Was ketchup sold as medicine? The true story is even stranger

It is one of those facts that circulates on the internet every few months: “In the 1830s, ketchup was sold as medicine.” Like many viral facts, it is half right. The real story involves a doctor with a dubious reputation, a craze for tomato pills and a pharmaceutical war in which the main product barely had any tomato in it.

First, some context. Until the early 19th century, many Americans looked at tomatoes with suspicion. The plant belongs to the nightshade family, the same as some poisonous species, and it was often grown more as an ornament than as food. That began to change in the 1820s and 1830s, as more cookbooks included tomato recipes. And it was exactly then that a doctor decided to turn the tomato into a miracle.

In 1834, Dr. John Cook Bennett, a physician and professor in Ohio, began claiming in lectures and newspapers that tomatoes could treat diarrhea, indigestion, liver problems and even help with cholera, a terrifying disease at the time. Bennett also published recipes, including one for tomato catsup. That was a novelty: until then, the word “ketchup” usually meant a salty sauce made from fish, mushrooms or walnuts, not tomatoes.

Newspapers across the country reprinted his claims, and the tomato quickly gained a reputation as a health food. That is where the “ketchup as medicine” myth comes from. Bennett did recommend tomato-based products as good for your health, but the real medicine business came next, in the form of pills.

In 1837, an Ohio merchant named Archibald Miles was selling a product called “American Hygiene Pills”. Following Bennett’s advice, he simply renamed it “Dr. Miles’ Compound Extract of Tomato” and advertised it as a cure for almost everything. It worked: sales took off. Soon competitors appeared, the most famous being Dr. Guy R. Phelps and his “Compound Tomato Pills”. The rivals attacked each other in newspaper ads in what historians now call the “tomato pill war”. The advertising slogans promised that tomato pills would cure all your ills.

There was a small problem. When people analyzed the pills, they found little or no tomato. Many were laxatives with another name, which explains why customers felt that “something was happening” after taking them. Doctors and journalists began to denounce the fraud, and the newspapers that had made the pills famous turned against them. It was not the first time medicine had prescribed something strange: in 1518, the doctors of Strasbourg treated a dancing epidemic with more dancing.

By around 1850, the tomato pill craze was over. But something unexpected had happened along the way: all that publicity had convinced Americans that tomatoes were not poisonous but healthy. The fruit went from the garden to the kitchen for good. Decades later, in 1876, the Heinz company launched its tomato ketchup, and the rest is history. Today the tomato covers pizzas all over the world, including the most divisive of them, the Hawaiian pizza, which was invented in Canada.

Most of what we know about this episode comes from food historian Andrew F. Smith, who wrote books such as The Tomato in America and Pure Ketchup. His conclusion is a lesson that still applies to the internet age: the story that ketchup was a medicine is too simple. The truth, with a dubious doctor, fake pills and a marketing war, is much more interesting.

Sources: Andrew F. Smith, The Tomato in America (1994) and Pure Ketchup (1996), JSTOR Daily, Atlas Obscura, Mental Floss. Cover.jpg): tomatoes on the vine, Unsplash via Wikimedia Commons, CC0.