Founded in the 1870s, C.I. Hood & Co. was a manufacturer of patent medicines to treat coughs and colds, headache, and heartburn, as well as long-forgotten maladies such as scrofula, salt-rheum, catarrh, and clergyman's sore throat.
The company's marketing strategy included publication of a series of cookbooks in which each paragraph-long recipe was followed by a one-liner — "Hood's Sarsaparilla vitalizes the blood. ... Hood's Sarsaparilla cures biliousness. ... Hood's Sarsaparilla makes the weak strong" — that together read like a litany of purported remedies for whatever might ail you.
Faint lettering for Hood's tooth powder, olive ointment, and vegetable pills is still visible on one side of the building (click on the photo for a larger view). The company seems not to have survived long after the death of Mr. Hood himself, in 1923; today the building's tenants include a furniture company and a apparel factory outlet.
The Hood's building
145 Thorndyke St., Lowell, Massachusetts
