Tobacco Death Bulletin

Dayton, 1910. Broadside on newsprint measuring 19 x 7 ½ inches. Fine condition. Fine. An unrecorded broadside advertising two products - called Victory Bullets and Victory Powders - to help stop smoking. The company, a Victory Remedy Co., of which we find several records circa 1910, guarantees the products’ success. The broadside, printed in the style of a newspaper, shows a series of fictitious horrors committed by smokers, with macabre illustrations. Some of the episodes involve death from tobacco use directly, the others warm of boy murderers, shooters, insanity from smoking, and a farmer who is stricken with ‘tobacco heart.’ As the scientific research on smoking was clearly not very advanced at this point, the broadside is an uncommon example of anti-smoking advertising, which would of course become much more common later in the twentieth century.