Patent medicine entrepreneur George Taylor Fulford I began his career in Brockville, Ontario as a railway and steamship ticket agent and wholesaler. He was apprenticed at the time in a drug store owned by his brother William, which he took over when William moved to Chicago. So successful was the sale of different patent medicines in his store that Fulford decided to start his own patent medicine company under the name Fulford and Co.
Fulford and Co’s most famous remedy– and the one which solidified the wealth and status of George Taylor Fulford– was Dr. Williams’ Pink Pills for Pale People, the patent for which Fulford bought from Brockville doctor William Frederick Jackson in 1890. He advertised the pills very widely and cleverly, using patient testimonials in advertisements that look like little newspaper articles. Unlike many patent medicines of the time, the Pink Pills were actually beneficial for some of the ailments they claimed to cure– the principal ingredient was iron, which made them effective in treating anemia.
Fulford had many famous friends, including then Prime Minister Wilfrid Laurier, and was known as a generous and civic-minded man. He gave to numerous charities and served on Brockville’s town council, as well as the Canadian Senate. Tragically, he was the first recorded Canadian to die from a motor car accident, passing away on October 13th, 1905. His son, George Fulford II, bequeathed Fulford Place, their family home, to the Ontario Heritage Trust in 1987. You can still visit it today!
Coated in pink-coloured sugar, an analysis of the pills conducted in 1909 for the British Medical Association revealed them to contain sulphate of iron, potassium carbonate, magnesia, powdered liquorice, and sugar. Approximately one third of the iron sulphate in the pills had oxidised in the sampling analysed, leading to the statement that the pills had been “very carelessly prepared”.[10] The formula went through several changes, and at one stage included the laxative aloe, the major ingredient of Beecham’s Pills. The Pills were finally withdrawn from the market in the 1970s.
It’s so weird to read what I initially thought would be an academic article that instead reads as someone falsely putting this person on a pedastool and not properly informing the audience of why these pills had to actually be pulled off the market in the 1970s….but I guess whatever it takes to keep a place “worthy” of tourism I guess.
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