A window display for 'Dr Morse's Indian Root Pills'

For centuries, one of the favourite techniques for marketing medicines has been to emphasise the rarity of their ingredients, the exotic places from which they, with difficulty, had been acquired, and the esoteric skills used to turn them into medicines. In the 16th and 17th centuries, vendors claimed to have gathered their raw materials from Araby or Turkey. In the 19th century they often claimed that their medicines drew on secret traditional folklore of the Native Americans, as shown in this set of colour lithographs.
The prints from a pharmacist's window display advertising the medicine supposed to be made by Dr Morse using native American roots vegetables. In fact the medicines were made in a factory in Morristown in the Adirondacks by the Comstock company established in about 1867 by William Henry Comstock. It flourished up to the time of World War I, but declined thereafter. The Morristown factory was closed in 1959 and the firm was dissolved in 1960.