More (too much?) about Henry R. Gering

Source: 1910 promotional booklet
published by the Omaha Commercial
Club

I know that a second post here in one week may be a little shocking to anyone who has gotten used to my posting schedule so far, but I have been inspired by a great presentation I saw yesterday about blogging family history, given by the talented Susan Petersen. And I dug up some more interesting information about good old Henry that I wanted to share.

As I mentioned, he was the managing trustee of the Western Medical Review, which was the official publication of the Nebraska State Medical Association, and in the very same volume containing the ads I discussed in my previous post, a report on the proceedings of the House of Delegates at the 46th Annual Meeting of said Medical Association revealed some friction on the subject of advertising in the Review. A complaint had been made by members of the Medical Association at the previous annual meeting that the Review, "in spite of the protests of the [Censoring Committee of the Association], continued to carry objectionable advertising," and a special committee (don't you love organizational life!) had been appointed to investigate.

Harsh words were said (actually, in today's political arena this would be considered pretty bland):  

Western Medical Review, Vol. XIX, #7 (July 1914), p. 351; accessed at Google Books

  I was naturally avidly curious to find out what they considered "objectionable" to the point of disgust, but even after wading through the dense prose of the report I am not really much wiser. It seems they objected principally to 19 "proprietaries" advertised in the January and February 1914 issues of the Review, which were apparently frowned upon by the American Medical Association. (One of them was Glyco-Heroin, but presumably cannabis-containing products were fine.) They included such popular remedies as Sal Hepatica, Iodum-Miller, Fagisota (isn't that a great name?), and Sabalol Spray, but it's not clear what exactly the objections were. Henry Gering spoke on behalf of the Western Medical Review Company (incidentally, I believe his company had in the past advertised some of these shady products, but no one mentioned that), and he and the board of the Review responded to the objections in a letter. The Coca Cola ad was to be discontinued, as were a number of other censored ads. The Henry R. Gering Co. would no longer list dosages in its ads (maybe that was it? Information that would allow the public to bypass doctors? Except that these ads were directed at doctors).  Mention was made of ads comparable to the disparaged ones that were still running in the august Journal of the A.M.A.  Those included the White Cross Electric Vibrator, as well as Rat and Roach Paste...just thought I'd mention these intriguing products. Anyway, tempers were calmed, the militants subsided, and harmony and dignity reigned. I think medical advertising might be a great topic for someone's doctoral dissertation--maybe it already has been.

Well, I've already spent WAY too much time on the Western Medical Review. Otherwise I would go ahead and post its column of medical jokes (Vol. 16, No. 7, July 1911, p. 392), "Some German Medical Jokes." Anyone who thinks doctors have no sense of humor...must have read this column.

Tempted? Go check this out on Google Books!

By the way, anyone with a Nebraska doctor in his or her ancestry would do well to have a look at these early issues of the Western Medical Review--they had a nice little gossip column about the doings of doctors around the state.

I've sort of gotten off the topic of Henry. Besides his activities in the various state medical and pharmaceutical operations, he liked cars; he was part-owner of the Des Moines Speedway until he sold his interest in 1916 (probably just in time, going by the history at the Des Moines Speedway Page), as I learned from The Automobile (Vol. 34, #19, May 11, 1916, p. 875)--another fascinating periodical digitized at Google Books, but I will NOT let myself be seduced.

Obviously he was doing pretty well financially. The July 11, 1918, issue of the same journal reported that ground had been broken in Omaha on Florence Blvd. for the first factory building of the United States Carburetor Company, the president of which was--Henry R. Gering!  The Atlantic News Telegraph of Aug. 28, 1913, reports that he was treasurer of the Rainey Mail Exchange Co. And on and on. The thought of all the committee meetings he must have attended gives me the horrors. Did the man ever stop to rest? I don't know how he had the time for any dalliance whatsoever with Mrs. Benjamin Redman--even just penning love notes. I guess he could have had his secretary do it....

And yet, amid all the wheelings and dealings, Henry still took the time to go home and carry out the somewhat unusual terms of his mother's will in 1920. I think this little article reflects so nicely on both Henry and his mother, I will close this rambling dissertation with it:

The Evening State Journal and Lincoln Daily News (Lincoln, NE), March 23, 1920, p. 1.

In case you think $5 is chintzy, it was the equivalent of roughly $54.40 in 2010. (I got that amazing information at Measuring Worth). Wasn't that a nice thing to do? Though I wonder if her children and heirs might have been just a tiny bit annoyed.

No more hysterics

As so often happens, while researching my last post, I came upon something that distracted me from what I had originally planned to write about next. In fact, several somethings, but I'll start with one, the Henry R. Gering Company and the way drugs go in and out of fashion. 

I was perusing a 1914 (Vol. 19, #1) issue of the Western Medical Review on Google Books, which contained quite a few fascinating ads for companies or institutions operating or based in Omaha or other Nebraska cities (probably because the Review's founder was a Nebraska-based surgeon, George H. Simmons), most of them more or less medical-related. The Henry R. Gering Company in particular had numerous ads for different products (probably because Henry was a managing trustee for the Review). The one that first caught my eye was eye-catching indeed:

Get your deformities fixed! Actually, this outfit is quite appealing in a Goth kind of way...Although presumably in 1914 the wearer would have put a dress on over it. I'd like to see their other "deformity appliances." 

This ad had the best art (although the illustrations for some of the ads for abdominal supporters do inspire awe), but some of Henry Gering's other products were even more interesting, and recall a time when people would dose themselves with almost anything. (Actually, has anything changed?)

There was this mixture, for example, which looks interesting to begin with, and is probably even more interesting when you add heroin to it, as the advertisement suggests (with the sanction of the Pure Food and Drugs Act of 1906):

Another popular remedy was cannabis. Yes, marijuana, pot, weed. Henry R. Gering was still advertising a cannabis concoction in 1921 (again in the Western Medical Review), although John Geluardi, in Cannabiz: The Explosive Rise of the Medical Marijuana Industry (available for check-out at Omaha Public Library), mentions that by the 1920s the use of marijuana, medical or otherwise, was beginning to worry a few people, and it was actually banned in California (of all places). Before that, however, cannabis extracts were widely available as over-the-counter remedies for everything from asthma (yep!) to "hysteria"; Queen Victoria used it for menstrual cramps. Ah, those were the days.....

J.P. Cooke building, address of Henry R. Gering & Co.

I was somewhat shocked to discover we had no biographical file in our Nebraska Reference department on Henry R. Gering, so I had to start from scratch. Henry was the son of German immigrants, Paul and Amelia Gering, and was born in 1868 in Cedar Rapids, Iowa, although the family later moved to Plattsmouth, Nebraska, and seem to have done very well there. (Their house is on the National Register of Historic Places). Henry became a pharmacist and his brother Matthew a lawyer. The two girls, Mia and Barbara, never married (going by the census). Henry was a busy fellow--ran a pharmacy in Plattsmouth, was elected mayor there in 1904 after serving as city treasurer, was a member of the State Pharmacy Board, Chairman of the Democratic Central Committee, and Secretary of the Board of Trade (all this from the Semi-Centennial History of Nebraska [1904]); newspapers of the early 1900s indicate he was active in the Democratic Party. He was also quite busy in the Nebraska State Medical Association. In 1909, Henry is in the Omaha city directory as president of the Porter-Ryerson-Hoobler Co. (a drug company that replaced the Mercer Chemical Company of Omaha in 1902). By 1910, the company had become The Henry R. Gering Company, at 1315 Howard Street (which local readers may recognize as the J.P. Cooke Building).

In both 1909 and 1910, Mila U. Gering was listed as the company's secretary-treasurer. Both Henry and Mila boarded at the Rome Hotel (Henry was still there in the 1920 and 1930 censuses). I'm pretty sure that "Mila" was Henry's older sister, Mia U. Gering--although the 1910 census listed her at home with her mother, brother Matthew, and sister Barbara in Plattsmouth, where she worked as clerk in the county treasurer's office--an office where she may have started out working under brother Henry. Did big sister ever get annoyed at always playing second fiddle--I mean secretary--to her little brother?

It doesn't look as though Henry married, though I'm coming up short on his later life. That's not to say he didn't like women--he was involved in a court case that arose as a result of his romantic indiscretion, and was defended by his brother, the lawyer.

From Lincoln Daily News, 21 May 1912.

There is much more we could say about Henry and his family, but I've strayed pretty far from the weird ads in the Western Medical Review. I'll save the genealogy for another day.