Dr. Mrs. Keck - Healer or Quack

"Dr. Mrs. Keck - Healer or Quack" is an excerpt from the film "Ahead of Their Time". ©2022 Fair Field Productions
To watch the trailer or stream the entire film, visit www.vimeo.com/ondemand/aheadoftheirtime

Rebecca Keck
At 16 years old, Rebekka Ilginfritz and her Pennsylvanian Dutch parents traveled from Ohio to Fairfield. During those days, women were in charge of maintaining the health of a family. Their mothers and grandmothers had passed down family recipes to make their own medicinal preparations and tonics so they could treat whatever illness came their way. In 1857, Rebecca met and married a 29-year-old mechanic merchant John Keck of Fairfield
For the first 13 years of their marriage, the couple did not stand out from the crowd of young families in Fairfield. According to her own promotional materials, Rebecca and several of her six children (five daughters and one son) suffered from severe lung disease during these years, and she collected herbs and brewed up medications to cure their “catarrh,” a 19th-century catchall term for everything from asthma to consumption.
Meanwhile, Rebecca’s husband, who aspired to invent farm machinery, opened a small foundry in 1866. The business took off quickly. By 1871, the Kecks owned four plots of land and a burgeoning machine shop that employed 15 men. They were riding high until the national banking Panic of 1873 choked off the money supply in September, and people could not afford expensive farm machinery. Rebecca immediately stepped in to help support the family. Not for nothing had John married a girl willing to wear bloomers in the town square. As his foundry business fell apart, John joined Rebecca along the roadside to harvest the herbs needed for her catarrh tonic.
In November 1873, with John’s full support, Rebecca took the train to Dubuque, Iowa. She ran a small ad in The Dubuque Herald for Keck’s Catarrhochesis and rented a room from a Miss Eggleston on Clay Street for a week to see new patients. From this modest start, she began selling her alcohol-based kidney tonics and bitters to the wider public.
Within six months she was running her newspaper ads in other Iowa cities, including Fairfield and Davenport, and printing testimonial letters from satisfied patients as references. One of her early ads compared her miraculous treatments to the equally miraculous “water-fueled” Keely Motor, which was a sensation at Philadelphia’s Centennial International Exposition of 1876 but later proved an ingenious fraud. In an era before medical associations had established any professional credentials or educational standards, Keck was legally allowed to declare herself a physician in her advertising. As business boomed, she adopted the public persona “Mrs. Dr. Keck, the Celebrated Catarrh and Consumption Specialist.”
As praise, recognition, and substantial income came to Rebecca Keck, back in Fairfield, local doctors became bitterly opposed to her success, not to mention that she was a woman succeeding in what was thought then to be a man’s profession.