Brother Bonaventure’s “Wizard Oil”

ECW welcomes back guest author Joseph Casino.

When Benedictine Brother Bonaventure Gaul returned from his Civil War service to St. Vincent Abbey in Latrobe, Pennsylvania, he took up again his craft of shoemaking and occasional wood carving for the benefit of the community.^[1] But Brother Bonaventure also returned with a new skill learned the hard way during his service as a nurse in the Union Army.^[2] In the field with the troops and in the hospital with the wounded and dying, he had discovered the wonders of “Wizard Oil.”

His time in the army was no sinecure. “We have no service [at arms],” he noted, “but we still have to participate in all the difficulties of war.”^[3] Throughout 1864 and 1865, Brother Bonaventure was constantly on the move, marching with the troops through the battles involved in the Overland and Petersburg campaigns.^[4] He wrote that at times “they had to dig trenches so close to the rebels, that they could talk to them.”^[5] He was with the troops pursuing Lee’s army in 1865 “in double-quick step through swamps and woods by day and by night, marching and fighting continually” and marching “over rocks and through water in rain and sunshine without getting scarcely any food.” “Mules fell by the wayside from sheer exhaustion,” he added, and “half of our men dropped out of ranks chiefly because they had slept very little for a whole week.” Ruefully he concluded, “These hardships will not easily be forgotten.”^[6]

Added to dealing with the terrible effects of Minié bullets and shrapnel was the daily chore of caring for soldiers’ everyday pains, bruises, cuts, and fevers occasioned by a demanding physical routine, often in insalubrious conditions with inadequate diet and foul water. After the war he himself was afflicted with neuralgia that lasted for weeks at a time, a condition which would have tied him to a liniment like the Wizard Oil he had applied to soldiers during the war.^[7]

Back at the monastery after the war, Brother Bonaventure became the infirmarian.  His “studio, cobbler shop, and emergency hospital was a place where students could go,” and “his hospital experience during the Civil War made him quite adept in setting broken bones and reducing slight fractures.”^[8] His obituary stated that “many a former student, who has perhaps long forgotten the brother’s name, will remember the good old shoemaker who treated his bruised finger, broken arm or sprained ankle. Even though applied a little gruffly, his remedies were always beneficial.”^[9] Of special note was the memory of him as he “acted as a resident nurse, and the recipe of a liniment which he brought home from the war,” which “had the popular name “wizard oil, . . . became a benefit for the abbey and the school.”^[10]

The origins of Wizard Oil are somewhat obscure. Given all the physical suffering caused by the Civil War and the return to civilian life of hordes of wounded veterans, it would be surprising if such a “patent medicine” did not become immensely popular.^[11] Their proliferation to almost absurd levels is abundantly clear when perusing the pages of the new mass-produced newspapers of the late 19th century.^[12] Unemployed magician John Hamlin was well-placed in Chicago to capitalize upon this craze for such nostrums, and his background in magic no doubt prepared him well for spreading the word of the miraculous properties of Hamlin’s Wizard Oil throughout the Midwest.^[13] Not limiting himself to the printed word, however, he sent out traveling troupes of performers in “medicine shows” that sometimes lasted as long as six weeks in a town. These shows always combined an element of entertainment along with pitches about the wondrous cures obtainable through an application of Wizard Oil.^[14] His company also published songbooks, cookbooks, and dreambooks.^[15]

Wizard Oil was a concoction including myrrh, capsicum, camphor, ammonia, chloroform, sassafras, cloves, turpentine, and up to 70 percent alcohol.^[16] Like so many nostrums abroad in post-Civil War America, it claimed to cure a myriad of ailments, like sore muscles, rheumatism, pneumonia, cancer, hydrophobia, diphtheria, toothache, and headache, when used externally as a liniment.^[17] One wonders about its efficacy when taken internally as indicated in its promotional literature.

Surprisingly, there is no mention of Wizard Oil in any hospital memoirs or major historical works on Civil War medicine.^[18] If it were not for this mention of the liniment in Brother Bonaventure’s biography, we might never have known that such unofficial remedies made their rounds through Civil War camps and hospitals.

Joseph J. Casino has been an adjunct professor of history at Villanova University since 1978 and serves on the Board of Governors of the Civil War Museum of Philadelphia.

Endnotes:

[1] Evan Portman, “Tales from a Monk in the Union Army: Petersburg,” Emerging Civil War (June 29, 2024); Joseph J. Casino, “Monks in the Military: The Benedictine Brothers Confront the Civil War Draft,” Emerging Civil War (September 2, 2024), and “The Brothers’ War,” Emerging Civil War (December 2, 2024).

[2] Jonathan A. Noyalas, “‘Weary of So Much Suffering’: Letters from the Sheridan Field Hospital,” Civil War Times (Winter 2024): 44-51.

[3] Portman, “Tales from a Monk.”

[4] Felix Fellner, Abbot Boniface and His Monks (Latrobe, PA: Saint Vincent’s Archabbey, 1956), 3:349; Laurie Snyder, “Sheridan’s 1864 Shenandoah Valley Campaign: Battlefield and Follow-up Medical Care (Sheridan Field Hospital),” https://47thpennsylvaniavolunteers.com/2023/12/27/ (accessed 26 December 2024).

[5] Fellner, Abbot Boniface 3:349.

[6] Fellner, Abbot Boniface, 3:350.

[7] While most histories of Civil War medicine highlight contributions of women in hospitals, most nurses were still male. To many physicians who opposed women in the medical field, the application of a topical remedy like a liniment may have been especially anathema. For example, nurse Elvira Powers was prevented from applying a mustard plaster to a male patient by a surgeon who warned her that “the men nurses do that.” Marilyn Mayer Culpepper, Trails and Triumphs: The Women of the American Civil War (East Lansing, MI: Michigan State University Press, 1992), 322; Elvira L. Powers, Hospital Pencillings: Being a Diary While in Jefferson General Hospital, Ind., and Others at Nashville, Tennessee as Matron and Visitor (Boston: Edward L. Mitchel, 1866), 64.

[8] Jerome Oetgen, Mission to America: A History of Saint Vincent Archabbey (Washington, DC: Catholic University of America Press, 2000), 123, 159.

[9] St. Vincent’s Journal, 6, No. 1 (September 21, 1896): 38-39.

[10] Fellner, Abbot Boniface, 3:351.

[11] One source asserts it was first produced in 1861 in Chicago by former magician John Austin Hamlin and his brother Lysander Butler Hamlin. Another source does not deny Hamlin as the creator but points out that he created the concoction in 1859 in Cincinnati before moving his manufactory to Chicago the following year. There are also claims that Hamlin’s Wizard Oil was based on an 1856 concoction called “Flagg’s Instantaneous Relief.” E. C Alft, Elgin: Days Gone By (Carpentersville, IL: Crossroads Communications, 1992); Origin, Growth, and Usefulness of the Chicago Board of Trade: Its Leading Members, and Representative Business Men in Other Branches of Trade (New York: Historical Publishing Co., 1885-6), 359; Wayne Bethard, Lotions, Potions, and Deadly Elixirs: Frontier Medicine in America (Lanham, MD: Taylor Trade Publishing, 2004), 117. Advertisement in Portland Daily Press, July 12, 1871, p. 4.  As a result of Hamlin’s salesmanship and showmanship, Wizard Oil was held in high regard into the 20th century.

[12] Proprietary medicines were often ridiculed as “snake oils” by a medical profession attempting to steer the public toward their services, but until the early 20th century they fought an uphill battle. Folk medicines held sway over a population inundated by hordes of foreign immigrants, especially when they cost about a third of a physician’s visit. Even some modern assessments have been less accusatory of patent medicines. One study by Meredith B. Linn has asserted that before the development of germ theory in the 1870’s, aseptic techniques in the 1890’s and effective antibiotics in the 1930’s, among other advances in medicine, “professional physicians’ therapies were far from miraculous and often produced more harm than healing.” Her study concluded that “for serious illnesses, the best physicians could offer was similar to what patients could access themselves from patent medicines: temporary relief from pain and anxiety.” Meredith B. Linn, “Neither Snake Oils nor Miracle Cures: Interpreting Nineteenth-Century Patent Medicines,” Historical Archaeology 56, No. 4 (December 2022): 686-689.

[13] One may be forgiven for seeing a parallel between John Hamlin and his earlier slight-of-hand career and John Hammond in Stephen Spielberg’s Jurassic Park who dabbled in “flea circus” trickery before going into DNA research.

[14] James Harvey Young, The Toadstool Millionaires: A Social History of Patent Medicines in America before Federal Regulation (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1961), Ch. 7 and 12

[15] Brooks McNamara, Step Right Up (garden City, NY: Doubleday & Company, Inc., 1976), 68-71.

[16] Recipes for Wizard Oil differ in minor elements. Compare Charles W. Oleson, comp., Secret Nostrums and Systems of Medicine: A Book of Formulas, (Chicago: Oleson & Co., 1890), 86, and Alvin W. Chase, Dr. Chase’s New Receipt Book, or Information for Everybody (Toronto: Rose Publishing Company, 1889), 27.

[17] Ann Anderson, Snake Oil, Hustlers and Hambones: The American Medicine Show (Jefferson, NC: McFarland & Company, Inc., 2000), 112.

[18] One searches in vain through the detailed accounts of their care of Civil War soldiers, for any mention of Wizard Oil in Louisa May Alcott’s Civil War Hospital Sketches (1863) or Sophronia E. Bucklin’s In Hospital and Camp: A Woman’s Record of Thrilling Incidents Among the Wounded in the Civil War (1869). No mention of Wizard Oil is found in Circular No. 6. War Department. Surgeon General’s Office, Washington, November 1, 1865. Reports on the Extent and Nature of the Materials Available for the Preparation of a Medical and Surgical History of the Rebellion (Philadelphia: J. B. Lippincott & Co., 1865). Likewise, Alfred Jay Bollet’s Civil War Medicine: Challenges and Triumphs (Tucson, AZ: Galen Press, Ltd., 2002) is a good example of silence on Wizard Oil. While listing and explaining the many drugs, useful and otherwise, used in Civil War hospitals, especially in Chapter 9, entitled “Treating Disease: Questionable Drugs and ‘Heroic’ Therapies,” there is no mention of Wizard Oil. Michael A. Flannery, Civil War Pharmacy: A History of Drugs, Drug Supply and Provision, and Therapeutics for the Union and Confederacy (New York: Pharmaceutical Products Press, 2004).