Swamp-Root Almanac: Weather Forecasts, Horoscopes & Dream Book
period advertisement · 1940
LINK
SUMMARY
A 32-page promotional almanac catalogued by the Wellcome Collection (work qxbtjjda) under the title Swamp-Root almanac: weather forecasts, horoscopes & dream book / Dr. Kilmer & Co., Binghamton, N.Y.: Dr. Kilmer & Co., 1940, physical description 32 pages, illustrations, portrait, 21 cm, Public Domain Mark, with the name-authority heading Kilmer, S. Andral (Sylvester Andral), 1840-1924. Fetched in full via the Wellcome IIIF presentation manifest (b3342231x, 36 canvases). Page 2 (image _0002) is a notarized 'Certificate of Purity' dated Aug. 25, 1936 (Broome County, N.Y.; notary Albert B. Engelbert; sworn by Jerome B. Hadsell, vice-president, Dr. Kilmer & Co.) crediting Dr. Kilmer with discovering Swamp-Root through scientific research and study and claiming he had long been successfully and actively engaged in the practice of his profession, echoing (without disclosing Kilmer's 1924 death or his 1892 exit from the company) a related sworn guarantee Samuel Hopkins Adams quotes from 1912, in the present tense, which Adams and Dr. S. Andral Kilmer's own 1912 sworn complaint (also quoted in Adams) show was already false at that earlier date; Page 3 (image _0003) lists the product's stated active ingredients by name (buchu leaves, scullcap leaves, oil of juniper, Venice turpentine, oil of birch, valerian root, colombo root, rhubarb root, golden seal root, mandrake root, sassafras, aloes, balsam copaiba, cinnamon, balsam tolu, and sugar as a preservative), captioned as information provided for the benefit of physicians. Page 35 (image _0035) shows front and back views of the retail carton, including a printed bust portrait labelled 'S. ANDRAL KILMER, M.D.' on the carton's front face, alongside (elsewhere on the same almanac page, not printed on the carton itself) two separate building engravings captioned, in substance, that it is the company's present fireproof home and the old home of Swamp-Root (the company's Binghamton factory buildings, per the surrounding page text giving the company's Binghamton, N.Y. address), and the page states then-current retail prices (60 cents small size, $1.15 large size). Used for the case's practitioner portrait, the packaging/pricing artifact, and the 1936 Certificate of Purity as documentation that the company kept invoking Kilmer's name and credentials as authority for the product decades after his 1892 exit and, by 1936, his 1924 death, without disclosing either; the certificate's own past-tense wording is not itself treated as a separately refuted claim (see the linked Claim entity).
NOTES
The 1940 Swamp-Root almanac (Wellcome Collection work qxbtjjda) is a 32-page promotional booklet the company mailed to households, mixing weather forecasts, horoscopes, a dream dictionary, and product advertising, catalogued with the name-authority heading Kilmer, S. Andral (Sylvester Andral), 1840-1924, and marked Public Domain Mark. Fetched in full through the Wellcome IIIF presentation API (36 page images), it supplies two artifacts central to this case: page 2, a notarized “Certificate of Purity” dated August 25, 1936, echoing — twelve years after Dr. Kilmer’s 1924 death — the same formula-discovery and professional-authority pattern Adams had already reported on in 1912 (where a present-tense version of the claim was shown false), again crediting Dr. Kilmer with discovering Swamp-Root through scientific research and claiming he had long been actively engaged in the practice of his profession, without disclosing his death or decades-earlier exit from the company; and page 35, showing the retail carton with a printed portrait labelled “S. ANDRAL KILMER, M.D.” and the company’s Binghamton factory buildings. Cited for the persistence of the authority-invoking pattern and its undisclosed omissions, the practitioner portrait, and period packaging/pricing detail, not for any assessment of efficacy.