Tucked away on a side street near then-fashionable Madison Square Park was the “United States Medical Dispensary,” a shady-sounding outfit that sold diet advice through ads in magazines at the turn of the last century.
I like the part about readers of this ad being afraid “the remedy is worse than the disease.” What could the treatment have been—tapeworms?
Looks like the city’s obsession with thinness and weight loss didn’t get its start with amphetamine-popping Upper East Side ladies in the 1960s or during the heroin chic days of the ’90s. New York has worshipped skinny people for at least a century.
Tags: Obesity in New York City, old medical ads, quack medical advice, United States Medical Dispensary, vintage magazine ads, weight-loss ads
Ephemeral New York 
May 14, 2009 at 5:13 am |
hi,
kudos to you for actually scanning that picture: it’s huge, so it looks like you found an original.
I’m actually looking for a hi-res version of a related image. It looks like this:
I’m curious as to whether you’ve seen it, and if you might know where I could find it.
best regards
Adam Jasper
May 14, 2009 at 7:58 am |
That’s a great image, but no, I’ve never seen it before. Perhaps a reader knows where you can find it.
September 3, 2017 at 4:41 pm |
I looked up the name of the book, “Obesity: Its cause and cure” and it’s written by Theodore Griffin 1868.
https://digital.case.edu/concern/texts/ksl:ditmedthe00757