Dr. S.B. Hartman and Peruna
secondary literature · 2025
LINK
SUMMARY
A 2025 historical-archaeology research paper on Hartman and the Peruna business, hosted on the Society for Historical Archaeology's bottle-research site and fetched directly as a PDF. It reconstructs the corporate chronology (Dr. S.B. Hartman & Co., 1867-1886; Peruna Medicine Co., incorporated Dec. 4, 1886; Peruna Drug Mfg. Co., operating at 242 South Lazelle St., Columbus, 1889-1902 per Columbus Metropolitan Library records; reincorporation as the Peruna Co. in 1908; sale to the Astor Chemical Co./Royal Drug Co. in 1916 and again to the Peruna Corp. in 1925; eventual absorption into the Consolidated Royal Chemical Corp. in 1937-1939, which advertised Peruna as late as 1983), documents Hartman's Feb. 5, 1918 Kansas City Star obituary (fixing his death shortly before that date, consistent with the widely reported Jan. 30, 1918 date), quotes a period product label reading 'a Cure for Catarrh of the Head, Lungs, Stomach, Liver & Kidneys, Bladder, Pelvic Catarrh, and Systemic Catarrh, Alcohol 28%' (citing Fike 1987), documents the federal government's 1905 ban on Peruna sales on Indian reservations due to its 28-percent alcohol content, reports the post-1905 reformulation and the short-lived Katarno revival of the original formula (with a Katarno newspaper advertisement dated as late as April 27, 1913), and quotes both a 1907 Collier's item mocking Hartman's post-reformulation finances and a 1922 Journal of the American Medical Association pamphlet noting Peruna's post-reformulation sales collapse. Cited throughout this case for corporate chronology, the alcohol-content figures, the federal reservation ban, and the Collier's/JAMA quotations; the paper's own citations to contemporaneous newspapers and trade journals (Cleveland Leader, Kansas City Star, Colliers, JAMA) are treated here as the paper's own reported findings rather than independently re-verified against those underlying originals.
NOTES
This 2025 Society for Historical Archaeology research paper by bottle historians Bill Lockhart, Bob Brown, David Whitten, Bill Lindsey, and Carol Serr is an institutional-archival secondary source assembled from period newspapers, trade journals, trademark filings, and company almanacs. Fetched directly as a PDF at secure-sha.org, it supplies this case’s corporate chronology for the Peruna business across its several changes of ownership and name, including Consolidated Royal advertisements continuing through at least 1983; the 28-percent (pre-1906) and 18-percent (post-1906) alcohol-content figures corroborating Samuel Hopkins Adams’s contemporaneous analysis; the federal government’s 1905 reservation ban; and verbatim quotations from a 1907 Collier’s item and a 1922 AMA pamphlet mocking the post-reformulation collapse of Peruna’s sales. It is used alongside Adams (1907) and Sullivan (2007) as corroborating documentation, not as the case’s primary evidentiary-failure source. One internal inconsistency is noted here rather than silently resolved: the paper states in one place that the alcohol reduction was “from 28% to 12%” and elsewhere quotes a 1939-1946 product label reading “Alcohol 18 per cent,” consistent with Sullivan’s (2007) account of an 18-percent formula; this case follows the 18-percent figure, which is corroborated by both a directly quoted label and an independent secondary source, and treats the paper’s “12%” figure as an apparent internal error rather than a fact asserted in this case.