Perley Fitch and His Pharma of Perils

 

We can excuse A. Perley Fitch for abandoning his first name for the odd-sounding “Perley.”  After all, he was baptized “Amasa,” a label anyone might want to shuck.  But can we forgive him for using his role as a trusted Concord, New Hampshire, pharmacy owner to make and merchandise nostrums containing dangerous substances and claim without proof they would cure serious diseases?

Perhaps the least troubling of his products was his whiskey.  An important element in the physician’s black bag of that time, whiskey was used in a variety of ways.  Like other pharmacists, Perley obliged with his own proprietary brand.  Shown below, he called it “Morrill’s Old Rye.”  My assumption is that he named it for Vermont Senator Justin Smith Morrill (1810-1898), a prominent ally of Abraham  Lincoln and author of the Morrill Land Grant College Act, legislation that revolutionized the American system of higher education.

Perley was born in Enfield, New Hampshire, in 1843, the son of Eunice Sargent and Asa Fitch, a farmer.  One of eight children, with limited education, he went to work at age 14 for a Concord pharmaceutical firm.  After learning the trade there, in 1861 with a partner he started a firm called Fitch & Underhill.  When that drug store closed five years later, he became a junior member of Eastman & Fitch, druggists.  In 1882, Perley bought out Eastman and henceforth ran the operation himself, incorporating in 1914.

By that time Perley was heavily into selling his nostrums.  He credited his most prominent remedy to the recipe of a deceased Concord physician, Dr, A. H. Crosby,  an advocate of frontier medicine.  Doc Crosby is quoted saying: “Many of the indigenous plants were very easily gathered, and were so carefully prepared that not even the extracts, tinctures, and elixirs of the same plants from the hands of the manufacturing pharmacists equaled them in therapeutic effect.”  When Crosby died without commercially exploiting his formula, Perley moved in,  He called the potion “Fitchmul.”

Ingredients listed in a company ad shown here indicate the potential perils of Fitchmul.   Chloric ether is a substance created by dissolving chloroform in alcohol.  It is considered habit-forming and a narcotic.  Hydrocyanic acid, also known as prussic acid, is a compound in which “cyanide” is the key element.  It is considered extremely poisonous.  Even small concentrations of hydrocyanic acid if inhaled, can cause headache, dizziness, feeling of suffocation, and nausea.  Tartrate of antimony  is used to induce vomiting and was used by the Romans in their bacchanalias.  Fitch’s 1907 patent application for Fitchmul indicates yet another ingredient called Venetian turpentine,  a product used to dilute oil paint.  One Internet entry says:  “The solvent is highly toxic. Turpentine weakens the paint film as well as our health.”  Finally, Fitchmul was just under 12% alcohol, about the same as red wine.

What was this mixture of ingredients meant to accomplish?  As seen in the ad here, among its uses Fitchmul was “curative of Bronco-Pneumonia,”  valuable in the treatment of acute or chronic bronchitis, and a cough remedy.  Then, amazingly, attention is directed by the ad below the beltline to the urethra, the tube that carries urine from the bladder.  Fitchmul is claimed to treat urethritis, an inflammation caused by an infection, sometimes linked to sexually transmitted gonorrhoea.   This litany of cures was embellished by “puff” pieces in pseudo-medical magazines.  In a 1904 edition of “Therapeutics” a Dr. William L. Allen of New York reveals the wonders he achieved with Fitchmul in curing advanced tuberculosis and ministering to a five year old girl with pneumonia:  “Treated with nothing but Fitchmul the child made a complete recovery.”

While Fitchmul was the flagship of Perley’s fleet of remedies, he issued a number of others.   PAN-ZIN-OID may have been among the more oddly named concoctions.  It was composed of bicarbonate of soda, ginger, and two enzymes, pepsin and pancreatin, all aimed at aiding digestion and curbing stomach problems including “borborygmus.”  For those readers as ignorant of that malady as I was, borborygmus is the rumbling or gurgling noises made by the movement of fluid and gas through the intestines. 

The success of Fitchmul and his other patent medicines caused Perley to outgrow the space available at his drug store on Concord’s Main Street where  24 clerks reputedly toiled to keep up with orders from all over the country.  In 1913 he leased the triangular-shaped Optima Building as a separate location where he claimed: “Fitchmul remedies are manufactured in fine modern laboratories.”  Having gained a national customer base, Perley was growing rich.  

In the mid 1860s, Perley had married Annie A. Colby, like himself born and educated in New Hampshire.  Their only child, a boy, died shortly after birth.  When the Fitchmul company incorporated in 1914, Perley made Annie one of four directors.  The couple lived in a comfortable home at 138 School Street in Concord.  A photograph from the New Hampshire Historical Society above shows the couple sitting on the front porch. The Fitches also kept a rustic cottage on New Hampshire’s Sunapee Lake, 35 miles northwest of Concord.  Perley owned five steamboats on the lake as owner and general manager of the Woodsum Steamboat Company.

Even in his early 70s, Perley Fitch continued to be engaged personally in both retail sales and the manufacture of his line of medicinal products.  As he aged, however, he began to be troubled by heart problems.  In October 1917, he was felled by a heart attack and died at the age of 75.  He was buried in Concord’s Blossom Hill Cemetery in Annie’s family plot.  His gravestone is marked only by his initials.

Despite the Food and Drug Laws ushered in with the 20th Century, the Fitchmul Company continued to thrive, apparently adjusting its recipes and advertising to meet every new government requirement.  Only in 1931 can I find the company in legal problems when it was hauled before a U.S. District Court for selling a nostrum called “Elder Hook’s Healing Balm.”  This product, said authorities, was misbranded and “false and fraudulent since it contained no ingredient or combination of ingredients capable of producing the effects claimed.”  No one from Fitchmul contested the finding and 69 packages of balm were destroyed.  

The company moved from Concord to Manchester, New Hampshire, in 1950.  In 1967, the A. Perley Fitch Company was acquired by Gilman Brothers, a Boston drug firm.  Shown here is a pre-1967 bottle and box of Fitchmul. The actual age is difficult to assess.  The bottle with box recently sold at auction to a collector of  medicinals for $69.  

Note:  This post was drawn from a variety of sources.  The most important was a biography that appeared about Perley Fitch in a 1915 issue of the Granite Monthly, a  local Concord magazine.  Special thanks to Peter Samuelson of  Intervale, New Hampshire, and his fellow collectors, Joe Shaw and Ray Trottier, for their help with photographs of Fitch bottles.