Medicine show

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While showmen pitching miraculous cures have been around since classical times,[2] the advent of mixed performance and medicine sales in western culture originated during the Dark Ages in Europe after circuses and theatres were banned and performers had only the marketplace or patrons for support.[2] Mountebanks traveled through small towns and large cities, selling miraculous elixirs by offering small street shows and miraculous cures.[1] Itinerant peddlers of dubious medicines appeared in the American colonies before 1772, when legislation prohibiting their activities was enacted. Increasingly elaborate performances were developed to appeal to a largely rural population.

Over the course of the nineteenth century, traveling mountebanks gave way to more polished medicine shows, which availed themselves of a burgeoning patent medicine industry. At least 1,500 patent medicines were recorded by 1858, affording enterprising drifters a specific product to sell.[2] These "medicines" seldom treated the specific symptoms of an illness, instead relying on stimulants or other drugs to produce a pleasurable effect. Alcohol, opium and cocaine were typical ingredients, and their addictive qualities provided an additional incentive for consumers to continue buying them, while their supposed medicinal benefit afforded a sufficient excuse. By 1900, the patent medicine industry was an $80 million business. Also contributing to the rise of the medicine show was the expansion of the advertising industry, through which shows were able to procure inexpensive posters, fliers, handbills, and other merchandising to promote their products.[1] Other forms of advertising included the use of memorable jingles, sensational testimonials, and scare tactics.

Medicine shows combined various forms of popular entertainment with sales pitches from a self-proclaimed "doctor" who sold an astounding cure-all medicine or device. Shows played either outdoors from a wagon, platform or tent, or indoors in a theatre or opera hall. Admission was usually free or nominal. Pitchmen would make grandiose claims about their product's efficacy, sometimes planting testimonials in the audience. The speaker's goal was to create a need, or fear, then offer his unique medicine as the only cure. Alternating entertainment with sales pitches wore down the audience's resistance, until the crowd was saturated with a desire for the product. The show would continue to run as many days as possible, then move on to the next town. A show might remain in a given location between one night and six weeks, depending on how the troupe behaved itself.

Medicine shows often brought entertainment to rural communities that might not have any other sort of performances for years at a time. Whatever the quality of the medical advice, some spectators enjoyed the free entertainment. Some shows followed circuits covering the entire United States, though most shows focused on the rural midwest and south, where the inhabitants were considered particularly gullible.

One of the most famous of the 20th-century traveling shows was the Hadacol Caravan, sponsored by Louisiana State Senator Dudley J. LeBlanc and his LeBlanc Corporation, makers of the dubious patent medicine/vitamin tonic Hadacol, known for both its alleged curative powers and its high alcohol content. The stage show, which ran throughout the Deep South in the 1940s with great publicity, featured a number of notable music acts and Hollywood celebrities and promoted Hadacol, which was sold during intermission and after the show. Admission to the show was paid in boxtops of the vitamin tonic, sold in stores throughout the southern United States. The Caravan came to a sudden halt in 1951, when the Hadacol enterprise fell apart in a financial scandal.

One of the last great medicine shows had its swan song in the summer of 1972, when the two-man show of Chief Thundercloud (pitchman Leo Kahdot, a Potawatomi from Oklahoma)[4] and Peg Leg Sam (harmonicist-singer-comedian Arthur Jackson) played at a carnival in Pittsboro, North Carolina. It was the last show of the year for them; Kahdot died that winter.[5] "Born For Hard Luck" a documentary film about Peg Leg Sam on Folkstreams.net, includes scenes from that last show.

Perhaps the last of the medicine shows was run by Tommy Scott, who staged as many as three hundred shows per year until about 1990. As a teenager in the 1930s, Scott joined the "Doc" Chambers Medicine Show, established by M. F. Chambers in the late nineteenth century. Scott sang, played guitar, performed ventriloquism and blackface acts, and pitched Chambers's Herb-O-Lac herbal laxative. When Chambers retired in the late 1930s, Scott took charge of the show, performing for many years with his wife, Mary, and his sidekick, Gaines Blevins, known as "Old Bleb". Scott's daughter, Sandra, performed in the show as a singer, bass player, and acrobat, and from the 1960s onward managed the business end of the show. Herb-O-Lac eventually gave way to a mentholated skin liniment, which Scott dubbed Snake Oil. For decades, the show toured arenas and senior centers as "Doc" Scott's Last Real Old Time Medicine Show. From the 1960s to the 1980s, the show also solicited donations for charitable organizations such as the Lions Club and the Optimist Club.[6]