As part of her morning ritual, my wife checks the level in my bottle of Listerine.

I could walk out the door wearing nothing more than a pair of running shoes and a bolo tie as long as there was less Listerine in the bottle today than there was yesterday.

She doesn’t want me contributing to the possible resurgence of a national halitosis epidemic. Or, more likely, contributing to a resurgence that can be traced back to our address.

For this I forgive her.

She, and millions of other Americans, are the victim of Gerard Barnes Lambert, who took Listerine, a product with limited appeal, and turned it into a cure for a disease that didn’t exist.

When Lambert’s father, J. W. Lambert, met Joseph Lawrence, the St. Louis chemist who invented Listerine, Lawrence was struggling to sell his concoction as an antiseptic, a cure for gonorrhea, or a floor polish (the latter two being closely related, at least in Lawrence’s mind.)

In 1881, Lawrence put Listerine in Lambert’s hands (and fortunately not his mouth).

J. W. died in 1891, and Gerard took over Listerine’s marketing. History is a bit sketchy here, but sometime in the early 1900s, Lambert found the term halitosis in a medical dictionary. It was all he needed.  In a series of ads he ran through the 1920s, Lambert anointed Listerine as the cure for an impending epidemic whose potential for disaster rivaled that of the ’62 Mets.

Thanks to Listerine, the world  could breathe a little easier.

The thought of my wife being so easily manipulated by another man, even if he’s been dead for 60 years, was unsettling.

Also, I spent nearly 20 years in advertising and I never invented a epidemic. Not that I’m jealous, but nobody is that good. I decided to find out the real story.

Purely for my wife’s sake, of course.

Here’s the part of the tale those Mad Men, telling and retelling the Listerine story up and down Madison Avenue, leave out.

At the beginning of the 20th century, amidst the shift in population from rural towns to big cities, newly-minted city dwellers yearned to be…and I’m not making this up…more like the farmers they’d left behind: in good health; in great physical shape; and engaged with things they could hold and touch.

Maybe those 20th-century millennials couldn’t go back to a time when their mailing address contained RFD 1 instead of Apartment #26, but they certainly could make whatever sacrifices necessary to be happy and healthy.

In the past, those sacrifices would have been hard work, self-denial, and thriftiness. At the exciting dawn of the 20th century happy and healthy meant carving out leisure time and shopping till you dropped.

From happiness, no doubt.

Unlike today’s turn-of-century millennials, who feel perfect and in need of appreciation, 20th-century millennials felt imperfect and in need of improvement.

And there was no shortage of improvement to go around.

“Soda drinks were considered to be health tonics,” said Marita Sturken, professor of media, culture, and communication at NYU and co-author of the book Practices of Looking: An Introduction to Visual Culture. “Lifebouy soap changed its advertising to emphasize how it prevented B.O. [body odor]. It was a reflection of what historians call therapeutic ethos, when people began to embrace ideas of self fulfillment and were concerned about body maintenance.”

Far from hawking a solution for a problem that didn’t exist, Lambert had a solution for the problem of the day which, according to Sturken, was people’s need to feel, “…socially accepted in a rapidly changing world.”

The shortcoming Lambert chose, bad breath, was not new, just unimportant. (A description of tablets that could cure bad breath was found in the 1550 BC Ebers Papyrus). Odds are, any personal improvement he announced Listerine would deliver would have allowed the product to thrive.

If dull floors left you sexually undesirable, my wife might be checking the level of the floor polish every morning (though given the question of how one would apply Listerine as a cure, I think gonorrhea would have still been a non-starter).

Lambert was good, but he was also in the right place at the right time.

Nearly a century later, my wife may still be worried about bad breath. But, she’s also worried about body odor, smelly feet, toenail fungus, indigestion, and my snoring—all of which have their roots in the therapeutic ethos of the 1900s.

So the notion that Lambert single-handedly created an epidemic in order to sell Listerine?

I find that, like the product itself, hard to swallow.

Courtesy of Marita Sturken