steps is now abandoned, and no longer do vessels ply back and forth across the river to connect Morristown and Brockville.  The railroad only survived the passing of the factory by a year or two and is now memorialized by no more than a line of decaying ties.  The main highway leading westward from Ogdensburg toward the Thousand Islands area has been straightened and rerouted to avoid Morristown, so that now only the straying or misguided traveler will enter the village.  If he does enter he will find a pleasant community, scenically located on a small bay of the St. Lawrence River, commanding an enticing view of the Canadian shore, and rising in several stages above the lower level, where the factory once stood; but it is a somnolent village.  No longer do river packet steamers call at the sagging pier, no longer do trains thread their way between the factory buildings and chug to a halt at the adjacent station.  No longer do hope-giving pills and elixirs, or almanacs and circulars in the millions, pour out of Morristown destined for country drugstores and lonely farmhouses over half a continent.  Only memories persist around the empty ferry slip, the vanished railroad station, and the abandoned factory buildings—­for so many years the home of the distinguished Dr. Morse’s Indian Root Pills.

Bibliography

The principal source of information for this history of the Comstock medicine business comprises the records, letters, documents, and advertising matter found in the abandoned pill-factory building at Morristown, New York.  Supplemental information was obtained from biographies, local and county histories, old city directories, genealogies, back files of newspapers, and materials from the office of the St. Lawrence County Historian, at the courthouse, Canton, New York.

Two standard histories of the patent-medicine era in America are: 

Holbrook, Stewart H. Golden Age of Quackery. New York City:  Macmillan Co. 1959.

Young, J.H. The Toadstool Millionaires, A Social History of Patent Medicines in America Before Federal Regulation. Princeton University Press. 1961.

Early in the present century, during the “exposure” of the patent-medicine industry, two principal critical works also were published, each highly specific and naming names fearlessly: 

Adams, Samuel Hopkins. The Great American Fraud. Serially in Collier’s Magazine in 1905-1906. (Reprinted in book form, 1906.)

American Medical Association. Nostrums and Quackery. Chicago:  American Medical Association Press. (Reprints from the Journal of the American Medical Association:  volume I, 1911; volume II, 1921; volume III, 1936.)

Recently two books have appeared, which are largely pictorial, essentially uncritical, and strive mainly to recapture the colorfulness and ingenuity of patent-medicine advertising.

Carson, Gerald. One for a Man, Two for a Horse. 128 pages.  New York City:  Doubleday and Co. 1961.