The Humour of America: Selected, with an Introduction and Index of American Humorists
General
The Humour of America: Selected, with an Introduction and Index of American Humorists
American wit and humor
I heard with singular promptness from other medical men. Fillemup &
Killem forwarded some of their Hair Tonic, with a request for me to try
it on any bald heads I happened to encounter, and report. Doser & Co.
sent on two packages of their Capillary Pills, with a suggestion to the
effect that if Pitman lost his hair again he would get it back finally
by following the enclosed directions. I also heard from Brown & Bromley,
the agents for Johnson’s Scalp Awakener. They sent me twelve bottles for
distribution among my bald friends. Then Smith & Smithson wrote to say
that a cask of their Vesuvian Wash for the hair would be delivered in my
cellar by the Express Company; and a man called on me from Jones,
Butler, & Co., with a proposition to pump out my vinegar barrel, and
fill it with Balm of Peru for the gratuitous use of the afflicted in the
vicinity.
But this persecution was simply unalloyed felicity when compared with
the suffering that came in other forms. I will not attempt to give the
number of the letters I received. I cherish a conviction that the mail
received at our post-office doubled the first week after Judge Pitman’s
cure was announced to a hairless world. I think every bald-headed man in
the Tropic of Cancer must have written to me at least twice upon the
subject of Pulsifer’s Renovator and Pitman’s hair. Persons dropped me a
line to inquire if Pitman’s baldness was hereditary; and if so, if it
came from his father’s or his mother’s side. One man, a phrenologist,
sent on a plaster head mapped out into town-lots, with a suggestion that
I should ink over the bumps that had been barest and most fertile in the
case of Pitman. He said he had a little theory which he wanted to
demonstrate. A man in San Francisco wrote to inquire if my Pitman was
the same Pitman who came out to California in 1849 with a bald head; and
if he was, would I try to collect two dollars Pitman had borrowed from
him in that year? The superintendent of a Sunday-school in Vermont
forwarded eight pages of foolscap covered with an argument supporting
the theory that it was impious to attempt to force hair to grow upon a
head which had been made bald, because, although Elisha was bald, we
find no record in the Bible that he used renovator of any kind. He
warned Pitman to beware of Absalom’s fate, and to avoid riding mules out
in the woods. A woman in Snyder County, Pennsylvania, sent me a poem
inspired by the incident, and entitled “Lines on the Return of Pitman’s
Hair.” A party in Kansas desired to know whether I thought Pulsifer’s
Renovator could be used beneficially by a man who had been scalped. Two
men in New Jersey wrote, in a manner totally irrelevant to the subject,
to inquire if I could get each of them a good hired girl.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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