This is the claim as Hartman’s own company advertised it: a full-page newspaper advertisement headlined “Half Our Ills Are Catarrhal in Nature,” carried in the Lexington Dispatch on December 17, 1902, promises that Peruna never fails to cure catarrh wherever located and lists catarrh “of the head,” “of the nose,” “of the throat,” “of the lungs,” “of the stomach,” “of the pelvic organs,” and chronic, winter, and summer catarrh, illustrated by rays of light connecting a bottle of Peruna to different parts of a man’s body (peruna-catarrh-ad-loc-1902). The advertisement backs the claim entirely with unsolicited reader testimonials — for catarrh of the kidneys, the stomach, the ear, the bowels, and more — rather than any clinical evidence.

Samuel Hopkins Adams’s 1905 investigation, later reprinted in The Great American Fraud (1907), documents the same pattern at book length: Hartman’s own booklet, “The Ills of Life,” led readers to diagnose pneumonia, consumption, dyspepsia, enteritis, appendicitis, Bright’s disease, and heart disease alike as forms of catarrh curable by Peruna (Adams 1907). Adams’s own chemical and reportorial analysis found the product to be essentially grain alcohol, water, and a trace of “mild drugs,” and concluded that the claim that this composition “will cure all or any of the ills listed above is too ridiculous to need refutation” (Adams 1907). The claim is logged as testimonial-grade and refuted on that direct, contemporaneous, chemically grounded contradiction.