out of which alighted a noble and elegant-looking man.  In a moment’s time he entered the room, and embraced the hand of his dear father and mother.  She clasped her arms around his neck and fainted away.

The Doctor, surprised to see his father so nearly gone, immediately went to his coach, taking therefrom various plants and roots, which he had learned from the Red Men of the forest as being good for all diseases, and gave them to his father, and in about two hours afterwards he was much relieved....  Two days afterwards he was much better, and the third day he could walk about the room ...and now we behold him a strong, active man, and in the bloom of health, and at the age of ninety-five able to ride in one day thirty-five miles, in order to spend his birthday with this celebrated Doctor, his son.

The foregoing event was supposed to have occurred some years before 1847, as the elder Mr. Morse’s ninety-fifth birthday referred to was celebrated on November 20, 1847, when he was still hale and hearty.  The old gentleman was also said to be enormously wealthy, “with an income of about five hundred thousand dollars annually, and the owner of a number of fine, elegant ships, which sailed in different directions to every part of the world.”  Dr. Morse, who was the first man to establish that all diseases arise from the impurity of the blood, subsequently discarded his regular practice of medicine and, as a boon to mankind, devoted his entire energy to the manufacture of Dr. Morse’s Indian Root Pills.

[Illustration:  FIGURE 6.-"A Short History of Dr. Morse’s Father.”  A copy was inserted in every box of the pills.]

This story, which was first disseminated as early as the late 1850s, was an entire fabrication.  Throughout the patent-medicine era it was the common practice to ascribe an Indian, or at least some geographically remote, origin to all of these nostrums and panaceas.  In the words of James Harvey Young, in his book on the Social History of Patent Medicines:[4]

From the 1820’s onward the Indian strode nobly through the American patent-medicine wilderness.  Hiawatha helped a hair restorative and Pocahontas blessed a bitters.  Dr. Fall spent twelve years with the Creeks to discover why no Indian had ever perished of consumption.  Edwin Eastman found a blood syrup among the Comanches.  Texas Charlie discovered a Kickapoo cure-all, and Frank Cushing pried the secret of a stomach renovator from the Zuni. (Frank, a famous ethnologist, had gone West on a Smithsonian expedition.) Besides these notable accretions to pharmacy, there were Modoc Oil, Seminole Cough Balsam, Nez Perce Catarrh Snuff, and scores more, all doubtless won for the use of white men by dint of great cunning and valor.

[Footnote 4:  Young, James Harvey, The Toadstool Millionaires, A Social History of Patent Medicines in America before Federal Regulation.  Princeton University Press. 1961.]