The Tomato Pills That Cured Everything — and Contained No Tomato

What happened?

In the early 1830s, most Americans in the North didn’t eat tomatoes. People in some Southern states cooked with them, but many New Englanders grew them as curiosities, and plenty of people distrusted the red fruit because it belongs to the nightshade family, which includes some poisonous plants.

That began to change in 1834, when an Ohio physician and amateur botanist named John Cook Bennett announced in the press that tomatoes were medicine. According to food historian Andrew F. Smith, who wrote the main scholarly history of the episode, Bennett claimed the tomato could treat diarrhea, indigestion (then called “dyspepsia”), and “bilious attacks,” and could even help prevent cholera. He gave a lecture on the subject in 1835 at Willoughby University in Ohio, passed transcripts to newspapers, and urged people to eat tomatoes raw, cooked, or “in catsup.”

Bennett didn’t do experiments himself. He collected claims made by other doctors, mostly European, and repeated them with great enthusiasm. He also predicted that someone would find a way to extract the tomato’s healing power into medicine. Two men soon said they had done exactly that.

The first was Archibald Miles, a merchant from Cleveland. Miles had been selling an all-purpose “American Hygiene” pill. Bennett apparently suggested that he play up a tomato connection, and by 1837 newspapers across the country were running ads for “Dr. Miles’ Compound Extract of Tomato.” Miles said his pills had been carefully tested and developed over years, and his ads promised relief from complaints ranging from indigestion to syphilis. He built a network of agents and shops stretching from the Gulf Coast to the Canadian border.

The second was Guy R. Phelps, a Yale-trained physician from Connecticut, who began selling his own “Compound Tomato Pills” around 1838. Phelps’s pills were cheaper, and they sold well.

Miles did not take the competition quietly. That year an editorial in the New York Journal of Commerce, written by or on behalf of Miles, called Phelps a quack and his pills a “baseless imitation.” Phelps answered with the line about his horse, and added that Miles had stolen the formula from him. Miles argued that Phelps’s low price proved there could be no tomato in his pills. Phelps called that “unjust and unmanly.” Newspapers printed the back-and-forth, along with glowing testimonials, and collected advertising money from both sides.

Meanwhile, other tomato pills, syrups, and extracts appeared on the market. Pharmacies advertised that they stocked tomato products.

Around 1840, physicians who were tired of the hype started testing the pills. They found no tomato in the ones they examined. By most accounts, they were mainly laxatives. Some editors began running mocking headlines along the lines of “Tomato Pills Will Cure All Your Ills.” Phelps and Miles quietly ended their national ad campaigns in 1839, perhaps after reaching a deal; historians aren’t sure what happened. Tomato pills stayed on sale into the early 1850s, but the frenzy was over.

Why was it strange?

The odd thing isn’t that people bought patent medicines. Americans in the 1830s bought pills made from sarsaparilla, rhubarb, mustard, and dandelion, all promoted as cures. The odd thing is the direction the story went.

Usually a fake cure gets debunked and disappears. In this case, the cure was fake but the advertising worked anyway: on the tomato. Years of newspaper articles telling people that tomatoes were healthy, safe, and even miraculous changed how Americans saw the fruit. Readers who never took a single pill started planting tomatoes and cooking them. A British visitor to a Wisconsin hotel in 1841 complained that he was served tomatoes at breakfast, dinner, and tea, including tomatoes “dried in the sun like figs.”

So the pill was a sham, while the food that was its excuse became a staple of American cooking.

The same thread — Patent Medicine — continues in The Radioactive Tonic That Dissolved a Millionaire’s Jaw.

What did scientists learn?

The episode is an early lesson in two ideas that medicine still takes seriously.

The first is the placebo effect: the real improvement people sometimes feel after a treatment simply because they expect it to work. Smith has pointed out that tomato-pill buyers likely felt better partly because they believed they would. Many complaints of the time, like indigestion, come and go on their own, which made any pill look effective.

The second is the need to check what’s actually inside a medicine. The tomato pills were only exposed when someone analyzed them. In the 1830s, no law required a seller to list ingredients or prove a pill did anything. That gap allowed “tomato pills” with no tomato to be sold in the first place.

There’s a twist in the science, too. Tomatoes are nutritious. They contain vitamin C and lycopene, the red pigment researchers have studied for possible links to heart health. But no one has shown that tomatoes cure cholera, diarrhea, or syphilis, and Bennett’s claims went far beyond any evidence.

Another odd chapter in medicine: The Rooster Diagnosed by Mail With Malaria, Diabetes, Cancer, and Syphilis.

How does it affect us today?

The tomato pill war was one small chapter in a long era of unregulated patent medicines, an era that eventually pushed the United States to pass the Pure Food and Drug Act of 1906, which required accurate labels on food and medicine and paved the way for today’s Food and Drug Administration.

It also helped put tomatoes on American plates. By the early 1850s, according to Smith, millions of bushels were grown in New England alone. Tomato soup, tomato sauce, and tomato ketchup (which had more often been made from mushrooms, walnuts, or fish) all grew more popular in the decades that followed.

And the pattern still shows up. “Superfood” supplements promising to put the benefits of a fruit or vegetable into a capsule are a modern version of the same pitch. It’s worth asking the question 1840s doctors finally asked: what’s actually in it?

Another treatment that history kept the receipt for: The Fake Metal Rods That Accidentally Invented the Placebo-Controlled Trial.

Fun fact

Bennett himself was skeptical of the pills his own publicity helped launch. “If the virtue is in the tomato,” he wrote, “why not give it in its simple state uncompounded?” In other words: just eat the tomato.

If you’re considering a supplement or remedy for a health problem, a doctor or pharmacist can help you check what’s in it and whether it’s likely to help.

Sources

• Andrew F. Smith, “Tomato Pills Will Cure All Your Ills,” Pharmacy in History 33, no. 4 (1991): 169–177 — the primary scholarly study of the craze.
• Andrew F. Smith, The Tomato in America: Early History, Culture, and Cookery (University of Illinois Press).
• Library of Congress, Chronicling America: Dr. Phelps’ Tomato Pills advertisement, Burlington Free Press, November 23, 1838 and Miles’ Compound Extract of Tomato promotion, New York Herald, July 4, 1838.
• Adee Braun, “The Tomato Pill Craze,” Atlas Obscura, October 16, 2017.
• Vittoria Traverso, “Ketchup was once a diarrhea cure,” Popular Science, August 22, 2025.