What was advertised in a colonial American newspaper 250 years ago today?

“Dr. Hill’s own direction is wrapped about each bottle.”

In the fall of 1774, William Young and his associates offered consumers exclusive access to “Dr. Hill’s AMERICAN BALSAM.”  According to an advertisement in the November 9 edition of the Pennsylvania Journal, this patent medicine “is an infallible, innocent, sure and effectual” cure for “coughs, colds, [and] swimming in the head” as well as a “very admirable remedy for children in the whooping cough, and in most all their disorders.”  Young implied that such recommendations may not have been necessary since the “virtue and goodness” of the medicine “are now so well known in America,” yet figured that trumpeting the efficacy of Dr. Hill’s American Balsam would aid in convincing consumers not yet familiar with this product.

As a means of guarding the reputation of this medicine and “to prevent counterfeiting,” a limited number of local agents stocked and sold this medicine.  Young made it available in Kingsess (or Kingsessing), just outside of Philadelphia.  William Sitgreaves, a merchant in Philadelphia, Christoper Sower, a printer in Germantown, and Ludwig Lauman, a merchant in Lancaster, each sold it as well.  Young also distributed Dr. Hill’s American Balsam to Michael Hoffman, a shopkeeper in New York, to sell there.  He had relied on that method for some time, having placed similar advertisement in May and October 1772.  Unlike some popular patent medicines widely stocked by apothecaries, merchants, shopkeepers, printers, booksellers, and other retailers throughout the colonies, only a select few carried Dr. Hill’s American Balsam.  The medicine came with “Dr. Hill’s own direction … wrapped about each bottle” to instruct patients how to use it to relieve or even cure “the most painful rheumatism, cholic, consumption,” and other maladies.  Such packaging represented another layer of marketing for this product, continuing to promote it to customers after they purchased it and took it home.

Young apparently considered these various strategies effective given that he invested in them on several occasions.  His marketing of Dr. Hill’s American Balsam incorporated the same elements in November 1774 that he deployed two and a half years earlier in May 1772.  That does not demonstrate the impact those methods had on consumers yet does suggest that Young considered them successful enough to repeat when he advertised once again.