JF Ptak Science Books Daily Dose from Dr. Odd
Evidently all roads lead someplace other than Rome--a bold statement of imaginary cartographic exactness to come from a soap company. What perhaps trumps this oddness is that this ad was improbably featured as a big back-of-the-cover ad in the relatively new Astrophysical Journal for November 1908. I'm not suggesting that astronomers and astrophysicists don't use soap, of course, but to find this ad as about the only piece of external revenue in this journal is very surprising. Perhaps the owner/manufacturer had an interest in astronomy and gave a little funding to the publication...
Here's a more global outlook of the capacity of a soap-like cure:
The second image belongs to Beecham's Pills, long a staple of chemist/pharmacy and general goods sellers, which were basically patent medicine cure-alls composed of aloe, ginger and soap, and which found a happy market for more than 150 years (1842-1998). Evidently Beecham's did do something right in there somewhere, as they had some sort of positive effect on digestion. Other than that I don't know, though the little pills seem to not have caused any direct harm.
Beecham's Pills - it's a complicated story. They were a mild laxative; but a number of books on the history of health tell that they contained juniper oil, and were widely taken as a (real or imagined) abortifacient.
Posted by: Ray Girvan | 12 April 2014 at 11:54 AM