MICROBE KILLER NO. 2, PART 2: The slow death of the cure-all and fast demise of its maker
By Krista Madsen–
After dipping into the history of this stoneware gallon jug found in my parent’s basement, I had many more questions to explore which require a part 2: now that I know the contents of the bottle (corrosive acids, wine!), what’s the recipe exactly and is it harmful? Did William Radam have a wife/family and what became of them? And most importantly, what happened to this Microbe Killer “to cure any ailment”?
Luckily the internet loves a good shyster story and there’s plenty of both the scanned original ads/articles from the heyday of this German emigre turned Texas nursery owner turned Microbe Killer peddler—and all the commentary since, from this primary document-rich Antique Bottle Story YouTube to this extensive article by Malcolm Goldstein.
Only two years after plant-guy Radam patented his human cure-all formula in 1886, he was rich enough to move from Austin, TX to a Fifth Avenue penthouse overlooking Central Park, with numerous Microbe Killer production facilities and distributors all over the country—up to 17 at the height with a handful more in other countries. It seems Radam’s real talent beyond concocting this product in the first place was mastering the art of selling, as the ubiquitous ads for these products were constant and often indistinguishable from articles. It’s one thing nowadays to become viral armed with social media tools that communicate to the world instantly, but imagine achieving this via newspapers and hard-won handwritten testimonials in the 1880s. And should you be so lucky as to land fame and fortune so fast, your first problem—as it might be now—would likely be people trying to stop you or partake of some of that. In Radam’s case, it seems the naysayers (the aghast medical/science community, for instance) didn’t get under his skin as much as the imitators trying to skim a share of the giant market of the gullible and fearful masses.
“Beware of Fraudulent Imitations” says this full-page “ad” in the face of wannabe competition. “The success of the Radam’s Microbe Killer has brought out many worthless imitations. Some of them are positively injurious, and we give warning, that the public may not be deceived. See that every jug has our trade-mark on it.”
In case you missed it, here’s that unmistakable logo again, this indelible branding which shortly followed the patent. I had the image originally pegged as a man beating a skeleton, but that’s not just any skeleton—it’s the Grim Reaper himself with his scythe in pieces at his boney feet. Radam’s getting incensed at the deception of his competitors while his magic medicine can of course claim to conquer mortality!
An example of the level of dramatic gobbledygook from the same page:
Contagion, Infection is created by absolute experience and scientific experiments and proofs, by the existence of minute organism or microbes. The Contagion, or microbe being particular and minute particles being irregularly scattered about in the atmosphere it is evident that the inhalation of one or more of those particles is purely a matter of chance. Yet such inhalation, no matter how healthy and strong the man or animal thus inhaling it, it will, as a matter of course be stricken down sooner or later, by the myriads of microbes that will: according to the contagious gaseous matter inhaled, breed into his system. To exterminate those it has been found that liquids strongly impregnated with gases and alkali have been the most efficacious, and it is but a matter of time when a liquid, strongly impregnated with those substances will be discovered that will effectually destroy the microbes or Germs of Disease.
Is it just me or are the good people of America about to be sold on drinking bleach after being beaten down with this spiky bat of confounding word-sludge? Now that we’ve impregnated enough fear here in the masses for the very air we breath, enter the cure, from someone as qualified as the My Pillow guy:
Radam, a florist and botanist by trade who grew up in his father’s “world-famous nurseries,” began studying microbes that caused plants to droop and die, eventually “found the true origin of the germs of disease, and by a secret inspired by Nature’s close study was as that exterminator of the dreadful scourge. Microbe—as recommended by the greatest authorities, and world famed authorities, on the subject, who all admit that to exterminate that pest and scourge requires just such a liquid, surcharged with gases, as William Radam’s Microbe Killer.”
Onto the long testimonials section, for which Radam will award $1,000 should you prove any ingenuine: people who seem to be attesting to recovering from a host of nasty problems like the man in Galveston, TX who had a combo of “dysentery, bloody flux and internal tumors” that had left him given up for dead until a friend suggested the Killer. His weight went from 86 to 146 pounds and he is “restored to my usual good health.” Or, the father (it’s all men in this ad for some reason) in Algiers, NO, who said his son was afflicted with the “most hideous and loathsome of diseases, leprosy, and of a character most malignant” but now everyone’s invited to his home address to come see how he’s improved.
I’m not about to read the 480-page treatise on Microbes and the Microbe Killer Radam publishes just a few years into his success in 1890, perhaps the longest pseudoscience marketing ad of all, but should you want to the whole volume is digitized. Along with a dubious before and after of the author, looking quite the same but with the second photo suggesting he’s cured, and chapters ticking off every disease he’s solved, Radam spends a good amount of time being defensive and offended. While he’s received no complaints (he says: if he was killing anyone, he’d be in jail), the imitators are just proving his point:
I have told how I also cured everybody who used the microbe killer in time and according to instructions, using it in sufficient quantities to purify the blood and to build up the system. Nobody can deny I have done this; nobody does deny it. My imitators are evidence in my favor, for if I had not succeeded I should not have been imitated, and they have by their conduct testified to the merits of the microbe killer. The medical press and physicians generally take such an interest in me as they never took before. They decry me as an ignorant man, one who knows nothing about medicine, or any thing but the raising of beets and cabbages, a useful thing to know, by the way, and an honorable business too. Possibly florists and nursery-men could tell the doctors a little about things that belong to their profession, and which they ought to know, for botany is not taught in their medical colleges here, although in Europe it is justly esteemed an essential part of a medical education. Then after abusing me for ignorance, they cry that I am killing people with poisons, and in the same breath they pray: ‘Oh, Heaven aid us and make these microbe killers harmless! Lord, protect our profession!”
Let’s counter your “science” with my Science: This advertisement in the Roanoke Times, March 28, 1894 shows how just a magnifying glass might reveal the scary death particles in us and surrounding us.
Another ad (December 24, 1890 in the Staunton Spectator), again not very differentiated from the front page articles of the newspaper around it, adds to the list of things the Killer can cure, “any disease that causes you anxiety or inconvenience,” and “any disease that your doctor has pronounced incurable.” Who wouldn’t want a big swig of that?
The original model comes at cost of $3 a gallon, which one should imbibe copiously, unlike the imposters that might cost less. So obviously it’s worth paying the premium for the real deal.
And how does one “impregnate” liquid with gas anyway? Well, like this, as summed up by Quackwatch.org:
The patent revealed how he managed to ape nature’s lightning. Inside a large closed tank the inventor built an oven. Into the bottom of the tank he poured water, and into the oven he placed a mixture of chemicals: four ounces of powdered sulphur, two ounces of nitrate of soda, an ounce of black oxide of manganese, an ounce of sandalwood, half an ounce of chloride of potash. The chemicals were burned, the products of their combustion mingling with the vapor of the heated water and being absorbed by the water remaining in the tank. When the combustion was over, the water was allowed to cool. Sediment and floating particles which had spilled over from the violent burning were removed. The water was drawn off and tinted a pale pink by the addition of wine. The sovereign remedy was ready for bottling.
Such a process of manufacture was so haphazard that no two Microbe Killer batches would contain the same proportion among the ingredients. Yet on one thing all future analysts were to agree, that the lion’s share of Radam’s remedy was water. A Department of Agriculture chemist was to place the percentage at 99.381. As for the rest—what rest there was—a doctor was shortly to suggest that a product identical with a batch of the Microbe Killer which he had analyzed might be produced for less than five cents a gallon by adding to a gallon of well water about an ounce of red wine, a dram of impure muriatic (hydrochloric) acid, and four drams of impure oil of vitriol (sulphuric acid). Such was Radam’s man-made pink lightning.
My notion that maybe at least people could get tipsy on the Killer also gets a big no. A placebo at best—which, I guess you could say, at least gets people drinking more water? Maybe no one would ever die from consuming too much of it (there are only traces of poisonous acids which at worst might irritate one’s stomach lining), but could they die indirectly from not taking other more viable medical paths? It seems any negative press as the medical and science community chastises Radam in the journals, and chemists debunk the MK as glorified water, is also good press since it just wins more publicity. There’s no estate of Aunt Bessie out there suing for damages after they found their loved one foaming pink from the mouth. People who might mistrust authority figures and the “establishment,” or resent the assertion of scientific data for that matter, are happily quaffing this by the gallon (and multiple times at that: “cures” can require 15-30 gallons).
For who needs facts when you have belief?
This city of New York abounds with men who live entirely, and live well, on the money they squeeze out of the pockets of individuals who are silly enough to trust them. People should not be led away by every charlatan who jumps up before them and talks; but as long as the world lasts there will probably be fools in it, and fools are a godsend to rogues.
Eventually there was a Food and Drug Administration and thank goodness it became problematic to make false claims on labels and elsewhere and play the public for fools. Yet what if the public wants to be played and continues seeking out these products? The bad medicine keeps selling for many years despite all the legalities that accumulate against it.
The National Library of Medicine sums up this slow death:
In the end, Radam’s extraordinary success in marketing this product not only made him rich—it also made his product an early target of efforts to monitor food and drugs. In April 1910 twelve cases of Radam’s Microbe Killer were seized, on the grounds of “false, exaggerated, and misleading” labels, and the contents were destroyed. Four years later, in July 1914, and following amendments in the Food and Drugs Act in 1912, a shipment of Radam’s Microbe Killer was seized by government agencies. After a hearing by a jury, more than 800 cartons and boxes of the Microbe Killer were destroyed. Yet advertisements for Radam’s Microbe Killer appeared even as these goods were being seized. On October 3, 1919, the Seattle Star published an advertisement from Bartell Drug Stores, which offered a No. 2 bottle of Radam’s Microbe Killer, regularly $1.00, now on sale for 83 cents.
Only when the demand diminishes sufficiently, does the price reveal the dissipation of the product that lasted in the market for about 30 years until the 1920s.
And I had to save the juiciest bit, the grandest hypocrisy and tragedy, for last:
This article by Goldstein clears up the most important remaining issues for me—the personal.
Radam did have a wife—Ida was also originally from Germany and landed in TX, packing up with her husband to come to NYC and be rich on Microbe Killer. And he did have kids once, but they both died in childhood, so his only heir would be his wife. Supposedly Radam was very motivated in his studies early on in trying to stave off the destruction of plants he witnessed, and then more urgently by the imminent death sentence the doctors gave him from his various serious and escalating ailments. But I can’t help but wonder if the untimely death of his kids ran underneath this uncommon drive to stop Death, and if his intentions at least started off more purely than it may seem when they become so highly monetized. Certainly he at least was out to save his own life if no one else’s. Did his irrational belief in his own medicine hurry his own demise?
Radam dies at the age of 57 in 1902 at the height of his product’s fame for curing all.
While Radam himself becomes the biggest example of the failure of his product, having only enjoyed a few years of its rampant instant success, his wife retreats to Texas and quietly remains a very distant owner-at-large until the company slowly disappears. What does Ida, who lives until 79, really think about her husband’s infamous invention—and was she taking it too? We’ll likely never know since these archives never go deep into the wives, but I’ll keep digging.
Ida only resurfaces in the papers when she comes back to NYC to withdraw $63,000 in bonds from a safe and, about to miss her train, leaves the package of bonds in her taxi in her haste. Apparently eventually a stranger hands in the package at Penn Station which finally arrives back to her eight months later. It would be nice to think this all concludes with a good samaritan story but truth is the bonds were non-negotiable, meaning they could only ever be cashed in by the owner. I’m sure whoever got their hands on it did their darndest to find a way to cash it in in the meantime. By now it was the Great Depression and that money really could have saved some lives.
Krista Madsen is the author behind wordsmithery shop, Sleepy Hollow, inK., and producer of the Home|body newsletter, which she is sharing regularly with The Hudson Independent readership. You can subscribe for free to see all her posts and receive them directly in your email inbox.