"1910-Herbal Quackery" Tie

Quack pitchmen were quick thinkers endowed with a brazen manner. Often using terms describing doctors, and most especially surgeons, as ready to "cut open your umbilicus and take out your tweedium." They needed to scare the living day lights out of the crowd in order to sell their quack medicine. Quick to point out that the operating doctor was a lower form of creature than a butcher, quick to engage in such a dastardly adventure, as to slicing the patient open, and ripping out various needed organs. O But wait!! It was only' "their" medicine could save them from such fowl deeds!! And what better way than to spin a yarn detailing how natural cures from Indian actually could heal them, because they came from the very 'noble' RED MAN himself!! Such was the Kickapoo Indian Medicine Company under the management of Healy and Bigelow. At one point they got the idea of putting on medicine shows to vend a remedy called Kickapoo Indian Sagwa. That the real Kickapoo Indians were never involved, so Healy and Bigelow began hiring Indians by the hundreds -- none of them Kickapoo -- to put on a show The 'employed Indians', supposedly Kickapoo's, began to tour the country demonstrating 'Indian life, and selling the medicines'. It has been estimated that as many as three hundred Indians were living in the "principal wigwam" the winter quarters, in New Haven in the late 1880's. The Wigwam was located at 521, 523, and 525 Grand Ave., which is now Connecticut Route 22. Sometime around 1894, the company carried on a portion of its business from offices in New York City. Records from the Patent Office show that Healy and Bigelow patented the labels for the "Sagwa" and "Indian Oil" in July of 1882