These are not the hands - Michelle Lovric

I’m making this short, as Covid-brain has inoculated me with attention deficit disorder, hop-skipping eyes and a dislike of detail. I don’t believe I am speaking just for myself when I say that I flinch away from length and complication the way we used to recoil from a mosquito when on holiday in the Mediterranean …

In 2020, my hands took a Great Leap Forward, not in a good way. They aged twenty years faster than the rest of my body. They don’t look like my hands any more.

Covid cleanliness is not next to pellicular loveliness. Add regular hand-washing to Corona-brain daydreaming, and I often find myself washing my hands for far too long. I can never remember when I last sanitized, so it’s always the right time to do it again. Result: mummification.

My messed-up hands had more use than normal during the lockdowns. They made many meals. They produced battalions of home-made cards collaged from antique ephemera and beads. They set up a guerrilla garden in my London street (only to have it stripped, night by night, by a thief); they spent quite a lot of time in the belly-puff of my fur-friend Caramella. They grew herbs and planted exotic tulip bulbs. They dispensed picnics on night-time boat trips in Venice.

But month by month, they looked more and more like leather carved out of a butcher’s apron. Caramella the cat, normally up for a belly rub at any time, began to cringe from my thorny touch.

I researched all kinds of moisturisers – finding ‘Hand Jam’, ‘Crack Attack’, ‘French Lavender Goat Lotion’, ingredients including chocolate-orange, pumpkin and Parma violets.

I was reminded that I’d been here before.

In an anthology about quack medical cures for women, produced some 20 years ago, I’d included a section on the products sold to women eager to keep their hands supple, soft and elegant. Ironically, marketing for such potions was targeted at the gullible rich, and were likely to have been beyond the pockets of the women whose hands were regularly punished by washing and scrubbing.

As ever, with quack medicine, the charm for me lay in the language. Quacks were the poets of their day, tellers of adult fairytales of the perfectability of health and beauty.

Skin treatments for women have always been sold as more than simple creams or lotions: they are magical solutions to life’s problems, if the advertisers are to be believed. No metaphor was too extreme, no allusion too exotic, no caution too terrifying.

As Carl A. Naether observed his book Advertising to Women (1928): ‘I can think of no commodity field in which superlatives are used more excessively than in cosmetics.’

One must add these superlatives to the quack’s usual arsenal of terms that sound scientific, and may well be scientific in origin but have nothing to do with rejuvenating ageing skin – and also, perhaps more than in any other field, the quacks have always scoured the world for exotic ingredients, or at least the names of them, when it comes to beauty preparations. A skin tonic could hardly expected to be effective without containing some ‘May-dew sublimated’, or ‘Ready-drawn Spirit of Mint and Saffron’. Precious stones and flower essences were favourite stated ingredients, but often the contents were more prosaic, as was demonstrated in a series of books published in the early 20th century. 

Secret Remedies analysed the contents of various well-known products. Part of the remit was to show how much very cheap ingredients were marked up by the manufactures (very much). Boric acid, maize starch, paraffin were popular ingredients but the most common one was … water. ‘Rino Curative Ointment’ was advertised as containing ‘napthalan, Peru balsam, chrysarobin’ but was found to consist of turpentine, oil of cade, boric acid and egg yolk.

Secret Remedies also pointed out that prices often started low, but those who wrote off for a simple cream would receive an answer that specified a complete treatment including a special soap, a medicine to be taken internally and a dusting powder. The treatment could not be expected to work unless all four products were used together, of course. 

Preparations for women were often sold with a female name in the title, such as ‘Mrs Merroll’s Face Bleach and Skin Food’. Lady beauticians handbills survive from as early as the seventeenth century. Naturally, none but ‘Gentlewomen’ pursued this elegant trade. In London they were usually to be found in the upper-class parts of town, like Mayfair and Bond Street. Their handbills invariably boasted that they were patronised by ‘Persons of the Highest Quality’. Like the medical quacks, these ladies often claimed to have trained in France, Italy or Germany, and to be the possessors of certain secrets and special formulas, created by all kinds of scientific processes, ‘chymical’, ‘hermetical’, ‘chirurgical’ etc.

An advertisement for a miracle worker in London’s Bond Street is typical: ‘… this Lady preserves Youth and Beauty. She beautifies without any paint and increases the Radical Humour in some and restores it in others, corroborating the spirits, animals or vitals and the whole body…’

Restoration ladies had a horror of yellowing complexions, sometimes described as a ‘wainscot’ colour, and of red hair. Unmarried girls could easily look pasty – victims of the ‘green-sickness.’ Help was always at hand.

One of the most picturesque preparations to come out of the 17th century beauty industry was the so-called ‘Water of Talk and Pearl.’ Ground pearls were claimed to be the ingredients of many beautifying powders but ‘Talk’ (talc) was more likely to be the real basis for this kind of tonic, which, it was claimed, could turn an unfashionably brown complexion to clear, bright white.

Victorian advertising cast different kinds of veils, with pseudo-scientific terms appearing in the names and marketing, as in ‘Scurfgofus – ‘a scurf preparation’ and ‘Emollio Tablet’ for ‘softening and whitening’ the hands’.

‘Otto of Rose’ (‘cooling, healing, emollient’) was a popular scent for Victorian hand creams. There were also glycerine and benzoin preparations ‘unrivalled for softening, whitening and preserving the skin. 

courtesy of Wellcome Images

But these ingredients were too cheap and accessible on their own. An exotic name or ingredient was still required to ‘sex it up’. Hence, Snowfire Glycerine Jelly, Holloway’s Glyco-Vazin Cream for Eczema’, ‘The Egyptian Salve’ ‘Machin’s Infallible Pearl Ointment’, ‘Northern Foam’ whereas ‘Sootheen’ has a rather Irish flavour to it, ‘Saponaceous Cream of Almonds’. Number 1 Mannina Ointment claimed to cure not just skin lesions but cancer and tumours. ‘Zam-buk’, made of beeswax and oils of eucalyptus, camphor, red thyme and pine, first appeared in 1903 in Great Britain, Australia, New Zealand and Canada. The name is said to come from a ridge of mountains in South Africa. This product is still available to buy.

In my own research for something to cure my hands, I finally discovered a cheap, greasy, fragrant supermarket product that worked far better and smelled much nicer than so many creams on which the marketing dollar had been lavished. There was nothing tricksy about its packaging. There were no grand claims for the expense and exoticism of its ingredients, most of which I could have found on my own balcony or in my fridge.

My formerly mummified scrag-ends are now so soft that the cat once more consents to hold hands on the sofa while we watch her preferred bird documentaries. All good.

I hope you’ve found your equivalent, or even made it. 

Michelle Lovric's website

The Health Jolting Chair – Michelle Lovric

Among my long wanderings in the quacklands of feminine health, finding this apparatus was a highlight.

Until the early 20th century, of course, there was no legislation in place to limit the grandiosity of advertisers to the truth. So The Health Jolting Chair Company of New York deployed all the pseudo-science of the age to persuade women that its product constituted ‘the most important Health Mechanism ever produced’.

The Health Jolting Chair was a kind of aggravated spring-enabled rocker, nothing more, nothing less. But it was sold as something far more magnificent.

Advertising in magazines such as Harper’s Weekly, in the 1880s, the manufacturers claimed that 'The Health Jolting Chair' could solve the problems of the ‘cripples, paralytics … the corpulent, the insane, the blind etc’, as well as being ‘indispensable to the health and happiness of millions of human beings who may be living sedentary lives through choice or necessity.’

 On a more practical level, it was claimed that the motion of the chair would dissolve ‘female congestion’, which may have signified anything from constipation or an unwanted foetus.

Applying classic quack formulas and cadences, the advertising lurched between enticing and reproving to the point of threatening, massaging the phobic pressure points of status anxiety and the shame of poor hygiene:

‘In the upper ranks of society, and especially of fashionable society, the fairer sex are particularly prone to neglect the taking of proper exercise …It is a requisition that cannot be dispensed with. It is a part of the constituted condition of existence, emphasized in holy writ …Nature has no use for the incorrigibly slothful. Many persons are too lazy to live; and they do not live. Their lives are shortened — disease fastening upon their ill-nourished bodies, sweeping them from mundane existence. The exercise of the most important parts of the body — the internal nutritive organs, comprising the heart, lungs, stomach, liver, etc. — naturally should receive the first consideration in hygienic living; yet these are the parts that are usually most neglected by the class of fair beings mentioned, as well as by most persons of sedentary habits and occupations.’

 The consequences are of course dire: ‘a deficient amount of excretion of the worn-out nutritive elements, which collect in the general system, producing, head, nausea, sick, creepy sensations, pain in the bones, bad breath …’ and all the usual litany of quackable disorders.

Of course the true target of the marketing, as shown by the illustrations, was the female who wished to have a taut posterior but was unable to find any decent way to exercise that part of her body if she did not have a horse.

For her, The Health Jolting Chair promised ‘THE MOST HIGHLY PRIZED Feminine Attractions … A Beautiful Rich Complexion; Bright, Sparkling eyes; A Sweet, Pure Breath; a Graceful, Well-Developed Figure; Vigorous Mental Action; and a Vivacious Manner.’

 Some writers have commented on the erotic potential of the Health Jolting Chair, suggesting that it might provide the same stimulation that horse riding may offer to the erogenous zones.

 Looking closely at the mechanism, one sees a handle beneath the seat. It looks as if the user would wind it up and release the motion, rather like a music box. To me, the two side-struts appear as gratuitous as the advertising copy, but perhaps they regulated the violence of the jolts in some way. After all, the manufacturers claim, ‘It can be regulated so as to give it any degree of severity desired.’

To help achieve the most effective rhythm, the manufacturers suggested a musical accompaniment … the Jolting Chair Gavotte, as advertised here.

The concept behind the chair has not died, as this video of Ellen Degeneres shows.

Various websites devoted to the history of medicine have featured the chair, to much acclaim.

But my favourite comment is this one: ‘I'm not buying one, it doesn't wash the dishes at the same time.’


 Michelle Lovric’s website

A mole on the belly - Michelle Lovric

Some years ago, I was lucky enough to spend a few days immersed in an old book at the British Library. This one was called THE Amorous Gallant's Tongue Tipp'd with GOLDEN EXPRESSIONS OR, THE Art of Courtship refined. It was published in 1741.

At the time, the only place to find a book like this was in the library, but now of course it exists as an Ebook too.

One of the things I liked about the Gallant was that it assumed a healthy interest in sex for both genders, reinforcing my private theory that the 18th century was a good time for women, a time when they were allowed to have a sense of humour and sensuality of their own. If you ask me (and don’t, unless you want hours of hectoring) it was Byron and the so-called Romantics who marginalised us as the bruised-flower victims or mothers of bad-boy heroes.

Because 18th century women could cope with laughing, the love advice in The Amorous Gallant was tailed with a bit of rough humour:- a Canting Academy Or the Pedlar's French Dictionary, a guide to unsavoury expressions.

Without googling, eighteenth century types bent on love had to find other ways to test the suitability, durability and sexual enthusiasms of their future partners. The Amorous Gallant suggested an examination of various physical attributes. Moles were a good place to start, although gaining access to all mole-sites must have entailed a certain amount of enterprise and an open mind, if not bodice and trouser.

According to our Gallant:

 A Mole on the lower Part of the tip of the Right Ear, threatens the party with drowning.

 A Mole on the Belly denotes Whoredom, Luxury and Gluttony.

 A Mole on the Lip signifies the Party to be much beloved and very amorous.

 A Mole on the left Buttock denotes a pleasing person and are very much delighted in the work of Generation.

 A Mole on the Eyebrow signifies speedy Marriage and a good Husband.

A Mole on the Ankle, in a Man, denotes Effeminacy; but in a Woman, a masculine Spirit, and that She shall wear the Breeches.

A Mole on the right Thigh foretells Riches and Advancement by Marriage; and on the private Parts it doth the like.
For further reading on this subject, the Wellcome Library holds a book by Richard Saunders, published in 1653: Physiognomie and chiromancie, metoposcopie, the symmetrical proportions and signal moles of the body, fully and accurately handled; with their natural-predictive-significations. The subject of dreams; divinative steganographical, and Lullian sciences. Whereunto is added the art of memorie. Below is an illustration from it. Perhaps our Gallant studied it before writing his own chapter.

The Gallant also suggested that the lover should pay attention to the Interpretation of Dreams:

To dream of long Hair, and being proud thereof, denotes Good to Women 

The hair of the Seven Sutherland Sisters, who marketed various quack preparations and
were the inspiration for my novel The True & Splendid History of the Harristown Sisters.
As it happened, long hair did not make any of the sisters, real or fictional, very happy.

This was certainly not true of the bearded lady Julia Pastrana, pictured above,
Julia's ruthless husband raised cash by sending her embalmed body
on tour with various circuses after she died.

 To dream you have Hair like Hog Bristles denotes great Affliction and Trouble, not without Danger of Violence.

 To dream of having many Ears, Signifies the Obedience of Wife, Children and Servants.

 To dream that the Eyebrows are hairy, and of a good Grace, signifies good to all, but more especially to Women.

 For a fair Woman to dream of having many Eyes is unfortunate, and betoken she shall have more Admirers than real Friends.

To dream of having a large Nose is generally very good to all; for it betokens Vivacity of Spirit and Prudence in Management of Affairs, and Familiary with Persons of Quality.

If a Woman dreams she hath a Beard it denotes she shall quickly have a kind Husband that will make much of her.

For a man to dream that his breasts are hairy denotes strength and good fortune, but for a woman to dream so betokens widowhood and loss.

The golden age of quack medicine, as I have written before, coincided with that of cheap printing. The purveyors of such products often produced booklets with useful advice about health, housekeeping and husband-hunting.
Mother Seigel’s Curative Syrup was one such product. Its nominal function: ‘for tonic and alterative effect. Laxative and cathartic’. It advertised itself as the ‘supreme remedy’ for ‘colic, wind, spasms and every possible ailment of the stomach, liver and bowels’. Moreover, it claimed to tone and invigorate every organ of the body, enabling the system to resist disease and lay the foundation of a happy old age.
 A chemical analysis revealed that the syrup was largely composed of treacle and water with dilute hydrochloric acid, tincture of capsicum and aloes.

Wildly successful, Mother Seigel was marketed all over the world. I have seen one brochure on its virtues – printed in 17 languages.

But, like all quack medicines, it promised a world of cures – on the working principle that sometime somewhere someone who bought this syrup might get better anyway. It was marketed from the 1880s. In my collection of quack ephemera is a booklet of general advice and problem solving published by Mother Seigal. (Most problems could be cured by the syrup, of course).

But Mother Seigel, who also ran to plasters and pills, additionally had advice for lovers.

She told her readers to look at the eyes and the fingernails. (Now that we are into the Victorian period, that was about all that a lover might glimpse of a mate before marriage.)

Here are some of her tips.

A weak constitution is indicated by thin eye-brows and long, curving lashes.

 When the eyes are wide open and set well apart the person who has them will have a rash disposition.

 Blue eyes are taken as a sign of weakness – of will.

Eyes that are upturned are said to denote devotion and sincerity.

 The very red (finger)nail indicates a person with a hasty temper.

The short, broad nail denotes and extravagant disposition, but usually the ability to earn plenty of money.

 Ridges on all the nails of the finger, together with numerous white spots, indicate sadness and an unhealthy state of the system.

 If the nails are long, tapering, and white, the person who has them is at times inclined to be quarrelsome and at times selfish.

Stubbornness, sulkiness and also great determination are said to go with very small nails lying close to the flesh and flattish on top.

Personally, I’m sticking to the Amorous Gallant’s dream manual. Recently my nights have been enriched with (medical doses of ) morphine, and I’ve dreamt of many hairy things …

Michelle Lovric's website.
The True & Splendid History of the Harristown Sisters
 is published by Bloomsbury.

Spells, Pills & Plasters to Help a Lady Get Her Man – Michelle Lovric

BAIT, n. A preparation that renders the hook more palatable.

The best kind is beauty.

Ambrose Bierce (1842−1914)
The Devil's Dictionary, 1911. 

Binding spells were probably the first bait deployed when beauty alone failed to attract the desired mate. In Renaissance Italy, binding spells could be cast, for a fee, by ‘wise women’ or undertaken by ordinary women with the right information.

For example, a woman who wanted to be sure of her man would burn the tips of olive branches and dip them in holy water, chanting: 'As I bind this wood with this cord, so may the phallus of my lover be bound to me.' Then she would take the branches to the garden outside the church and plant them in the ground, chanting: 'As this wood cannot grow green again, so may not the phallus of my lover be inclined to relations with any other woman.'

Women who required the undying fidelity of their men were advised to rub their entire bodies with holy oil before sexual congress with them. This formula had the added advantage of leaving the woman free and unbound; while her husband might not stray, she was able to engage her body and her feelings wherever she wished.

Another love-recipe involved the use of large sage leaves: the woman would write on them and give them to the object of her love, who, on eating them, would be overwhelmed with passion.

The lips of would-be lovers would be anointed with holy oil, and they had to make sure they stayed slick and slippery until the very moment of stealing a kiss from the person they longed to possess.

There were always ways to renew a man's lust for his wife. She had to place under the conjugal bed the blade of a plough, and the hoe and shovel used for burying at least one corpse. In another spell the wedding ring of a young virgin who had subsequently died was required: the affected man had to urinate through this ring and would soon find his powers miraculously restored.

Some notions of this kind were kept in manuals or even published. Illustrated below is a receipt (recipe) for a person to make her husband love her, from A Booke of Physicke, circa 1710.

 Vendors of quack love potions put on wonderful shows of intimate expertise at markets and country fairs, as you can see in this coloured lithograph by C. Voct after A. de Valentini. It shows Lablache, a flamboyant itinerant medicine vendor selling Mariol an aphrodisiac at a country fair. (Courtesy of Wellcome Images).

The marketing of sexual attraction really began in earnest with the age of printed advertising. Almost any product could be sold with the promise - or, even better, the hint - that it would bring the opposite sex flocking, panting and salivating.

 Lady quacks in London often specialized in beauty treatments that mined women’s insecurities about retaining the exclusive attention of their husbands. A ‘gentlewoman’ practising at the Haymarket could furnish her own proprietary nostrum at just a shilling a bottle, asserting: ‘God the author of all things, to make man in love with his wife in her state of innocency, he made her smooth, soft, delicate and fair to intice him; I therefore, that woman may be pleasing to their husbands, and that they might not be offended at their deformities and turn to others, do commend unto you the Virtue of an eminent and highly approved “Balsamick Essence”, with several other Incomparable Cosmeticks …’.

 Salves, pills and creams constituted the main tools of the trade, but other less likely inventions were also aimed at would-be lovers. One of my favourites in this department are the Oxien Active Sex Plasters, which promised post-coital glow, without the bother and mess of coitus.

The advertising pitch was this: ‘You may have heard of the woman who felt so nice she thought it was caused by walking on velvet. Oxien Sex Plasters make any one, man or woman, feel just too good and happy for anything …When one of these plasters is placed on the warm body, the nap to this downy-feeling fabric seems to generate that warmth of food nature that comes from the satisfied nerves when content reigns supreme.’

Oxien Active Sex Plasters were, according to the manufacturers, ‘delicate and soft as a kitten’s ear … not only soul-satisfying, but they are large and well-shaped.’

No wonder Oxien could warn, ‘You cannot afford to do without.’

Some love-pills were advertised with romantic imagery. Shedd’s Little Mandrake Pills, for example, used an image of a courting couple and a series of (terrible) jokes on the back of the trade cards as their pitch. An example:

 USE SHEDD’S LITTLE MANDRAKE PILLS
If cats howl in the back yard it is a sign that you do not love mewsick.

I came across a Victorian trade card advertising ‘Attraction Wafers’. The manufacturers boasted, ‘Quite a large majority of our most attractive ladies are indebted to the Attraction Wafers for enhancing their personal attractions. Strongly magnetic personal attractions and lovely complexions are the keystones of a lady’s success in life.’

Some quacks set themselves up as experts in fulfilling the romantic dreams of their women clients. Typical were the claims advertised in an 1880s poster for a ‘Professor Franklin, M.D’. The doctor described himself as an ‘Eminent Lecturer, intuitive veteran Physician of Body and Mind’ and mentioned some of his previous publications, ‘The Medical Counsellor’, ‘Art of Health and Beauty’, ‘Phreno-Medical Chart’, ‘Compass Tree and Book of Life’, ‘Science of Life and Mind’, ‘Oracles of Truth for Every Youth’.

His poster gave notice of a lecture ‘FOR LADIES ONLY. Subject: HEALTH and BEAUTY, WOMEN’S SPHERE and DUTY. Her gifts, qualities and capabilities, Signs and causes of Passions, Character and Diseases; the best means of prevention and cure, without drugs.’
The good doctor warned: ‘No lady should miss these best efforts of Franklin to please and instruct the fair. His extensive travel, great experiences, pre-eminent abilities have wonderfully fitted him for his work…’.

He concluded, ‘Every lady can learn how to perfect her form and features, mould the heart, rule in the domain of Love and make judicious rejections of friends and husband by the light of science. Every lady can treat herself without exposing her condition.’

Have things really changed so much? How much advertising uses the promise of sexual or romantic success, even between the lines? Next time you watch an advertisement on television, or see one in a magazine, can I suggest you ask yourself how often sex is dragged into the equation. And how often sexual insecurity is used as a hook for a purchase that is nothing to do with physical intimacy.


Michelle Lovric’s website

The image at the top of the page, courting couple sit by a tree and the man hands a flower to the woman. Engraving by C. de Pas, courtesy of Wellcome Images

Domes of beauty – Michelle Lovric

Those readers who know me personally will detect a certain irony in this post. Those who don’t know me personally must be informed that I have a plenitude of bosom and frequently complain about my burdens. Indeed, I work on the theory that I was given the wrong breasts and that daintier ones would suit my character and lifestyle better. But enough of that ...

A few years ago I researched an illustrated book about feminine nostrums: quack preparations for women that played – for profit – on feminine insecurities and body dysmorphic disorders. Much work went into that small volume, and much outrage too. Only a fraction of the material could be used in the published book, so I have raided that research for several of my novels – a Bankside notion-monger called Valentine Greatrakes in The Remedy, quack complexion cures in The Book of Human Skin, London mermaids with the vapours in The Mourning Emporium, and hair treatments in The True & Splendid History of the Harristown Sisters.

Until now, I had not given breasts - or breast quackery - a second look, except for a little flurry in the History Girls private forum last year when we traded historical names for breasts. Over that, I also draw a veil.

But all things quack are of interest to me, historically and linguistically, so I have decided it is time to revisit charlatanism of the cleavage.

In the days before silicone and surgery, various ‘laboratories’ developed creams and tablets that purported to increase breast size. As is typical of quack medicine, they attempted to blind their clients with pseudo-science, using words that smacked of the laboratory but were in fact empty confections of senseless syllables.

Regularly invoked were the names of doctors and physicians (of dubious qualifications) - the historical equivalent of television advertising featuring people in white laboratory coats. Adulatory testimonials were published. The advertisements invariably claimed that the products were ‘100 per cent safe’, and they may well have been so, but they were certainly also 100 per cent useless.


Peruna advert courtesy of
Wikimedia Commons

During the American Civil War, many soldiers became addicted to an alcohol-based tonic called Peruna, sold as a cure for catarrh (although the maker defined catarrh as the basis of half the world’s diseases). The effects of this 28% proof liquid even gave rise to a new phrase, ‘Peruna drunk’. (Later, when his ingredients were outed, it was suggested that the inventor should put some real medicine in his drink - or open a bar.)

Clever quacks set about selling remedies to cure dependence on Peruna, especially after it was outed as a temperance-busting fraud in the early 1900s. But manufacturers turned their sights on the female market and the same drug was sometimes sold as a breast-enlarger.

 Then there were the ‘flesh-making’ bust creams for the ‘undernourished’ tissue. Ingredients usually included lanolin or other natural fats. ‘Flesh-firming’ creams relied on astringents to ‘tighten and lift’. One recipe entailed a night-time painting of the breasts with ‘elastic collodion’ to keep the sleeping bosom supported overnight. E.A. Fletcher, The Woman Beautiful, 1899, suggested that a firming cream should be dotted on but not rubbed in before the collodion mask was applied.


Allure Cream for ridding yourself of body dysmorphia



A Doctor (of course) R. Vaucaire of Paris (naturally) introduced goat’s rue, Galega officinalis, as an indispensable remedy for flat breasts. It had previously been used to encourage milk production in domestic animals.The 1930s were a grand time for the breast quacks. Biological ingredients such as placenta or embryo extracts were introduced with much fan-fare. Hormones were also much vaunted. The makers of Milo-Crème Lion attributed their product’s efficacy to its ‘30,000 Estrogonic Hormones’ that were ‘easily absorbed by the breasts’. The suppliers of Pro-Forma tablets claimed that they were prescribed by many doctors for weak and sagging breasts.

Pro-Forma with
'extract of Galega'

Quacks love to denounce their rivals.

‘Doctor Colonnay, the distinguished Physician of the Faculty of Medicine, Paris’ explained that he had performed experiments upon 200 ladies and could definitely refute the claims of others propagating ‘medicines, nostrums, prescriptions, dieting, apparatus, appliances, greasy creams, massage’. He claimed that his system, on the other hand, could create eight to eleven pounds of extra flesh in the desired parts, with healthy tissue created at will.


Strenuous arm exercises were popular, on the principle that the muscles of the chest could be developed to aesthetic advantage. I am sure you will have heard of the mantra ‘I must, I must, improve my bust’. This was originally

meant to accompany an exercise that entailed clenching the palms of the hands in front of the chest. Lifting heavy books was supposed to generate breast-enhancing muscle. (I must say that I can think of better uses for heavy books). Spring-loaded devices were also popular, promising that resistance combined with persistent exercise would create extra breast tissue. As late as 1966, there was a patent out for the Mark Eden Bust Developer, a clam-shell wire-sprung device in baby-doll pink. Breathing exercises were also suggested – because bigger lungs could only, of course, create a more splendid bosom. And that splendid bosom of course required harnessing in the correct corsetry, as shown at right. In the Victorian period, you could take advantage of Bazalgette-quality engineering to put you right, as seen below.

Combined breast pads by Henry S. Lesher from 1859,
courtesy of Wikimedia Commons

Some of the quack breast treatments involving pumps and suction must have been very painful. The instruments themselves were rarely illustrated in the advertisements: just the delectable result, as in the Fem-in-a Bust Developer. What was not shown, usually, was the hand or foot pump that was used to suck fluid into the breast via a mammary cup. While these treatments must have been painful, with the introduction of electricity they became positively dangerous, with a risk of ruptured blood vessels.

Le Massosein (get it?) of France in the mid 1930s sold a machine with a massive cup and hose for douching the breast with cold water. The Abunda Bust Developer also used hydrotherapy to ‘stimulate’ breast growth. The device was plugged into a tap that sent water gushing through perforations in a plastic breast cup.

Bust massage was popular, though advertisers were always aware of the moral dangers of conferring pleasure. Lucille Young, who offered Bust Massage in Chicago, advertises herself with a picture of a gentle, smiling young lady, who surely never knew a moment of transgression. Mechanical rollers and later electrical vibrators were sold for discreet and strictly medical self-massage in the home.

The Sears-Roebuck Catalogue of 1897 offered both the Princess Bust Developer and Princess Bust Cream Food. The 1905 catalogue devoted half a page to these products. The Developer was a bell-shaped cup of aluminium and copper, with a metal rod for handling. The advertising promised that correct use of this device could increase bust size by three to five inches.

A quick look at the internet reveals that the quacks have never abandoned the profitable field of breast-enlargement. Painful pumps are still marketed today, as are ‘natural’ vegetable drugs. And the makers are still using pseudo-scientific terms to describe their expensive contraptions and concoctions. 

I leave you with a genuine quack advertisement. Below is a letter sent out by The Olive Company for the National Developer for the Bust, 1920s. It deploys all the mischief of nurtured body dysmorphia, impossible promises and emotive language that are the trademark of the medical charlatan. Read it and weep, ladies, and think about it the next time you see a beauty product advertised on television.


THE NATIONAL DEVELOPER

… No longer need you be ashamed of your bust or your scrawny neck, nor need you fear evening gowns or low-necked dresses, which are all the fashion now, for you may have beautiful breasts yourself, little domes of beauty on a shapely chest.

Oh, lovable woman, don’t waste your moments in regrets and unrealized hopes any longer, for we bring you ‘Good Tidings of Great Joy!’ and you will bless us for years to come for giving you the opportunity to secure this glorious invention at this special price …

Think of all the stage beauties who have become famous – Lilian Russell, Maude Adams, Lina Cavalieri; the moving pictures stars – Lillian Walker, Marguerite Snow, and Kathlyn Williams. What was it but the charm of a perfect figure that helped to make these celebrities famous? You never saw a famous actress or a moving picture star with a scrawny, flat chest.

Think of all the women you know in your town, who are most prominent socially, and who have the most friends. In nearly every case they have beautiful figures, well-developed busts, the charm of perfect development. It is not the pretty face that makes a lasting impression on men, but the charm and poise of a beautiful figure, a PERFECT BUST – the crowning glory of womanhood.

Send us your order now, and let your fallen, flaccid, undeveloped breasts expand and blossom into that superb development which it is perfectly natural and right that every woman should have – a beautiful bust of real, firm flesh and blood.



Michelle Lovric’s website

Her most recent adult novel The True & Splendid History of the Harristown Sisters, an account of hair quackery, is published by Bloomsbury.


Note, a further update on the London Borough of Southwark’s conservation policies: a wooden hut advertising a certain pod company has mysteriously appeared in front of the replica of the Golden Hinde. It has been erected in a pedestrian area with traffic of up to 200,000 pairs of feet a week. But its site also happens to be within the Borough High Street Conservation Area, and it is squarely positioned in a protected historic view of the Scheduled Ancient Monument of Winchester Palace. The pod first appeared a month ago, though there is no record of it on Southwark’s planning register. We have been told that it was ‘donated as an office’ to the Golden Hinde, which already has an office in Clink Street, luridly festooned with its own advertising. The pod is empty apart from its advertising billboard for the company that manufactures it. Southwark seems to be on the way to establishing itself as a natural haven for those companies that wish to profit from propinquity to genuine historical stock while at the same time destroying the historic aesthetic of that very spot. The sadness is that, as with the subtenant of the Famous Chain of coffee shops mentioned in my previous posts, Southwark allows this happen. And yes, Famous Chain’s subtenant is still sporting his illegal A frames, balloons and merchandise, even though there is now a non-compliance case number.