Dr. William Sweeting's Flag Salt Remedy is rarely used these days, but his discovery of the treatment remains ripe for dramatic recreation.

The one-year anniversary meeting of the Montezuma Historical Society saw Sweeting depicted by Savannah town historian John Spellman, who has extensively studied the Savannah doctor and his medical career in central New York.

“Dr. Sweeting was a very honest, modest person, and he always saw the good in people,” Spellman said. “We can do that today the same way.”

Clad in a derby hat, white overcoat and with a stethoscope clinging to his neck, Spellman took his audience in the Clifford House back to America's gilded age to tell Sweeting's story.

Sweeting followed the path of his father, Mortimer, by studying homeopathic medicine. After his education at Hahnemann Medical College in Chicago, Sweeting set up his own medical practice in Savannah in 1882.

At the time, Sweeting noticed how healthy American Indians in the area would chew the roots of tall grass -known as flags - in the Savannah swamps.

After looking into the potential medical applications of the plant, Sweeting concocted a recipe for its ingestion mixed with salt.

The Flag Salt Remedy, advertised for headaches and neuralgia (arthritis and rheumatism), was packaged by Sweeting and eventually a staff of workers in Savannah and priced at 25 cents a box. Sweeting sold $2,000 worth of the medicine in 1886, and his sales total reached $7,000 by 1888.

“In an interview I had in 1975 with a woman in Savannah, she said, ‘If I'd only had some flag salt, I'd feel 100 percent better,” Spellman said. “I thought that was quite a testimonial.”

Although technology couldn't pin down the medicine's precise biological effect at the time, Spellman says it contained blood-thinning properties similar to aspirin. Unlike other remedies with which Sweeting's creation competed during the patent medicine craze, Flag Salt did not contain alcohol. Its package - which Spellman brought with him to the Clifford House - reassured consumers that it made unnecessary the use of morphine or opium.

“On one side of the box it says that Flag Salt is safe, pleasant to take, retained by the most delicate stomach, it leaves no disagreeable after effects and there is no habit acquired by use,” Spellman said.

Spellman, as Sweeting, recalled for the Montezuma audience how he spread word of the Flag Salt Remedy across America toward the end of the 19th century. Spellman produced a pennant from an 1899 football game between Harvard and Yale with a back side inviting whoever waved the pennant that day to ask for a free sample in writing. Flag Salt sales climbed by 10 percent after Sweeting's clever advertising trick.

While the popularity of the remedy rose across the country, Sweeting continued to practice medicine in Savannah. He made many a house call to farms in the area, where he accepted pies or stew in exchange for his services.

Spellman showed his audience the blade Sweeting used to amputate limbs and the hammer and pick he pounded into patients' knees to alleviate their arthritis.

Another product of the late doctor's work was in the audience - 92-year-old Lucille Purser Hitchcock, whom Sweeting delivered. Although Spellman heaped upon his audience an abundance of facts about their neighboring town's history, Hitchcock learned another lesson altogether.

“How old I am,” she joked.

The remainder of the audience was in awe of the enthusiasm with which Spellman thrust himself into the role of Sweeting and how extensively he had studied the doctor's history.

“There's not enough of this for people to do in Cayuga County, it's a little bit of history you don't encounter at this level,” said Michael Ohora of Fleming. “Guys like this are the last of a dying breed.”

Staff writer David Wilcox can be reached at 253-5311 ext. 245 or david.wilcox@lee.net