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Title
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Woman Cries Aloud with Joy When Rheumatic Pain Goes (1929)
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Description
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Emma Jarvis, a boarding house operator at 417 Cooper Street, lent her name to a product endorsement.
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Emma Jarvis was recently widowed when she appeared in this testimonial advertisement for Nurito, a powder that claimed to provide relief for rheumatism and other ailments. The Chicago-based Nurito Company placed similar advertisements in newspapers across the company; the product could be purchased in Camden at Weiser's Pharmacy at Fifth and Market Streets.
During the late 1920s and early 1930s, Jarvis rented 417 Cooper Street for $60 a month and operated it as a boarding house. The 1930 U.S. Census found her at this address at age 59 with two of her adult children (David, 35, an auto repairman, and Marion, 26, a bookkeeper) and six boarders. The boarders included a cook, a laundry manager, a saleswoman and a salesman, and a newspaper reporter.
The subheading of the advertisement claims that Jarvis "tried everything without results until she heard of Nurito, amazing remedy for neuritis, sciatica, lumbago, rheumatism, and neuralgia." Below the photograph of Jarvis, the text purports to be a direct quotation:
"Happy? I can't be anything else. For three years I have suffered with rheumatism and tried everything I heard of and yet each time no good came from anything I tried. I was just like a hcild. So helpless the children had to help me from chair to chair. At night I was so full of pain I could not lie in bed, I never could sleep. People would tell my children they could hear me scream and they would wonder what the matter was. This was caused by me turning in bed, for every joint in my body was stiff. And how I prayed for God to take me for I would rather die than to suffer day after day. My friends came to me and said they heard Nurito would help me, or my money would be returned. So I sent for a box, and how happy I am to say today--the first three powders proved it would help me. Now I have taken 2 boxes and I am as well as I was when I was a young girl. So I say to those who are not as bad as me--do try Nurito. It will do you more good than anything you have tried, for I sleep, eat, and do all my housework, and people who see me don't believe it is me. So I say, let Nurito help you as it did me."
There is no public record of whether Emma Jarvis indeed suffered the condition described in the testimonial, although the youngest of her "children" at the time of the ad was 25 years old, and Emma lived to the advanced age of 71. The advertisements of the Nurito Company attracted the attention of the Federal Trade Commission, which investigated in 1933-34 and found that the miracle drug was largely aspirin and not effective for curing the diseases listed in its advertising. The FTC ordered the Nutrino Company to cease and desist such far-reaching claims.
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Date
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January 26, 1929
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Associated Individuals
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Emma Jarvis
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Location(s) - Cooper Street
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417 Cooper Street
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Posted by
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Charlene Mires
Send corrections to cmires@camden.rutgers.edu
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Research by
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Charlene Mires
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Sources
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Advertisement in <em>Camden Courier-Post</em>, January 18, 1929.<br />Federal Trade Commission Decisions (Washington: U.S. Government Printing Office, 1936), 24-30.<br />U.S. Census, 1930, and Camden City Directories, 1927-31 (Ancestry.com).
417 Cooper StreetSee all items with this value