Wm. Radam's Microbe Killer

The gardener who killed weeds and disease alike

The man on the label is clubbing a skeleton, its scythe already snapped. The label belonged to William Radam (1845-1902), a Prussian-born gardener and nurseryman in Austin, Texas, with no medical training, who had tended a store and a nursery on some thirty acres for nearly two decades (Barnett) before he became the most famous microbe-slayer in America. His authority rested entirely on a conversion story. After years of his own illness, malaria followed by rheumatism and sciatica, and the death of two of his children, he read of Pasteur and Koch and concluded that microbes had caused every one of his ailments and could be killed inside the body the way pests are killed in a garden. He compounded an acidulated water, called it the Microbe Killer, claimed it had cured him after six months of drinking it, and from 1887 sold himself as the humble gardener who had succeeded where physicians failed. His one-line creed, preserved by the Handbook of Texas, was ‘I treated all my patients with the same medicine, just as in my garden I would treat all weeds alike.’

Cheap by the jug, but the formula was sealed

The brand and process were proprietary, but the Microbe Killer was a cheap commodity sold broadly by the jug through agents and druggists, with a free glass offered to passers-by at Radam’s Broadway store. The commercial system centered one named authority, a registered trademark (the man clubbing a skeleton, secured in 1887), a patented manufacturing apparatus (US 412,664, 1889), and numbered strengths made under Radam’s brand and explained by his book. His newspaper campaign ran the advertisements beside news of Koch’s real discoveries.

One microbe, one cure, never measured

The mechanism was a surrogate dressed in new scientific language. Radam reduced all illness to one cause, microbes, and all treatment to one act, drinking a liquid said to kill them. He described the Microbe Killer in his 1890 book as something that ‘cannot be compared with ordinary drugs. It does not contain any of them. It is pure water, permeated with gases which are essential to the nourishment of the system, and in which micro-organisms cannot live and propagate, or fermentation exist,’ to be taken until ‘the tissues shall be thoroughly soaked with it.’ The mechanism was asserted, never measured. It also contradicted itself: a liquid mild enough to drink freely by the glass cannot carry a germicidal dose to the blood and tissues, and the germ theory Radam borrowed had shown that distinct organisms cause distinct diseases, not that one universal microbe causes all.

A 6,000 percent margin on flavored water

The conflict is the developer-vendor pattern, stated on the documented facts and not overstated. Radam was at once the author of the doctrine, the holder of the patents, and the proprietor of the only remedy the doctrine endorsed, and his income depended directly on sales. Barnett records that he built the Koppel Building in Austin in 1888 and by 1890 ran seventeen factories and lived in a Fifth Avenue mansion overlooking Central Park; the Handbook of Texas notes the move from his Austin gardens to that New York mansion. The margin drew the central criticism: R.G. Eccles, who analysed the product as little more than acidulated water, charged that Radam made profits of 6,000 percent, and the government’s 1913 prosecution valued one seized shipment at $5,166 in retail against an estimated $25.82 to produce. The proceeds were not Radam’s alone, since agents, the factories, and licensees at home and abroad shared the trade; the conflict named here is that one man’s fortune tracked the sales of a liquid he proclaimed a universal cure.

The chemist’s bench and a pit in St. Paul

The Microbe Killer was disconfirmed both chemically and legally. R.G. Eccles, a physician and pharmacist, published an analysis finding it to be water with only minute amounts of hydrochloric and sulphuric acid; an analysis attributed to the US Department of Agriculture placed the water content at 99.381 percent; and Radam’s own patent confirms the agent was the fumes of burning sulphur dissolved in water to a ‘sour acid taste.’ The two men sued each other for libel (a Brooklyn jury awarded Eccles $6,000, a Manhattan jury later awarded Radam $500, and the Brooklyn award was afterward reversed), and Samuel Hopkins Adams attacked the product in ‘The Great American Fraud.’ The decisive end was regulatory: under the 1912 Sherley Amendment, which made false and fraudulent curative claims illegal, the Bureau of Chemistry under Carl L. Alsberg prosecuted the Microbe Killer’s labelling, a jury condemned a seized shipment, and the confiscated stock (539 boxes and 322 cartons) was destroyed in a pit, an action Barnett dates to December 1913 and the National Library of Medicine to 1914. The single-microbe theory is obsolete, the liquid had no demonstrated effect, and the federal courts ruled its cure-all claims fraudulent.