“The Forest Is Their Laboratory”: Representations of Medicine and American Indians in Kickapoo Indian Medicine Company Advertisements

Abstract

This paper examines the printed promotional materials of the Kickapoo Indian Medicine Company (KIMC), a popular patent medicine company in the late-nineteenth century United States. KIMC exploited stereotypical images of “uncivilized” American Indians living in the past to market its nostrums as the “antidote” to social and bodily weaknesses that had resulted from a new urbanized, industrial society. Most scholarship on KIMC’s marketing does not question representations of American Indians. However, this ignores a central paradox in KIMC’s advertisements. To sell their products, KIMC borrowed not only American Indian imagery, but also scientific language to cultivate a reliable perspective on the body. Moreover, KIMC wanted to appropriate Indian tropes and science while remaining a gatekeeper between the Indians of the past and the science of the present. But the barrier between the two was more porous than scholars have observed and by making claims such as “the forest is their laboratory,” KIMC inadvertently associated American Indians with the modern, “civilized,” industrial present in the process of selling their drugs.