The Unlucky Husbands of Mrs. Fowler
A local curiosity report regarding a woman whose husbands seem to meet a grim deadline exactly two years after marriage.
The story, cleaned up
A cleaned-up reading of the newspaper page: spelling and layout repaired, one story lifted off a crowded page. It follows the original closely but it is not a transcription. The original page is below; read it if a detail matters.
Mrs. Fowler, of this city, was married last January to her sixth husband, and strange as it may seem, five of them died exactly two years from their marriage day. Her present husband has been sick for the last four months with chronic jaundice, and was given up by four of our best physicians; as a last resort he began using Sulphur Bitters, and yesterday told our reporter that they had saved his life, smilingly saying that he guessed Mrs. Fowler would be unable to take a seventh better half for some time to come.
“Her present husband has been sick for the last four months with chronic jaundice, and was given up by four of our best physicians; as a last resort he began using Sulphur Bitters.”
This piece of yellow journalism from 1892 plays on the common tropes of 'black widow' sensationalism, used here to sell patent medicines like Sulphur Bitters. It serves as a stark reminder of the era's medical desperation and the manipulative ways newspapers bundled 'human interest' stories with quack cures.
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