to meet the demands upon it [the body]. The vital spark burns
low in consequence, and there is constant danger.”55
Though Mellins was no doubt an artiﬁcial food, there were also on themarket many other foodstuffs that were “already cooked requiring neither boiling nor straining.”56 Artiﬁcial food became a mainstay for Allen& Hanbury’s business. “No Better Foods Exist,” the company boasted,than “a nourishment peculiarly adapted to the digestive organs of Infants
and Young.”57 Dr. Ridge’s Patent Cooked Food and Benger’s Food, displayed at the exhibition, were other brands targeting infants and persons
with digestive trouble.58 The medicinal virtues of such daily foods andAMERICA’S SHADOW

155

drinks, often supported by doctors’ recommendations and certiﬁcates,
were distorted as advertising strategies for manufacturers. For example,
cocoa manufacturers never failed to publicize their product’s medicinal
qualities. The earliest advertisements for Van Houten Cocoa andCadbury’s Cocoa always accentuated their product’s nitrogenous, ﬂeshforming, and thus highly therapeutic virtues. Van Houten Cocoa, it wasclaimed, would “smooth the nerves and is . . . strengthening. . . . Its nourishing qualities enable the blood to build up, during sleep.”59
Another interesting case showing the public’s concern and demand
for nutritious food was Hovis, the national brand maker of “brown bread”(ﬁgure 2). Launched in the 1880s as Smith’s Old Patent Germ Bread ata time when white bread was already popular, Hovis sold its patented
bread as the “Only Food that will Prevent or Cure Indigestion” because
it returned wheat germ to white ﬂour. Beginning in the 1890s, Hovis
placed numerous advertisements in popular newspapers and magazines
boasting of the bread’s therapeutic effect of curing indigestion and building good bones, ﬂesh, and muscles. Its advertisements illustrated thesuperior beneﬁts of its “brown bread”: “1 1/2 lbs. Hovis is more digestible and nourishing than 1 lb. of white bread and 1/2 lb. of beef steak.”60
Hovis also asserted that for the “formation of sound teeth, strong bones,
vigorous constitution” Triticumina Bread was worth buying.61 Someyears later, in 1911, the Daily Mail began a campaign to make brownbread the “standard bread,” insisting that consuming white bread was aserious factor in the deterioration of the nation’s public health. The newspaper cited the work of Cambridge biochemist Frederick Gowland
Hopkins, who did experiments that discovered nutritional elements thatwere later labeled “vitamins.” The Daily Mail’s campaign highlighted
the necessity of consuming important nutrients by returning to the traditional way of making bread. Although commercial bakers of breadmade from reﬁned ﬂour spearheaded a boycott of the Daily Mail on
account of its bread campaign, British consumers continued to view
Hovis’s brown bread as a nutritious product.62
Various kinds of medicinal extracts, such as Liebig’s Extract of Meat
and Coleman’s Malt Wine, occupied a considerable share of the patent
medicine market. The Maltine Company sold Carnrick’s Beef Peptonids,“Concentrated Powdered Extract of Beef, Partially Digested and Combined with an Equal Portion of Gluten.”63 Lion Brand Essence of Beef
was another extract for “invalids & Persons of Weak Digestion.”64
Gordon’s Extract, sold as a pure vegetable essence and “the great

156

TAKAHIRO UEYAMA

Figure 2

Hovis Form Blood Bone Brain Flesh and Muscle,
The Graphic, Jan. 29, 1898

AMERICA’S SHADOW

157

panacea,” could “Cure Disordered Liver and Chronic Indigestion” andeven “Cure those Discharged from Hospitals as Incurable.”65
Today these various substitutes, extracts, and drinks would be categorized as food products, but in the late nineteenth and early twentiethcenturies manufactures stressed the medicinal virtues of this panoply of
products. In order to exploit people’s obsession with health, manufacturers of patent medicines used advertising language that easily caught
consumers’ attention and encouraged them to imagine alternatives toprofessional medical treatment. The newly emerging health culture,
partly cultivated by medical doctors, like the popularizer Andrew
Wilson, opened up a Pandora’s box, since doctors’ medical services
increasingly came to be replaced by use of medical commodities. And
ﬁn-de-siècle capitalists never overlooked the proﬁt that could be gained
through the commodiﬁcation of this health culture.
A ROBUST BODY, PERFECT HEALTH, AND “PHYSICAL CULTURE”
Britons’ growing desire to overcome nervous weakness and neurasthenia is further evidence of the cultural and entrepreneurial shadow castby America. In the late nineteenth century, British urban dwellers began
to see “health” not only as the condition of a properly functioning body
but also as the achievement of untapped reservoirs of exuberant, abundant energy and the opening of a way to a richer, fuller life. In his writings, cultural historian Jackson Lears has shown Americans’ obsession
in the late nineteenth century for buying therapeutic commodities primarily to achieve a sense of “self-realization” through being healthy.66
Similar to Americans who exposed themselves to highly industrialized
and stressful working settings, Londoners wanted to be physically strong
to face the business competition that was coming from North America.
The advertising of medical commodities on both continents both produced and exploited this aspiration for abundant health. Key phrases thatcropped up again and again in patent medicine advertisements were perfect condition, robust body, vital energy, supreme strength, invigorating
health, robust masculinity, long life, and so on (ﬁgure 3).
Flawless health became the symbol of ultimate achievement. Manybooks gave instructions on how to gain perfection in life in the form ofideal health: Perfect Health for Women and Children; The Modern
Family Doctor, A Guide to Perfect Health; The Secret of Perfect Health;158

TAKAHIRO UEYAMA

Figure 3 Frame Food Diet for Infants & Everybody,
The Illustrated London News, Nov. 26, 1898

AMERICA’S SHADOW

159

The Key to Perfect Health and the Successful Application of PsychoTherapeutics, and the like.67 Perfect enjoyment of life was also pursued
in physical beauty, which was associated speciﬁcally with health:“Perfect health is the foundation of all culture of physical beauty” and“We cannot add or take away one inch form our stature, but the wellknit, supple frame of perfect health does a great deal to atone for excess
or surplus.”68 Advertising language no doubt reﬂected this perfectionist
psychology. For example, Hood’s Sarsaparilla promised “perfect healthrestored.”69 Other advertisements went so far as to dispense psychological advice along with a recipe for health: an advertisement for J. C. Eno,a brand of fruit salt supposedly salutary for health, preached that “PerfectHappiness lies First of All in Perfect Health, and does not Grieve for thethings which we Have Not, but Rejoices for Those Which We Have.”70
Furthermore, products sold for the health of the brain or nerves were
often considered ideal for helping to acquire perfect health. There was
Bromo-Phosph, which was sold as “Brain Food” and which was claimed
to restore the energy and vital force of the entire body: “It prevents Decayof Nerve Force, adds zest and pleasure to life by invigorating the wholeframe.”71 The promise of robust health called the public’s attention to
the ways in which medicine could help people achieve a fully prosperous and pleasant life. “Robust Health,” Bile Beans proclaimed, “is thething necessary to complete enjoyment of life,” while another famousliver pill, Beecham’s, offered “to build robust health.”72
Advertisements also often highlighted virile masculinity as a symbolof a happy, healthy life. Many of the patent medicine advertisements
focused on nervousness, debility, and weakness, all three of which wereseen as typical of a woman’s unhealthy state of being. Recoveringstrength and vitality, however, was often highlighted as a necessary condition for both men and women who had to survive stressful city lives.
In the modern urban environment, masculinity itself was not simply agendered connotation but rather became the embodiment of achievement
for both sexes.
The emphasis on masculinity in consumer culture is another noticeable break from conventional British gender icons. Unlike cultural
historian Lori Ann Loeb, who describes how “women-as-consumers”
emasculated men by having them indulge in a lifestyle of luxury andprodigality, Jackson Lears says that the American model of consumers
as the triumph of masculine materialism ﬁts well with British images of

160

TAKAHIRO UEYAMA

urban consumers of health. Lears, in his seminal work, Fable of Abundance: A Cultural History of Advertising in America, portrays the age ofmodern consumerism as one in which the Old World’s conception ofluxurious abundance, often associated with “women-as-fecund-earth”
and feminine fertility, was passing away.73 Lears argues quite convincingly that in the late nineteenth century, which witnessed an unparalleledexplosion of mass production and mass consumption in America, there
emerged a new style of consumerism that featured the “disembodimentof female icons of abundance.”74 Buying luxurious commodities had
long been seen as perilous and was considered an exotic temptation
toward a prodigal life. Modern consumerism, however, represented thevictory of the rationalized factory system with its managerial efﬁciencyof mass production and corporate culture. The advertisements in this newage, therefore, signaled not so much indulgence and “effeminate luxury”
as masculine materialism and the “abundant” availability of plentiful
commodities; advertisements reﬂected the images of factories rather
than the goddess of land fertility, as they had in previous eras. Even when
women appeared in these advertisements, Lears explains, they played apassive role as the “beneﬁciaries of the largesse generated by the malegenius of mass production.”75
In this context, advertising valorizing strong, vigorous health was the
norm:
HOOD’S SARSAPARILLA

which makes rich, healthy
blood and thus gives strengthand elasticity to the muscles,
vigor to the brain, and healthand vitality to every part ofthe body. Hood’s Sarsaparilla
MAKES THE WEAK STRONG

Similarly, Guy’s Tonic, promised to restore “Muscular Vitality” and wassaid to give its user “that Vigour and alertness that are signs of returning Health.” Its advertisement depicts two men toasting and thanking the
product for the vivacity and strength it has given them (ﬁgure 4).
What cultural meanings underlie these advertising phrases? In otherwords, what imaginary landscape was associated with what products
when the public consumed them? The inextricable mesh of images these

AMERICA’S SHADOW

Figure 4

161

Guy’s Tonic for Vivacity and for Strength,
JJC, The Bodleian Librarywords conveyed to consumers can best be understood by looking at
Britain’s burgeoning “physical culture” boom and the way it identiﬁed
muscular vitality with general health.
Small wonder, then, that this was a period in which gymnastics, bodybuilding, and all kinds of sports activities were introduced as healthrelated disciplines. For late Victorians, being healthy signiﬁed a vitalityacquiring process, and for that purpose, various kinds of physicalexercises were recommended, along with dietary and other regimens.
Archibald Maclaren, founder of the Oxford gymnasium and an apostleof physical education for schoolchildren, deﬁned health as “that amountof vital capacity, which shall enable each man in his place to pursue his
calling and work on in his working life.”76 Gymnastic exercises and training, Maclaren wrote, aimed to achieve “the strengthening, the developing of his body, muscle and joint, organ and limb; [to] make him a man,

162

TAKAHIRO UEYAMA

and as a man give him power over himself.”77 As Bruce Haley has elegantly described in The Healthy Body and Victorian Culture, the years
between the 1850s and 1880s saw the rise of a new mood in which various athletic sports became a national mania. All well-known modern
sports, including football, hockey, croquet, lawn tennis, badminton,
bicycling, boxing, wrestling, gymnastics, golf, and dumbbells, which
once had been the object of ridicule by gentlemen, were developed into
respectable educational disciplines during that period. It is signiﬁcantthat they were accepted and celebrated as a part of a physical educationthat would provide a healthy and vigorous life to young men.78
The development of a physical culture was ﬁrst recognized by those
upper-middle-class enthusiasts who saw a pedagogical role for sports inthe fashioning of the true manly gentleman.79 By the end of the century,
however, physical culture expanded to become a predominant concern
for a wide range of late Victorians who worshipped physical vigor androbust muscularity, sought out exercise, and bought various exercise
machines. Tricycling was taken up as a bourgeois substitute for the aristocratic sport of horse-riding, while its shaking-the-liver movements
were believed to help squeeze waste out of that organ.80 To achieve
similar purposes, Vigor & Co. extensively marketed such machines as
Vigor’s Home Rower as a perfect chest and muscle developer andVigor’s Horse-Action Saddle as a perfect substitute for a live horse (ﬁgure 5). The advertisement for this machine says, “It invigorates the system by bringing all the Vital Organs into Inspiriting Action. . . . It is acomplete cure for Obesity, Hysteria, and Gout.” Interestingly, the manriding this machine is a bearded aristocratic-looking gentleman. The
advertising for the machine sought, however, to appeal to the lower middle class, by mimicking the exercising habits of the gentleman class.81
Physical culture was not only popularized but institutionalized. It was
spotlighted as a military discipline in France and Germany. The gymnasium was introduced into late Victorian England as a means of providing health-enhancing exercises, and private gymnastics institutions
soon becoming a preeminent manifestation of this physical culture. For
example, the London Polytechnic Institute, founded by Eton graduate
and later chairman of the East India Company, Quintin Hogg, and situated along fashionable Regent Street, was ﬁrst intended to provide an
educational site for working-class youths. However, it quickly grew to
become a well-known social club for the lower-middle-class public with
its numerous gymnastic machines, a swimming pool, and other exercise

AMERICA’S SHADOW

163

Figure 5 Vigor’s Horse-Action Saddle,
The Graphic, Jan. 11, 1896

facilities (ﬁgure 6).82 Quintin Hogg in 1865 opened a school on York
Street for the philanthropic purpose of helping boys on the lowest rungof the social ladder. By not only providing lodging to homeless anddestitute boys but also nurturing them with religious education and practical and technical lectures, including mathematics, mechanical engineering, elementary chemistry, mining, glass cutting, and clock making,
Hogg aimed to build up a generation of good Christian youths. His pedagogical method was to develop these youths’ spiritual welfare throughathletic exercise as well as through religious and educational instruction.
In 1881 he took over the Polytechnic Institute, which has previously beena place for exhibiting technological innovations. In its new guise as amodern gymnasium, the Polytechnic Institute gained great popularity,with membership exceeding more than three thousand in 1882.83
Under the aegis of trained gymnasts, Hogg’s Polytechnic Instituteoffered many classes using dumbbells and barbells, rowing exercises,
parallel bars, ﬂying rings, high jumping, a vaulting horse, and a trapeze.84
The Polytechnic Institute, appealing to people’s quest for physically164

TAKAHIRO UEYAMA

Figure 6 Gymnasium at London Polytechnic Institute,
University of Westminster Archives, London

developed and muscular health, often advertised its gymnastic facilities
in health-related journals as a way of curing back pain, rheumatism, andstomach troubles. Where physical sports had once been solely the domain of the well-to-do, Hogg’s institute offered a more democratic visionof health: the gymnasium and other facilities at the institute were open
to any member of the public who bought tickets at three shillings perannum in addition to the member’s regular subscription (ﬁgure 6).
Another health discipline, body building, emerged out of this physical culture and eventually achieved a toehold in late Victorian society.
That the best-selling British health manual of body building, William
Blaikie’s How to Get Strong and How to Stay So, appeared in numerous
editions from its ﬁrst publication in 1880 and acquired a wide range ofreaders both in the United States and Britain, attests to the transatlantic
cultural atmosphere in which health was conceived of as an epiphenomenon of muscular vigor.85

AMERICA’S SHADOW

165“Never, since the world began,” Blaikie wrote, “was the art of bodybuilding so well understood as it is now. Your lacks; your weakness;
your probable length of life, can be gauged with a certainty well-nighunerring.”86 Observing that frequent complaints of the blockage of physical vitality were closely connected with mental strain, fret, anxiety, anddepression, Blaikie stressed throughout the book the usefulness of bodybuilding or “vigorous muscular exercise for all parts of the body” in orderto rescue people from both physical and mental “running down.” Capitalizing on the extent to which sedentary occupations, such as teaching,ofﬁce work, law, editing, and medicine had increased rapidly from the1880s, he argued that a vigorous mind required a vigorous body.
Moreover, he emphasized that these learned professions required greater
physical endurance: “To win lasting distinction in sedentary, in-door
occupations, which task the brain and the nervous system, extraordinary
toughness of body must accompany extraordinary mental powers. . . .
The sound body is at the bottom of all.”87 Blaikie’s championing of exercising to gain “an unusual store of vitality,” “the stout bodily frame,”and “bodily stamina” eventually carried the day, with exercise coming
to embody the entrepreneurial ideal in Victorian England.88
CONCLUSION
The proliferation of patent medicine businesses marked the beginningof a new cultural phenomenon in the late nineteenth century. The public, both working-class and middle-class consumers, began to see being
healthy as a modernized manifestation of their individual desires, hopes,
and aspirations. As advertising illusions began to infuse market capitalism into health culture through the media related to these commodities,
the public enjoyed consuming a cultural imagination of “health” that
could be purchased, stored, exchanged, and even achieved. In this milieu
there are traces of the early Americanization of British society. In therealm of patent medicine and health-related foods, British society was
becoming more and more “capitalistic,” in the sense that a person’s
behaviors and allocation decisions were driven by market forces and forproﬁt activities. The permeation of market capitalism into the very private sphere of people’s health signiﬁes a departure from Britons’
traditional way of life in an age of newly emerging globalization.

166

TAKAHIRO UEYAMA

NOTES
1For a detailed discussion, see Takahiro Ueyama, Health in the Marketplace: Professionalism, Therapeutic Desires, and Medical Commodification in Late Victorian
London (Palo Alto, CA: Society for the Promotion of Science and Scholarship, 2010).
2
Report from the Select Committee on Patent Medicines, together with Proceedingsof the Committee, Minutes of Evidence, and Appendices, Ordered by the House ofCommons, 1914 (London: Wyman and Sons, 1914) 501, xiii–xiv. E. S. Turner, The
Shocking History of Advertising (London: Michael Joseph, 1953).
3
S. W. F. Holloway, Royal Pharmaceutical Society of Great Britain 1841–1991: A
Political and Social History (London: Pharmaceutical Press, 1991), 308.
4
W. H. Helfand, “James Morrison and His Pills,” Transactions of the British Societyof the History of Pharmacy 1 (1974): 101–35.
5
Parliamentary Papers (1914) IX: Select Committee on Patent Medicines, published
as Report from the Select Committee on Patent Medicines, together with Proceedingsof the Committee, Minutes of Evidence, and Appendices, Ordered by the House of Commons, 1914 (London: Wyman and Sons, 1914), 501.
6
Ibid., x.
7
For the business history of the Beecham Company, see H. G. Lazell, From Pills to
Penicillin: The Beecham Story (London: Heinemann, 1975); Anne Francis, A Guinea aBox: A Biography (London: Robert Hale, 1968).
8“Sir Joseph Beecham Found Dead in Home—By the Sale of His Pills He Had
Become the Third Richest Man in England,” New York Times, October 24, 1919.
9
In the Illustrated London News, for example, the ﬁrst printing of pictorial advertisements was in 1888.
10
Diana Hindley and Geoffrey Hindley, Advertising in Victorian England, 1837–1901(London: Wayland, 1972).
11
Smith’s Advertising Agency Successful Advertising: Its Secrets Explained, 21st ed.,(London: Smith’s Advertising Agency, 1885), 295. Listed papers are: The Capitalists(est. 1885); Commercial Intelligence (1898); Electrical Engineer (1883); Electricity andElectrical Engineering (est. 1890); Family Doctor (1895); The Hospital (1886); Insurance Post and Remembrancer (1879); Insurance Record (1863); Insurance Worldand Monetary Record (1879); London Commercial Records (1876); Medical Press andCircular (1825); Newspaper Owner & Modern Printer (1898); Polytechnic Magazine(1879); and Vegetarian (1888).
12
William Stead, Jr., The Art of Advertising: Its Theory and Practice Fully Described(London: T. B. Browne, 1899), 97.
13
Successful Advertising: Its Secrets Explained, 67.
14
Ibid., 68.
15
Stead, Art of Advertising, 12.
16
Ibid., 42.
17Phillip Smith, Successful Advertising: Its Secret Explained, 24th ed. (London:
Smith’s Advertising Agency, 1909), 19.
18
Ibid., 45
19
Ibid., 11.
20
Although I have not yet made a statistical examination of the advertisements thatappeared in the Illustrated London News, the Graphic, and Health, I did review theadvertisements from 1870 to 1910 and found no advertisements employing bombastic
illustrations until the mid-1880s.

AMERICA’S SHADOW

167

21
Andrew Wilson, Brain and Body: the Nervous System in Social Life (London: James
Bowden, 1900), 12.
22
Wilson, Brain and Body, 10–11.
23
Illustrated London News, November 5, 1898, 988.
24
Illustrated London News, February 5, 1898, 197.
25
Illustrated London News, September 14, 1901, 401.
26
Illustrated London News, February 16, 1901, 249.
27
Graphic, January 9, 1892, 55.
28“Hood’s Sarsaparilla (blood puriﬁer)” in the John Johnson Collection at theBodleian Library [hereinafter JJC], Patent Medicine box, miscellaneous patent medicines.
29
Weir Mitchell, Fat and Blood: and How to Make Them (Philadelphia: J. B.
Lippincott, 1877); Weir Mitchell, Fat and Blood: An Essay on the Treatment of Certain
Forms of Neurasthenia and Hysteria (Philadelphia: Lippincott, 1898).
30
W. S. Playfair, The Systematic Treatment of Nerve Prostration and Hysteria(London: Smith, Elder & Co., 1883).
31
Ibid., 72.
32
Cliford Allbutt, “Neurasthenia” in Cliford Allbutt and Humphry Davy Rolleston,eds., A System of Medicine, vol. 8, (London: Macmillan, 1910), 778. Allbut used the“Mitchell-Playfair method” combining it with the new terminology of neurasthenia.
33
See Janet Oppenheim, “Shattered Nerves”: Doctors, Patients, and Depression in
Victorian England (New York: Oxford University Press, 1991), esp. chap. 3.
34
Andrew Clark, “Some Observations Concerning What Is Called Neurasthenia,”
Lancet 2 (1882): 1–2.
35
George M. Beard, Sexual Neurasthenia (Nervous Exhaustion): Its Hygiene, Causes,
Symptoms, and Treatment, with a Chapter on Diet for the Nervous (New York: T.B.
Treat, 1884), 36.
36
George M. Beard, American Nervousness: Its Causes and Consequences, aSupplement to Nervous Exhaustion (Neurasthenia) (New York: G. P. Putman & Son.,
1880).
37
Ibid.
38
H. von Ziemssen, “Clinical Lectures on Neurasthenia and its Treatment,” trans.
Edmond J. McWeeney, in Clinical Lectures on Subjects Connected with Medicine andSurgery, 3rd. ed., by various German authors (London: New Sydenham Society, 1894),
57.
39
Clifford Allbutt, “Nervous Diseases and Modern Life,” Contemporary Review 67(1895): 210–31.
40
Many newspapers and periodicals welcomed this exhibition and carried articles on
its purpose and with illustrations. See, for example, the articles in Illustrated London
News, 1884.
41
For spectacular scenes from the proliferating exhibitions of the nineteenth century,
see Richard D. Altick, Shows of London (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press, 1978).
42“International Health Exhibition,” Health, May 9, 1884, iv.
43
The Health Exhibition Literature, vol. 8, printed and published for the Executive
Council of the International Health Exhibition and for the Council of the Society of Arts
(London: William Clowes and Sons, 1884), 4.
44
Health Exhibition Literature, 24–25.
45
Thomas Richards begins his narrative with the Great Exhibition of 1851, exploring
the ways in which the burgeoning commodity culture and advertisements emerged as a

168

TAKAHIRO UEYAMA

theatrical spectacle in bourgeois society. The Commodity Culture of Victorian England:
Advertising and Spectacle, 1851–1914 (London: Verso, 1991).
46
Ernest Hart, The International Health Exhibition: Its Influence and Possible
Sequels, A Paper read before the Society of Arts, November 26, 1884 (London: Smith,
Elder & Co., 1885), 11. Also see his report on the exhibition, “Abstract of a Lecture on
the International Health Exhibition of 1884: Its Inﬂuence and Possible Sequels,” British
Medical Journal 2 (December 6, 1884): 1115–22.
47
Ibid., 12.
48
Ibid., 14.
49“The International Health Exhibition,” Health, May 9, 1884, iv.
50“International Health Exhibition Supplement,” second notice, Health, May 16,
1884, iv.
51
“International Health Exhibition Supplement,” third notice, Health, May 23, 1884,
iii. This series went to fourth and ﬁfth notices: May 30, 1884, iii–vi; June 6, 1884, iii–vi.
52
Ibid., Health, May 23, 1884, iv–v.
53
Dr. de Jongh’s Light-Brown Cod Liver Oil, Illustrated London News, 1872,
December 21, 1884, August 30, 1884, and in JJC, Well-Known Patent Medicines, box
6.
54
Allen & Hanbury’s ad for “Bynin” and “Tonga,” in JJC, Patent Medicine, box 1.
55
Scott’s Emulsion, Graphic, January 1, 1898, 26.
56
Mellins’ Foods were extensively advertised in many journals. See, for example,
Health, March 29, 1889, and March 10, 1893.
57
Allen & Hanbury’s Infants Food, Illustrated London News, January 13, 1894, 64.
58“Ridge’s Food Is Enjoyed by All the Young Masters,” Health, February 10, 1893;
Benger’s Food, Graphic, April 7, 1906.
59
Van Houten Cocoa, Graphic, March, 29, 1902, 439; Cadbury’s Cocoa, for example, Health, February 15, 1889.
60“The Hovis, at One Third the Cost,” Health, June 16, 1893, 2.
61“Triticumina Bread: Entire Wheatmeal Malt Bread,” Health, January 13, 1893.
62
For the Daily Mail’s campaign for brown bread as standard bread, see Mark
Weatherall, “Bread and Newspapers: The Making of ‘A Revolution in the Science ofFood,’ ” in Science and Culture of Nutrition, 1840–1940, ed. Harmke Kamminga andAndrew Cunningham (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 1995).
63
Carnick’s Beef Peptonoids, Health, April 13, 1883.
64
Lion Brand Essence Beef, Health, July 17, 1885.
65
Gordon’s Extract, Health, August 28, 1885.
66
Jackson Lears argues that consumers’ desire for self-realization promoted the proliferation of consumption culture in the United States. See his “From Salvation to SelfRealization: Advertising and the Therapeutic Roots of the Consumer Culture,” in The
Culture of Consumption: Critical Essays in American History, 1880–1980, ed. Jackson
Lears, T. J. Jackson, and Richard Wightman Fox (New York: Pantheon Books, 1983).
Also see Jackson Lears, Fables of Abundance: A Cultural History of Advertising in
America (New York: Basic Books, 1994).
67
Elizabeth Sloan Chester, Perfect Health for Women and Children (London: Methuen& Co., 1912); The Modern Family Doctor: A Guide to Perfect Health (London: T. C.
& E. Jack, 1914); Walter S. Moon, The Secret of Perfect Health: Disease Rendered
Preventible and Removable by Washing its Germs out of the Body (London: Ofﬁces of
Sanitary Engineering, 1890); and Arthur Hallum, The Key to Perfect Health and theSuccessful Application of Psycho-Therapeutics: A Practical Guide to both Operator andPatient (London: St. Clements Press, 1912).

AMERICA’S SHADOW

169

Modern Family Doctor, 262.
Hood’s Sarsaparilla, in JJC, Well-Known Patent Medicines, outsized material.
70
Eno’s Fruit Salt, Graphic, April 2, 1900, 73.
71
Bromo-Phosph or Brain Food, in JJC, Patent Medicine, box 1.
72
Bile Beans and Beecham’s Pills, both in JJC, Well—Known Patent Medicines, box
5.
73
Lori Anne Loeb, Consuming Angels: Advertising and Victorian Women (New York:
Oxford University Press, 1994); Lears, Fables of Abundance.
74
Ibid., 109.
75
Ibid., 120.
76
Archbold Maclaren, A System of Physical Education, Theoretical and Practical(Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1885), 24.
77
Ibid., 91.
78
Bruce Haley, “Growing Up Healthy: Images of Boyhood,” in his book, The Healthy
Body and Victorian Culture (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1978), 141–60.
79
Bruce Haley, “Anarchy and Physical Culture,” in Healthy Body and Victorian
Culture, 161–79.
80“The Tricycle and its Relations to Health,” Health, June 20, 1884, 162–64.
81“Vigor’s Home Rower: A Perfect Chest and Muscle Developer,” Illustrated London
News, February 1, 1896, 152; “Horse Exercise at Home, Vigor’s Horse-Action Saddle,”
Illustrated London News, March 16, 1895, 336; “Live Your Life Healthy,” Graphic
January 11, 1896, 55.
82
The records of the London Polytechnic Institute are at the University of Westminster
Archives. See for example, The Polytechnic: (The Pioneer Institute for Technical
Education), Its Genesis and Present Status (London: The Polytechnic, 1892); Fred A.
McKenzie, “The Regent Street Polytechnic: England’s Largest Educational Institute,”
Winsor Magazine 8 (October 1898).
83
See Gerard Van de Linde, “Mr. Quintin Hogg and the London Polytechnic,” Clerks’Journal, October 1, 1888, 3–4; Sarah A. Tooley, “The Polytechnic Movement: An
Interview with Mr. Quintin Hogg,” The Young Man: A Monthly Journal and Review 101(May 1895): 145–50. Both journals are at the University Westminster Archives.
84
Wilson’s journal, Health, carried an introductory article on Hogg’s gymnastic facility. See “Gymnastics at the London Polytechnic,” Health, November 14, 1884, 106–8.
85
William Blaikie, How to Get Strong and How to Stay So (London: Sampson Low,
Marston & Company, 1899).
86
Ibid., 466.
87
Ibid., 62.
88
Ibid., 466, 467, 470.
68
69