User:Greta Nettleton/Mrs. Dr. Rebecca J. Keck

Mrs. Dr. Rebecca J. Keck Mrs. Dr. Rebecca J. Keck (1838-1904) Eclectic physician, patent medicine entrepreneur and one of the wealthiest self-made business women in 19th century America.

LIFE

The oldest daughter in a large family of pioneer farmers who emigrated west from Pennsylvania Dutch country through Wayne County Ohio, Rebecca Ilgenfritz grew up in Fairfield, Iowa. As a young woman, she already demonstrated a spirit of tough-minded independence when she shocked the locals by wearing bloomers in public in the center of town. At nineteen, she married John C. Keck, a mechanic and inventor of agricultural machinery.

MEDICAL CAREER

As was typical for frontier women in that era, Rebecca nursed her younger siblings and her children through a series of serious illnesses. She developed her own herbal remedies to try to help them; in some cases she was successful (all six of her children lived to adulthood) and in others, she failed (three of her brothers died of tuberculosis before the age of thirty). She began to be known around town as a physician.

Mr. Keck's small machine shop and foundry collapsed during the Banking Panic of 1873. Facing bankruptcy, Mrs. Keck began to sell her home remedies door to door. In November of 1873, she ran the first advertisements for her "Catarrh Cure" in the newspapers in Dubuque and Davenport Iowa and began to call herself a doctor in print. The only other American woman to make a successful career in the patent medicine business, Lydia Pinkham, started to manufacture and market her famous "Vegetable Compound" at the same time and for many of the same reasons, although Lydia Pinkham never pretended that she was a physician. By 1874, Mrs. Dr. Keck was selling her products in Chicago.

Sensing wider possibilities for her business, Mrs. Keck moved her family to Davenport in 1876. She expanded her marketing into Wisconsin, Nebraska, Minnesota and Illinois. She was assisted in running her business by her husband, who formulated remedies in a home laboratory and by her two oldest daughters, Belle and Charlotte, who were her business managers. The nationally known patent medicine producer Dr. Cyrenius Wakefield was a close family friend and probably a business mentor. His products were based on herbal formulas from the Eclectic School of Medicine, and Mrs. Dr. Keck began to describe herself as an Eclectic Physician starting in the late 1870s.

Described in an editorial endorsement as "a household name" by the Evening Peorian, Mrs. Dr. Keck was popular with less affluent, working class people in towns, and in rural areas where farmers could not afford to pay the high cost of having a regular physician travel for miles to make a house call. At its height in the mid-1880s, her business served between 12,000 and 15,000 customers. An imitator even used her name to sell a different product in Oregon. In the many testimonial letters she published in her advertisements, she claimed to be able to cure not only catarrh (a catch-all term for lung and mucus problems) but also heart disease, insanity, liver and kidney problems and many other ills. Her bold advertising style, her great wealth and her claims of unbelievable cures led the regular medical doctors in Davenport and elsewhere to attack her vigorously as a quack.

LEGAL PROBLEMS

In the 1870s in Iowa and Illinois, no laws existed regarding medical credentials, and anyone who wished was permitted to advertise their services as a physician. Illinois was one of the first states in the nation to pass a Medical Practices Act in 1877, which sought to regulate the medical profession by requiring all doctors in the state to certify that they had actually graduated from a recognized medical school, or to prove that they had been in established local practice for at least ten years.

Mrs. Dr. Keck continued to advertise heavily in Illinois and travel her circuit of "branch offices" (usually rented rooms in good hotels). In February, 1878, a "regular" M.D. doctor from the county medical society in Bloomington, IL demanded to see her nonexistent credentials to practice medicine and she became one of the first test cases of the new law. According to the Chicago Tribune, Dr. John H. Rauch, the secretary of the State Board of Health declared that he was going to "let loose the dogs of war" against Mrs. Dr. Keck. Over the next decade, she was arrested and taken to court for practicing medicine without a license in Illinois at least five times. Because of her substantial financial resources, strong endorsements from newspaper editors and effective legal representation, she continued to operate in Illinois in towns including Peoria, Quincy and Rockford in spite of the constant efforts of the Illinois State Board of Health to put her out of business and she never spent more than a few hours in jail because she always posted bail promptly.

MRS. DR. KECK'S INFIRMARY

Iowa had not yet passed any laws to require medical credentials for physicians, and in June of 1879, Mrs. Dr. Keck purchased a large mansion at 611 Brady St. for $12,000 in cash (at that time, this was enough capital to start a state bank), refurbished it and shortly afterwards opened Mrs. Dr. Keck's Infirmary for All Chronic Diseases. From that point onwards, her ads, which ran on the front page of newspapers such as the Chicago Tribune, the Davenport Gazette, the Bloomington Leader, the Quincy Daily Herald, the Dubuque Herald, and business directories for the state of Iowa and the city of Davenport featured an exaggerated engraved image of the building. Some of her patients testified to the healthful and lifesaving nature of the treatments they received there although the vast majority of her patients received treatment by mail or after brief visits with Mrs. Dr. Keck at her itinerant offices. She continued to operate the infirmary, which was also the family home, until her retirement in 1900, when the building was sold to W.C. Putnam for $12,800, and the Kecks moved to Chicago. The family business ended at that juncture because none of the six Keck children were interested in or able to continue selling the remedies as a stand-alone patent medicine brand. The success of the venture depended entirely on the energetic effort, personal charisma and medical expertise of Mrs. Dr. Keck herself, rather than on her products.

FINAL YEARS

Rebecca Keck and her husband lived in Chicago until their deaths, the wife dying seven years before her husband. Her life insurance payout of $15,000 was the largest one in the nation at the time of her death.

External links

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