Dr. Wolcott's Pain Paint

In the late 1860s, a Dr. Chatham in New York City came up with one of the strangest ideas I have ever come across: Pain Paint.

It inspired all sorts of poetry, such as this ballad found in the Brooklyn Daily Eagle, which reads in part:

"My Dear Wife!"

"What! grunt with pain and never try
Pain Paint in every store!
I blush to see you pout and cry,
When Paint will quick restore.

Our Bridget shall a bottle bring;
Then bathe your ankles well;
Wolcott's Pain Paint is just the thing
For crippled Joe or pouting Nell.

...Why, Wolcott's Pain Paint never fails
When properly applied;
To cure disease and all the ails
Soak full of paint outside.

An ounce of bread can never fill,
Or quench the appetite;
Small bottles! No, a pint is still
Too small, a quart is nearer right.

A quart of Pain Paint cost $8 - a tremendous amount of money in 1868.

A man named Peter Minck wrote most of the Pain Paint poetry, including the epic "A Hundred Years Ago," at right. He signed the piece entitled "My Wife Had An Ulcer" which is a tribute to the Paint which "the Doctors told me was humbug." Minck's verse concludes:

I am well known in this city,
And any person
Can make further inquiry
At 101 West Street, New York,
At the Hanover-House
Of which I am proprietor.

Peter Minck is listed on the 1880 US census at FamilySearch: he was a Hanover-born restaurant owner, hence the name of his establishment. Minck was 53 years old in 1880, so was writing his poetry for Pain Paint in his early 40s (circa 1868).

So what was this astonishing mixture which wiped out all manner of aches and pains, and made restauranteurs wax poetic? A Dr. Crull in the Medical World, quoted in Charles Wilmot Oleson's Secret Nostrums (1892) gives his recipe: dried mint leaves soaked for a few days in oil of peppermint, dissolved in alcohol and diluted with water.

Dr. Wolcott also made an Instant Pain Annihilator (1867 ad at left).

Image with poem "A Hundred Years Ago" from Harper's Weekly, November 1868, at HarpWeek's 19th Century Advertising History. The wonderful Dr. Wolcott dollar bill is from the Bowers Merena auction site, link here to see both sides of the bill. And the color ad for Wolcott's Pain Annihilator is from the Library of Congress; I've already used it in a previous post, but it's worth showing here, too. You can get the large version over at LOC.

Additional Sources

Advertisement, Brooklyn Daily Eagle, Sept. 21, 1867, p. 6.
"A Dangerous Man," Brooklyn Daily Eagle, Nov. 29, 1867, p. 3.
Oleson, Charles Wilmot. Secret Nostrums and Systems of Medicine: A Book of Formulas (Chicago 1892), p. 194.
Sampson, Henry. A History of Advertising from the Earliest Times (New York, 1875), p. 592.