Monday, November 07, 2011

Curtis's Cure for Baldness

Men have feared losing their hair for all of recorded history, it seems, and other men have happily played to this fear by selling products meant to prevent this "terrible" fate. One such product was Curtis's Cure for Baldness, an ad for which ran (amongst other places) in the January 6th, 1860 edition of the Providence Daily Post. Some excerpts:
To be bald, or not to be bald!
That's the question.
Curtis's Cure for Baldness.
The late Great and Reliable Remedy.

And the only article which restores the hair to bald heads and stops its falling off, and which has merited the certificates of reliable men in our midst; containing no oil, sulphur or lead.
Read the following testimony...
One piece of testimony came from J.Q. Brigham:
About a year since my hair began falling off badly; to prevent which, I tried various preparations without success. Believing I should otherwise lose my hair entirely, I was about to submit to the shaving of my head, when a friend, who had been using Curtis' Cure successfully, advised me first to give it a trial.
Despite all the flim-flam, there's something charming about the style of these ads - probably something of a misplaced nostalgia. Anyway, the ad concludes:
Notice the size of the bottles, which contain one pint of the fluid.
For sale by all wholesale and retail druggists everywhere.
J.M. Curtis, Proprietor, Providence. R.I.

1 comment:

James Anderson said...

Curtis is a very big topic to discuss I publish a very paper on this topic as a Masters Education Dissertation Topics you can also get some more information about that topic.

Thanks for this!