[The Glessner Medicine Co.]

Dr. Drake's German Cough and Croup Remedy. The Great Guaranteed Cure for Croup, Coughs and Whooping Cough. [caption-title]

[Findlay, Ohio]: [The Glessner Medicine Co.], [ca. 1910]. An advertising circular for Dr. Drake's (opium-based) German Croup Remedy, an elixir first made by a newspaperman, Leonard Glessner, in his home in 1889. He initially obtained the recipe from a German physician, August Drake, and incorporated in 1905 as the Glessner Medicine Co. In 1903, Glessner won a landmark legal decision after a local man, also named Drake, began hawking his own cure all under the same name. Although the medicine was touted as safe and never to sicken, a Dr. J. A. Palmer wrote a letter to the Journal of the American Medical Association in 1907 reporting a case "in which death was directly attributable to "Dr Drake's Germany Cough Remedy." It was also explicitly mentioned in a Dr. Kebler's report before Congress in 1909 on medicinal preparations that contained habit-forming drugs. In alarmist languague, the recto describes the frightening onset of croup and the medicine's miraculous and instantaneous cure while the verso features from physicians and satisfied customers.

Printed in blue on both sides of an 8 ¾” x 5 ¾” sheet. No date is given, but as the 'German' was dropped in 1912 in the lead-up to WWI, the flier was published sometime between 1905-1912. Some toning, but a fine copy. Item #03158

Price: $35.00