Weird Island
61. WINDSWEPT: The Pain-Killer Mansion
Episode Summary
Have you ever been to Scarborough Beach in Narragansett and noticed that beautiful stone ruin just beyond the sand? Well, it turns out it’s the remnants of an old carriage house that once stood beside this mansion overlooking the water. The mansion was called Windswept, but locally it was known as the house built with Painkiller money, and it was built by a family who made their fortune selling this over-the-counter medicine called “Perry Davis’s Vegetable Pain Killer,” remembered today as the first-ever nationally advertised remedy for chronic pain.
Episode Notes
Have you ever been to Scarborough Beach in Narragansett and noticed that beautiful stone ruin just beyond the sand? Well, it turns out it’s the remnants of an old carriage house that once stood beside this mansion overlooking the water. The mansion was called Windswept, but locally it was known as the house built with Painkiller money, and it was built by a family who made their fortune selling this over-the-counter medicine called “Perry Davis’s Vegetable Pain-Killer,” remembered today as the first-ever nationally advertised remedy for chronic pain.
Want to know more? Check out these other podcasts:
About Perry Davis’ Pain-Killer:
Perry Davis’ Vegetable Pain-Killer - Ads and Marketing Materials
Patent Medicines / Medicine History:
Edmund Davis’s Death - If you want to learn more about that!
Episode Transcription
- Open up your medicine cabinet and look inside. You’ve probably got some kind of pain reliever in there, right? Maybe Tylenol, Aspirin, Advil, something like that. For many of us, these kinds of over-the-counter pain medications have become a part of our daily routines. One third of Americans take some sort of over-the-counter pain medication every single day.
- I don’t like to leave the house without Advil in my bag or in my car, because you just never know when a headache or backache might ruin a fun day out. Like a day at the beach, soaking up sun, sweating, and inevitably not drinking a ton of water. You’re bound to leave with a pounding sensation in your head. But a couple of painkillers and a swig of water and you’re all set.
- It turns out that if you’re a Rhode Islander, your beach day might be spent just a literal stone’s throw from some pretty fascinating painkiller history, that is if your go-to beach is Scarborough Beach. Because just beyond the soft sand, rising out of the grass and shrubs that have grown around it, is this beautiful stone ruin that I’m sure you’ve seen. It makes for a gorgeous photo, even for someone like me who is, honestly, not super great at taking photos.
- That ruin is the remnants of an old carriage house that once stood beside this big 21-room mansion overlooking the water that was built in 1895 by a man named Edmund Davis. The mansion was called Windswept, but locally it was known as the house built with Painkiller money.
- I’m Sara and you’re listening to Weird Island. Each week, I’ll be telling you about the strangest stories I can dig up from my tiny, little state of RI. And this week, I’m going to tell you about the Davis family, and how they amassed a fortune selling this over-the-counter medicine called “Perry Davis’s Vegetable Pain Killer,” remembered today as the first-ever nationally advertised remedy for chronic pain.
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- Edmund W. Davis built Windswept Mansion in 1895. But today’s story begins earlier than that, with Edmund’s grandfather Perry.
- Perry Davis was born in Dartmouth, MA in 1791. His family wasn’t incredibly wealthy, and Perry Davis left school at a young age to begin working. Which is why it was really tragic when, at age 14, Davis had a bad fall that resulted in a crippling injury to his hip and leg that he would suffer from for the rest of his life. Suddenly, his prospects changed. Physical labor was no longer an option, so his father apprenticed him to a shoemaker at age 17. And we don’t know a lot about the next 20 or so years of his life, except that he married a young woman he met at his Baptist Church and they started to grow their family. But they suffered misfortune after misfortune as 5 of their 7 children died when they were young.
- We believe Davis continued working on shoes during those years, but as he did his mind wandered to different ideas about industry and he started to formalize this idea he had for an invention–a design for a grain grinding mill. In 1828, he moved his family to Pawtucket where he promoted his invention in the growing industrial town, but sadly nothing came of it. The family moved to Taunton, thinking there might be a better market for the idea there. But, again, Davis failed to sell the idea.
- And then, already down on his luck, Perry Davis got sick. He complained of a cold that seemed to have settled in his lungs. Followed by a cough, and then pains in his sides. And soon his stomach was sore and he was barely eating. And desperate for some sort of relief, he mixed up a home-made medicine.
- “I searched the globe in my imagination and selected the choicest gums and plants that I thought the world afforded,” he later wrote. “I commenced using my new discovered medicine with no other hope than handing me gently to the grave.”
- But that isn’t what happened. Instead, he got better. And before long, he was back at it, working away on new ideas for inventions. But this good luck wouldn’t last for too long. In 1843 a fire destroyed the family’s home and the business Davis was starting to build. And deep in debt with little but the clothes on their backs, the family moved to Providence where it’s said a group of charitable citizens contributed to a fund for those affected by the fire.
- Perry Davis took an inventory of what he had, which wasn’t much. And realized that through the years of misfortune he’d suffered, the one piece of good fortune he’d had all along was that medicine he’d made. So he decided to take one last shot at entrepreneurship. He would become a medicine manufacturer.
- He named his magical cure Perry Davis’s Vegetable Pain Killer. At first, the medicine didn’t exactly take off. The story goes that Davis filled a basket with bottles of the drug and walked to Boston, where he tried and failed to sell it to drug stores. And as he traveled back home, disheartened, he gave it away to poor folks he met along the road. And it worked so well for them that they spread the word.
- This story comes from marketing materials for the medicine, so it’s probably a bit exaggerated, but, largely, the early success of the medicine was based on word of mouth. Davis sold it at State Fairs and walked door-to-door and people told their friends about it. Within a few years, it was said that “Perry Davis’s name was more widely known than that of any other citizen of Rhode Island, and his face was familiar throughout the world.” And, that’s because Perry Davis’s face was right there on the bottle’s label for everyone to see.
- Perry Davis’s Vegetable Pain Killer was what is called a Patent Medicine, which sounds fancy but is essentially an over-the-counter medicine with a proprietary–and, often, non-disclosed–formula. Patent medicines, for the most part, were not actually patented, especially back then. But the term originally referred to this practice where the royal family in England would give their stamp of approval, called a “letters patent,” to medicines they liked–and this would allow the manufacturer to claim in marketing that it was endorsed by the royal family. In America in Perry Davis’s day, patent medicines were basically just non-prescription medicines or they’re sometimes referred to as Quack remedies today–because many of them didn’t really do what they claimed to. You might know them as “snake oils,” because of one specific patent medicine called “Clark Stanley’s Snake Oil Liniment,” which was tested and proven to contain nothing but mineral oil, fatty oil, capsaicin, turpentine, and camphor.
- When I first heard the gist of this story, I made a couple of wrong assumptions. The first was regarding the significance of Perry Davis’s Pain Killer. I knew there were thousands of different remedies people were mixing up at the time. Some estimate the number could be as high as 30-50K distinct remedies that were sold in the US in the 1800s. And I thought this was just another one of them, and was probably known locally and nowhere else. But that’s not the case. In an 1878 History of Providence, the author wrote “Of all the patent medicines manufactured, none possess a more world-wide reputation than Perry Davis's Pain-killer.” And it was truly a global phenomenon. We may not remember the drug today, but people knew it at the time. Davis’s medicine was sold all over the world with the packaging and directions printed in 30 different languages for all different markets.
- This was partly because it was actually a revolutionary product at the time. Today, it is pointed to as the first-ever nationally advertised remedy specifically for chronic pain rather than pain and other illnesses. And while the term painkiller is considered a general term today, it wasn’t back then. That was Davis’s brand name, and he had the term trademarked. Over time, others mimicked Davis’ product, and the term painkiller became like Kleenex today, despite Davis’s best efforts to protect it. He actually had a ton of some of the earliest trademark lawsuits in the US. Today the term painkiller is thrown around as a descriptive word, but surprisingly a derivative of Davis’ original manufacturing company actually owned the trademark up until 2017.
- Beyond the revolutionary nature of the product, Davis actually got lucky when he launched his medicine–which is kind of surprising after all the bad luck he faced earlier in his life. There were two geo-political factors that contributed to the drug’s success. First, there were three serious waves of cholera in the US in the early to mid-1800s, and Davis’s Pain-Killer was distributed as both a treatment and a preventative. In fact, Mark Twain recalls that his mother gave him Perry Davis’s Vegetable Pain-Killer hoping to prevent cholera. He described the drug as “a most detestable medicine.” And he even gives it a cameo in a chapter of Tom Sawyer.
- The Civil War was the second big factor that contributed to the drug’s success, as the government actually took over Davis’s factory at the outbreak of the war to make medicine for both soldiers and horses. Add to that the fact that patent medicines, including this one, were some of the most heavily advertised products at the time. And by the late 1800s, tons of people around the country and the world were familiar with the brand.
- There’s one other thing I really misunderstood about Perry Davis’s Vegetable Pain Killer, and it had to do with the ingredients. One of the drug’s marketing slogans was the super-catchy line: “One thing is certain, Pain Killer kills pain.” But I wasn’t convinced. I heard the term “Vegetable” in the name, and assumed that it was made of safe, natural ingredients like some mixture of herbs. And I thought the drug probably wasn’t very powerful, but maybe worked well enough at the time, considering the options available. Which just goes to show you that I am very susceptible to marketing, because they wanted me to think it was an all natural mix of herbs. The formula likely did include myrrh and capsicum (which is basically red pepper), and benzoin and guaiac (which are saps obtained from some tree barks), but it also included alcohol and opium. So, um, yeah Pain Killer killed pain.
- While this sounds pretty shocking, it wasn’t unusual. Patent medicines were often high in alcohol content and opium appeared in hundreds, if not thousands, of over-the-counter patent medicines up until the early 1900s. And it wasn’t just patent medicines, opiates constituted half or more of all medication prescribed in American hospitals.
- They were marketed as pain-killers, cough suppressants, and “infant soothers,” to help put fussy babies to sleep. And many women took opiates for menstrual cramps. In fact, a lot of opiate-containing medicines were advertised for infants, children and women. But the thing is, they were really heavily used because–they worked. Opiates were effective in relieving pain, but they were also effective remedies for coughs and diarrhea. And the first laws restricting the use of opium weren’t enacted until 1909, so this seems shocking to us today, but it was legal.
- But, of course, opiates are highly addictive. Following widespread use of opiates during the Civil War, the post-war morphine addiction was referred to as “soldier’s disease.” And it began to be reasonably well understood that the use of opiates could be dangerous. By the 1890s, over-prescription of opiates had led to an addiction epidemic that affected roughly 1 in every 200 Americans. And over 60% of those addicted were upper or middle-class white women who could most afford to visit a doctor.
- Many medicines would actually advertise that their drug caused none of the harmful effects of opium, regardless of whether or not that was actually true. And medical trade journals educated doctors on the latest non-addictive drugs available to prescribe. Like this 1910 pamphlet from The Bayer Company with the headline, “The Substitute for the Opiates,” which advertised Bayer’s latest miracle drug which was believed to be a less addictive alternative to morphine. That drug was named “Heroin.” And within 6 years, Bayer had stopped mass producing the drug because it was, in fact, as we know today, highly addictive.
- Despite the fact that some estimate patent medicines placed more newspaper and magazine ads in the late 1800s than any other industry, it was actually newspaper reporters that began to drum up support for regulation as they publicized instances of death and addiction and exposed the predatory marketing of patent medicine manufacturers. And as doctors became better educated about the risks of opiates, they played a critical role in slowing and reversing overuse of these highly addictive drugs by prescribing them less frequently. Then the 1906 Food and Drug Act really marked the beginning of the end of opiate-laden patent medicines by requiring manufacturers disclose their ingredients.
- Perry Davis passed away in 1862, but before his death, he was able to see the enormous success of his brand. Poor for most of his life, he died wealthy. And his face continued to be shown on packaging long after he died. First his son took over the business, and later his grandson Edmund became involved. But by the late 1800s, Perry Davis’s Vegetable Pain-Killer was frequently imitated by competitors and the term painkiller had become generic. And with increasing criticism of patent medicines and a call for their regulation, the brand began to decline. Some accounts suggest Edmund Davis sold off the rights to the family name to another patent medicine firm and then used the proceeds to build the Windswept estate, which is why the grand summer home became known as the “mansion built with painkiller money.”
- Edmund Davis died in 1908–under somewhat mysterious circumstances. He was found shot at his fishing camp in Nova Scotia, and no one is quite sure what happened. But that’s a whole other story. The Windswept Mansion stayed in the family until 1939 when it was apparently sold to Paul and Alfred Castiglione. Local accounts remember it was turned into a restaurant called Cobb’s By the Sea. And after the restaurant closed down, the property suffered a number of fires and damage by vandals. The house itself was razed in the 1970s, and the property was acquired by the state to keep the land from being developed into luxury condos. All that remains today are the stone ruins of the carriage house, and many have forgotten the story of the Windswept Mansion and the Pain-Killer that funded it–they just see a beautiful stone ruin on the beach, the perfect place to take your beach-day Instagram shot.
- But maybe it’s a story that shouldn’t have been forgotten. I opened this episode by saying that we probably all have some sort of painkiller in our medicine cabinet. I mentioned Advil, Tylenol and Aspirin, but it’s also possible your medicine cabinet includes something more potent.
- Just about 100 years after the opioid epidemic of the 19th century, we found ourselves in another one. In 1995, a company called Purdue Pharma successfully introduced their newest drug, OxyContin, which was advertised as a new, less-addictive type of drug because of its time-release formula which allowed a single dose to last 12 hours, supposedly reducing the risk of addiction. It kind of reminds of that 1910 ad for Heroin, which was claimed to be less addictive. And like that ad for Heroin, which appeared in a medical trade journal, companies like Purdue Pharma heavily advertised to doctors. They provided physicians with OxyContin coupons for patients, swag for doctors, and the company funded more than 20K educational programs designed to promote the use of opioids for chronic pain rather than just for end of life care.
- According to the CDC, opioid overdose deaths have been rising since 1999. Beginning with a wave of deaths tied to prescription opioids and then followed by a rapid increase in overdose deaths involving heroin and most recently fentanyl.
- Many of the missteps that led to our current crisis directly echoed those made in the past. But, perhaps, many weren’t familiar with the learnings from the 1800s. And maybe they should have been. Today’s opioid epidemic has a ton of its own nuances that I couldn’t possibly cover in this episode.But if this has you itching to know more about the current crisis, I’m going to link to another couple of podcasts I’ve been listening to in the past few weeks that I think you’ll also get a lot from. Find those in the show notes and on Instagram. And if you’re someone who is suffering from an opioid addiction, please know you are not alone. Millions of others today and throughout history have had or currently suffer from opioid use disorder. There are people who care about you and want to help. If you don’t know who to talk to, one resource is SAMHSA’s National Helpline. It is a free, confidential 24/7, 365 day-a-year treatment referral and information service for individuals and families facing substance use disorders. They can be reached at 1-800-662-HELP.
- Thank you so much for listening to this week’s episode! And thank you to Melissa for suggesting the topic! As always, all episodes are written and researched by me, Sara Corben. If you liked this episode, I would love it if you could share it with your family or friends, or you can send me a note at Weird Rhode Island at Gmail.com or on IG at Weird Island Podcast. And if there’s a topic you’d really like to hear about, let me know! See you next time as we dig up more stories about all things weird and wonderful in the little state of Rhode Island.