Daniels House

Hamilton Daniels grew up in Naper’s Settlement and built his white-pillared house across the river on Washington Street in 1852, a few years before he attended Rush Medical College in Chicago. For 40 years, Dr. Daniels worked as a family practitioner, bringing babies into the world and treating their ailments, along with those of their elders, with his special line of patent medicines. At the time Dr. Daniels practiced, the approach thought to be most scientific promoted bloodletting, purging, vomiting, and blistering. For obvious reasons, this approach was not popular with patients. Another option was surgery, but prior to the Civil War, whiskey was the leading anesthetic, and infection seemed inevitable; this method was also unpopular. After his death, Dr. Daniels' sons published a catalogue of his medicines, legitimizing the scientific basis of the prescriptions, at a time when medical practitioners were scrutinizing patent medicines in favor of regulated treatments. In the catalog preface, they wrote, “It is a recognized fact that in well-defined ailments, the remedies prescribed by practitioners of the same school of medicine are practically alike, repeated tests having proven their potency, making them specific remedies and the healing art a positive science.” In 1974, Dr. Daniels’ House arrived here at Naper Settlement.

In the late 1800s, many doctors and patients turned to patent medicines cure illnesses. The latter half of the nineteenth century is often termed the “Golden Age of Patent Medicines.” Patent medicines were often mass-produced and did not require a prescription to purchase. In the absence of pharmaceutical regulations, these patent medicines were primarily compound made of plant extract mixed with as alcohol, opium, or cocaine and promised to cure everything from tuberculosis to stomach and liver ailments. In addition to treating patients in his home, Dr. Daniels also developed his own medicines, including remedies for fever, asthma, and skin concerns. After his death, Dr. Daniels’s sons published fifty of his medical recipes. The catalog preface reassures patients of the scientific validity of Dr. Daniels’s recipes, explaining, “It is a recognized fact that in well-defined ailments, the remedies prescribed by practitioners of the same school of medicine are practically alike, repeated tests having proven their potency, making them specific remedies and the healing art a positive science.”