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Medicine Bottles

Display of 18th and 19th century English medicine bottles. View the original source document: WHI 5490

John Till was not a typical doctor. He wore farmer's overalls instead of a white lab coat and he didn't have a college degree or even a medical license. But at the start of the last century, people came from far and wide to be healed by his miraculous treatment.

Till's Plaster

Till, an Austrian immigrant, arrived at a lumber camp at Turtle Lake in rural Barron County in 1898. He brought with him a unique paste. When applied to the back, Till's paste would cure any ailment from bunions to cancer. His theory was that illness is caused by poisons that seep into the body, and that the patient would be cured when the plaster drew those toxins out.

In the autumn of 1905, a farm wife named Meline Cloutier in the nearby town of Somerset was near death from an infection. Her husband took her to Till, whose treatment appeared to cure her. The news of her recovery spread like wildfire and before long the little town of Somerset was taken by storm. There were even reports in northwestern Wisconsin that the plaster had been used to reattach a dog's severed tail, and that in ten days the animal was healed and the tail once again happily wagging.

Moving in With the Cloutiers

John Till soon moved in with Octave and Melanie Cloutier, who built a new wing onto their farmhouse to accommodate the influx of patients. His fame  spread far and wide, and soon trains were letting off hundreds of sufferers in Somerset each day. From early morning to late at night, Till and Cloutier lined patients up on chairs in the makeshift clinic, treated them in groups of six and sent them on their way.

Till's plaster was a mixture of kerosene and croton oil, which the Encyclopedia Britannica defines as a "poisonous viscous liquid obtained from the seeds of a small Asiatic tree..." It is now considered too dangerous for medical use. The mixture was sponged on the back, which immediately began to boil and blister, supposedly lifting the toxins out of the patient's body.

Growing Business

A local clergyman recalled, "Till would feel the patient's jugular vein and tell them what their trouble was. The sufferer's back was laid bare. Till would take his sponge and smear his croton oil concoction from neck to base of spine. Cloutier in the meantime would sew in the person's garments some cotton batting. This would soak up the running matter from the skin inflamed by Till's powerful counter-irritant. In time the back would almost be like raw beef. The batting would remain two weeks and then a second treatment might be in store."

Till never charged for his services, but each patient left behind a gratuity. A reporter noted that "each contributed as much as he deemed fit, none less than a dollar, which sums were carelessly thrown into the treasury box to the rear of the thrifty and industrious operator who appeared not to give it a thought." The local bank reported that Till regularly deposited up to $3,000 per week.

Legal Troubles and Final Days

Till's growing popularity and reputation eventually caught the eye of the State Medical Board, who had him arrested and brought to trial several times for practicing without a license. But Till brought so much revenue into the small town of Somerset that no jury of his peers would convict him. After a trial in the county seat of Hudson, "Doctor" Till was greeted on his return to Somerset by a great throng of celebrants headed by a brass band that escorted him triumphantly to his office. That night there was a joyful demonstration with 1,300 new patients clamoring for consultation. "In the long run," the local press concluded, "Till is liable to have many more friends than the ... board which is frantically determined to ding away at the legislature until they have made it a felony to take a dose of catnip tea or onion syrup without their prescription."

In 1908, he had a falling out with the Cloutier family and eventually left Somerset for New Richmond. But Till proved too unsophisticated to manage such a popular business, and in subsequent years everyone from relatives and assistants to business partners and outright swindlers took advantage of his lax approach to money. As he moved around northern Wisconsin in search of greener pastures, lawsuits and damage claims followed him until the State Medical Board finally convicted him in 1920. In 1922 he was allowed to return to Austria on condition that he would not practice medicine again in Wisconsin. A quarter century later, after losing virtually all his property first to the Germans and then to the Communists, Till returned to Wisconsin, where he died while visiting friends in Kiel in 1947.

[Till's story is told in the "Wisconsin Magazine of History" vol. 39 no. 4 (1956): 245-250. Other details given here are taken from the Chippewa Valley Museum]

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John Till

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