Levi doesn’t fit in among the regular doctors of the 1890s, with their mercury treatments and bloodletting, nor does he feel at home amidst the traveling medicine men peddling opium tonics to the poor and unsuspecting.
A Novel
Synopsis
The Medicine Show explores the often overlooked theme of the medicine shows and snake oil salesmen of the 1890s along with the infamous patent medicine boom through the eyes of its quixotic protagonist Levi York. The story also chronicles the many spiritual revivals, health crazes and populist political movements of the period.
Among the many themes explored are: New Thought, mesmerism, the Populist party, “progressive” mental asylums, Christian Science, the cereal wars and the appropriation of folk healer identities by corporations for advertising purposes. The story also explores Native American wisdom, the history of plant medicine, the persecution of women in the middle ages and eighteenth century as well as the generational traumas surrounding alcoholism and the civil war.
Levi York tells his story to his medicine show troupe in the form of flashbacks after they ask him how he got started. He tells them about his apprenticeship under his father, a poorly trained doctor obsessed with bloodletting and mercury treatments, as well as with his grandmother, an herbal healer whose remedies were passed down through her family since the middle ages.
In this way the story follows Levi’s adventures in two different time periods, the present, in which he and his troupe travel around California putting on medicine shows while he tells them his story. And the past which depicts Levi getting kicked out of medical school, working in a pharmacy where he saw the effects of opium based patent medicines, his apprenticeship in a hospital where he realized he was too squeamish to become a regular doctor and witnessing his father’s professional decline.
Levi eventually finds out that he has an illegitimate half-brother named Abe, who is a pitch man with a wife who is an herbal healer. Together they convince Levi and his father to join forces with them to start their own medicine show. When his father retires, however, Levi travels the southwest to learn about healing from an ancient native tribe and spends time in a wagon train and a cattle drive. When he returns to New York he finds himself persecuted by patent medicine executives who are upset with his tendency to warn people about their addictive products. He finally decides to leave for California where he discovers that the eastern financial interests he was fleeing had arrived there long before him.
Testimonials
"Thank you for sending The Medicine Show—and for such a vivid, imaginative introduction to your world. Your premise crackles with color and invention: the vanished circuit of traveling medicine shows, the spiritual and scientific crossroads of the late 19th century, and a protagonist poised between empiricism and spectacle. The detail, dialogue, and cinematic rhythm show the hand of a filmmaker; your pages unspool with the visual precision of a lens. I especially appreciate your impulse to revive a lost piece of Americana through both literary and visual media. The notion of adapting this to animation—especially AI-assisted animation—feels in keeping with the book’s own interplay between illusion and revelation."
