rtise them than there was to advertise laudanum or
leeches or castor oil. Even the Supreme Court of Massachusetts in 1837
took judicial cognizance of the fact that the old English patent
medicine names had acquired a generic meaning descriptive of a general
class of medicines, names which everyone was free to use and no one
could monopolize.[108]

[106] _Political Examiner_, Frederick, Maryland, April 19, 1837.

[107] _Frederick Examiner_, Frederick, Maryland, January 31,
1844.

[108] _Massachusetts Supreme Court_, Thomson vs. Winchester, 19
Pick (Mass.), p. 214, March 1837.

As the years went by, and as advertising did not keep the names of the
old English medicines before the eyes of customers, it is a safe
assumption that their use declined. Losing their original proprietary
status, they were playing a different role. New American proprietaries
had stolen the appeal and usurped the function which Bateman's Drops
and Turlington's Balsam had possessed in 18th-century London and Boston
and Williamsburg. As part of the cultural nationalism that had
accompanied the Revolution, American brands of nostrums had come upon
the scene, promoted with all the vigor and cleverness once bestowed in
English but not in colonial American advertising upon Dalby's
Carminative and others of its kind. While these English names retreated
from American advertising during the 19th century, vast blocks of space
in the ever-larger newspapers were devoted to extolling the merits of
Dyott's Patent Itch Ointment, Swaim's Panacea, and Brandreth's Pills.
More and more Americans were learning how to read, as free public
education spread. Persuaded by the frightening symptoms and the
glorious promises, citizens with a bent toward self-dosage flocked to
buy the American brands. Druggists and general stores stocked them and
made fine profits.[109] While bottles of British Oil sold two for a
quarter in 1885 Wisconsin, one bottle of Jayne's Expectorant retailed
for a dollar.[110] It is no wonder that, although the old English names
continue to appear in the mid-19th-century and later druggists'
catalogs and price currents,[111] they are muscled aside by the
multitude of brash American nostrums. Many of the late 19th century
listings continued to follow the procedure set early in the century of
specifying two grades of the various patent medicines, _i.e._,
"English" and "American," "genuine" and "imitation," "U.S." and
"s