Ad for Hunt's Remedy (Fighting Death) Mint Stamp for 1906 Pure Food and Drug Act

Description

[Ebay's non-refundable
30¢
payment processing
fee will be charged to buyers who request cancellation
after
payment has been made.]
This Listing is for ONE NEW
1906 Pure Food and Drugs Act
Single
Stamp from the Sheet
1900s: Celebrate the Century
from 1998.
Mint. MNH. No flaws. Original undisturbed gum. From a Smoke-free and Pet-free Environment.
The U.S. Postal Service issued this 32¢ gummed stamp on the sheet
1900s: Celebrate the Century
in Washington, DC on February 3, 1998
. The artist is Richard Waldrep of Sparks, MD.
Text on the back of each stamp provides educational information for the significant events selected from the 1900s decade of American history.
From 1872 to 1881, William E. Clarke of Providence, RI manufactured and sold Hunt’s Remedy, a cure-all wonder drug known in New York and New England since at least 1850. He used colorful, dramatic trade cards to advertise his product (see 3rd photo).
The image on the front of the card shows a hale and hearty male patient wielding a bottle of Hunt’s Remedy against death, personified as a skeleton with a scythe and hourglass. The reverse lists no end of ailments against which the wonder drug has “never been known to fail,” including back pain, kidney problems, and “female diseases.”
More than a century later, the USPS created another stamp from the image, commemorating the 1906 Pure Food and Drugs Act, passed in the wake of a public outcry caused by Upton Sinclair’s
The Jungle
, as part of the Celebrate the Century series. The Act regulated the hyperbolic claims made by earlier patent medicine producers such as Clarke, and required accurate labeling of ingredients.
Little is known about the ingredients in Hunt’s Remedy beyond the claim made on the back of Clarke’s trade card that it was “purely vegetable” and based on a recipe that descended from the original Dutch inhabitants of New Amsterdam. The secret formula was acquired by new owners in about 1881, and Hunt’s Remedy was apparently still being sold as late as 1908, when a Kansas State Board of Health Report described it as “a brown solution of bitter vegetable drugs, containing 17.2 per cent alcohol.”
Scott # 3182f
Free Shipping in the U.S. by USPS First Class