Dr. Kilmer's Swamp Root Kidney Cure

[robertk]

Bottle Vitals​

	Date	Color	Shape	Size (Height x Diameter)	Value*
Dr. Kilmer's Swamp Root Kidney Cure	1880s	Aqua	Round cylindrical	3" x 1"	$15.00

Bottle Views (click to enlarge):

Front	Back	Side	Side	Bottom
Sample Bottle Dr Kilmer's Swamp Root Kidney Cure Binghamton NY				1

Modern medicine men routinely scour the Amazon looking for new medicinal plants and herbs that may one day cure our most horrible diseases. More than a century ago, they were doing the same thing -- in the swamp.

Doctor Sylvester Kilmer was one such medicine man, in Binghamton, New York. In the early 1870's, he began marketing his Swamp Root Kidney Cure. Like many patent medicines of the period, this one was a collection of herbal extracts in a serum composed with alcohol as one of the main ingredients. Dr. Kilmer was quite serious about its curative powers and was more interested in helping the sick than in making a buck, apparently.

He did advertise and built a successful business with this and other cures, but it wasn't until his brother Jonas and Jonas's son Willis took over that things really took off. By the early 1900s, they had built it into a very large business and made Swamp Root a household name. Here's their shiny laboratory, then and now.

Swamp root was so successful, that apparently someone once asked Willis what Swamp Root was good for, and he quipped "about a million dollars a year".

I must admit, I might be tempted to take a dose or two myself if I had a bad case of "internal slime-fever". It sounds pretty awful.

Here's a whole page telling how great it was for some folks in Boston (click to enlarge):



But apparently some of that success was based on some false advertising, attributing things to Doctor Kilmer that he didn't actually do. He wound up taking the company's new owners to court for false advertising and won initially, but then was overturned on appeal.

This bottle is from the 1880s. It's a sample size, and even says so right on the bottle. Here's the before and after, just soap and water and brushes to clean.



* Value is based on sold eBay listings at the time of posting, and varies considerably with condition.

 

[Limitool]

Wow guy... another great job Robert. I don't remember reading that bottle EVER. You'd think you'd never forget a bottle labeled as such...? Great info.

 

[UnderMiner]

Neat! Never saw that variant before!
I found a swamp root cure bottle myself once 4 years ago while traversing of all things, a swamp, sank up to my knees in places, it seemed quite apropos as it was the only thing of interest I found out there.

You can tell a bottle like this is old simply by the word "cure" in the title, when the FDA came into existence in 1906 the word "cure" was replaced by "remedy" to appease the government's crackdown on medical quackery.

 

[robertk]

I found a swamp root cure bottle myself once 4 years ago while traversing of all things, a swamp, sank up to my knees in places, it seemed quite apropos as it was the only thing of interest I found out there.

That’s pretty awesome.

 

[robertk]

You'd think you'd never forget a bottle labeled as such...?

Yeah that one seems like it would stick with you. Maybe there was still a bit of it in there when you found it and just a whiff of the smell was enough to fog the memory a bit.

 

[Limitool]

Yeah that one seems like it would stick with you. Maybe there was still a bit of it in there when you found it and just a whiff of the smell was enough to fog the memory a bit.

Yea maybe.... When I dug them up a lot of them had corks and fluid in them. That was many decades ago...!!!!