Was he ‘eminent specialist’ or just a quack?
Newspapers in the late 1800s and early 1900s were filled with crazy ads for miracle health cures. The mother of them all may have belonged to Dr. Powell Reeves, who took out a giant missive in the Vancouver World on April 7, 1900.
“Consult The Old Doctor,” said the top of the ad. “You Can Be Cured!”
Cured of what? Most anything, if you believed the ad, which touted Reeves as the “World’s Leading Specialist.”
“RUPTURE, VARICOELE, LOST MANHOOD, CURED,” it blared. “$1,000 REWARD for any case he fails to cure coming under his treatment by following his directions.”
It went on to list body parts Reeves could cure of disease: eye, ear, head, throat, lungs, heart, stomach, liver, spleen, and “sexual organs.”
Beside each body part Reeves listed various ailments he dealt with in that region of the body. He promised to cure “all private diseases” in the sexual organs, for example, including spermatorrhoea, syphilis, and prostatorrhoea, as well as “softening of the brain, idiocy (and) insanity.”
Not sure why that was included in the sexual organ area, but the ad warned “men who are wasting away ” that “fully 80 percent of the unhappy and forlorn victims who fill our MAD HOUSES are victims of SEMINAL WEAKNESS, NERVOUS DEBILITY and their kindred causes.”
It’s a masterpiece of ludicrous hype.
“The Successful Physician!” the ad stated. “The Skillful Surgeon! The Eminent Specialist! Your Best Friend. The World’s Benefactor.”
The ad also said he was “Permanently Located,” which is hilarious, given that “The Old Doctor” seems to have spent much of his life bouncing from one town to another.
In a newspapers.com search, Reeves ads turn up between 1884 and 1901 in cities like Fort Worth, Spokane, Omaha, Salt Lake City, and Portland, as well as in Seattle and Tacoma.
His ads also crop up in numerous smaller cities where he took his medical miracles on the road, including Anaconda, Mont.; Great Falls, Mont.; Butte, Mont.; Missoula, Mont.; Leavenworth, Kan.; Topeka, Kan.; Lewiston, Idaho; Yakima, Wash.; Astoria, Ore.; and Eugene, Ore.
The ads aren’t always under the name Dr. Powell Reeves, though. From 1884 to 1886, he billed himself as Dr. Vanmonciscar, “the most successful throat and lung doctor in America.” But you can tell it’s him because the Vanmonciscar ads feature an illustration of a bald guy with giant mutton-chop sideburns, a handlebar moustache and a bit of stubble on his chin, the same as Reeves ads.
The “old doctor” also doesn’t seem to have been that old. When he died of blood poisoning on Nov. 19, 1901, the Washington Standard said he was only 48. Yet in an 1886 Dr. Vanmonciscar ad in the Portland Oregonian, he described himself as “the oldest and most successful physician on the coast, (with) 25 years experience.”
If he really was only 48 when he died, that means he was 33 when he billed himself as the oldest physician on the coast. If he did have 25 years experience in 1886, he would have had to start practising medicine at the age of eight. In some ads, he claims to be from New York, in others from Chicago. Sometimes he claimed he had four degrees, other times he said he had two. The Butte paper said he came from the “Hoosier state” — Indiana.
The most extensive story about Reeves is in the March 15, 1890 Texas Health Journal, which warned its readers to “Look Out for the Notorious Fraud, Dr. (?) Powell Reeves.”
“This notorious, ignorant pretender is a fraud of the first water,” said the Journal, “obtaining money from victims by guaranteeing cures, even when the patients are in the very jaws of death.”
The Journal alleges Reeves started off as a horse trainer before switching to medicine, which makes sense — there are many stories in old papers about his stable of horses.
The controversy over Reeves continued after his death, when his son sued his stepmother (Reeves was married three times) over his will. The son claimed Reeves had made $60,000 in the last two-and-a-half years of his life and owned property worth $25,000, but his wife claimed the entire estate was worth only $300. The son lost.