old gentleman was also said to be enormously wealthy, "with an income of
about five hundred thousand dollars annually, and the owner of a number
of fine, elegant ships, which sailed in different directions to every
part of the world." Dr. Morse, who was the first man to establish that
all diseases arise from the impurity of the blood, subsequently
discarded his regular practice of medicine and, as a boon to mankind,
devoted his entire energy to the manufacture of Dr. Morse's Indian Root
Pills.

[Illustration: FIGURE 6.-"A Short History of Dr. Morse's Father." A copy
was inserted in every box of the pills.]

This story, which was first disseminated as early as the late 1850s, was
an entire fabrication. Throughout the patent-medicine era it was the
common practice to ascribe an Indian, or at least some geographically
remote, origin to all of these nostrums and panaceas. In the words of
James Harvey Young, in his book on the Social History of Patent
Medicines:[4]

From the 1820's onward the Indian strode nobly through the American
patent-medicine wilderness. Hiawatha helped a hair restorative and
Pocahontas blessed a bitters. Dr. Fall spent twelve years with the
Creeks to discover why no Indian had ever perished of consumption.
Edwin Eastman found a blood syrup among the Comanches. Texas
Charlie discovered a Kickapoo cure-all, and Frank Cushing pried the
secret of a stomach renovator from the Zuni. (Frank, a famous
ethnologist, had gone West on a Smithsonian expedition.) Besides
these notable accretions to pharmacy, there were Modoc Oil,
Seminole Cough Balsam, Nez Perce Catarrh Snuff, and scores more,
all doubtless won for the use of white men by dint of great cunning