How Did Vicks VapoRub Become Every Brown Person’s Cure-All?

When I remember my grandmother saying “Vicks,” I can hear the “v” pronounced as a “b” so clearly—more like “beaks,” with an sizzly emphasis on the “s.”

Vicks VapoRub was a remedy for all ailments—from headaches, to colds, to wrinkles, to my hard-to-ignore hormonal acne. The menthol-y, eucalyptus-y scent was embedded into my grandparents’ bedroom; if the door was propped open even a few inches, the smell would waft into the hallway. Whenever my cousins and I snuck into the bedroom to steal cough drops, or borrow a hairbrush, or hide each other’s things as a prank, we inhaled that Vicks smell.

My grandmother—Nanay as my family calls her—applied Vicks to her face every night. She claimed it kept her skin young. She believed it was a miracle drug. Despite her suspicious nature, that meant she believed in miracles.

Late this February, when Covid-19 cases were increasing worldwide, I saw a tweet that made me chuckle: a map showing the number of cases across the world, with no cases (yet) in South America, and the caption That Vicks & Sana sana colita de rana combo is undefeated. This tweet wasn’t an outlier. A search for “Vicks” and “corona” on Twitter pulled up countless hits with the same sentiment: Vicks can cure and prevent anything, maybe even the deadliest global pandemic of this millennium.

In January 1918, ten months before the end of World War I, a different global pandemic broke out. It was known as the Spanish Influenza, and despite its name, the virus’ geographical origins are still being debated to this day. In his book America’s Forgotten Pandemic, the professor Alfred W. Crosby recounts the course of the influenza of 1918, which infected five hundred million people the world over—a third of the global population at the time.

The pandemic lasted until June 1920 and reached every continent, its path likely accelerated by all the international travel during the war. Public gatherings were limited, self-isolation and quarantines were encouraged and enforced, and corporations were quick to find ways to capitalize on the panic of the people. Nearly a hundred years later, we have again been called to completely change how we live our lives in hopes of saving each other. The answers to this call have been disparate at best, deadly at worst.

After the pandemic’s first wave in the spring of 1918, a second wave of the influenza hit American shores that fall, brought home by soldiers returning from the war. Products claiming to be influenza remedies sprung up in the newspapers. The Illinois-based Mattoon Journal-Gazette featured pages full of advertisements for Dr. Bell’s Pine Tar Honey, Schenck’s Mandrake Pills, Neecham’s Pills, one very literally called Miller’s Antiseptic Snake Oil, and, perhaps most aggressively, Vicks VapoRub.

The company (Vicks, namely; VapoRub is the product) ran a comprehensive and long-winded ad campaign. The “Spanish Influenza Series” consisted of six long advertisements that read more like a public health announcement about the virus, with some language seemingly meant to ease panic: “Influenza itself has a very low percentage of fatalities . . . attacking principally patients in a run down condition—those who don’t go to bed soon enough, or those who get up too early.”

Despite this call to not panic (a message strikingly similar to one carelessly thrown around today that Covid-19 is less dangerous if you are not elderly, disabled, or immunocompromised), Vicks implied that there was still enough to worry about that you should buy their product. And while the company managed to avoid incorrectly citing VapoRub as an actual cure, they might as well have. Here’s an example of one of their “headlines”:“How To Use Vick’s VapoRub In Treating Spanish Influenza: The Influenza Germs Attack the Lining of the Air Passages. When VapoRub is Applied Over Throat and Chest the Medicated Vapors Loosen the Phlegm, Open the Air Passages and Stimulate the Mucous Membrane to Throw Off the Germs.”

Nanay believed it was a miracle drug. Despite her suspicious nature, that meant she believed in miracles.

Shortly after the series was first published, another set of advertisements came out, claiming that “Vicks VapoRub Oversold Due to Present Epidemic.” In these new ads, the company stressed the dangers of the product not being conserved, and specifically addressed all distributors of Vicks VapoRub, telling them that their duty is to “distribute VapoRub in the quickest possible manner to those sections stricken by Influenza.”

Whether “oversold” meant customers had ordered VapoRub and not received it, or stores had simply sold out, is unclear from the ad. Still, it’s possible that the alleged shortage was drummed up by the hysteria of the ads themselves.

The ad laid out the company’s plan for raising their VapoRub production month by month. This included a call for more employees, since they were understaffed; many of their employees were drafted into the war—or as they put it, “wearing Uncle Sam’s khaki.” According to the history page on the Vicks website, the sales of VapoRub went from $900,000 to $2.9 million from 1918 to 1919.

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In his Netflix stand-up special Jo Koy: Live from Seattle, the comedian jokes about how his Filipino mother raised him, how she “would try and cure everything at home, like a true Filipino woman. You had to die to go to the hospital. My mom cured everything with Vicks VapoRub.”

The audience goes nuts for this line, and I understand why. It’s true; we Filipinos freaking love Vicks! Use it on a bug bite and it’ll disappear! Slather it on for baby-soft skin! Unfortunately, what’s also true in Koy’s joke is that Filipinos rarely go to the hospital unless they’re already on death’s doorstep with one foot inside the house.

In this report from the Los Angeles Times, a referenced government document shows that seven out of ten Filipinos living in the Philippines die without ever visiting a hospital. My parents never saw a doctor when they were growing up, nor did they ever use pharmaceutical drugs in the ’60s and ’70s. Back then, whatever medical advances were being made in Western nations were rarely shared with the countries they had once colonized. Home remedies were simply remedies, as many families in the Philippines at the time never knew the alternative.

I think of that viral tweet from the early days of the pandemic: “Sana, sana colita de rana,” which is typically followed by, “Si no sana hoy, sanará manaña.” It’s a rhyme often said—chanted, even—while a parent or elder applies Vicks to a sick or injured child. “Maybe the magic of Vicks is the ‘Sana sana,’” writes Danielli Marzouca in a piece about the Latinx love for Vicks VapoRub, also called Vivaporú.

The internet taught me that this obsession with Vicks was not exclusive to the Philippine diaspora. I remember being surprised by all similar beliefs so many cultures shared about the product: the idea that Vicks is capable of anything, how it could shrink moles, and get rid of bug bites and pimples; our warm memories of the salve being rubbed on us by our loved ones and caretakers.

Years later, it feels impossible to view these similarities outside the context of colonization, how that violence creates a crater of lack, and how that crater is filled with whatever is in reach. If healthcare wasn’t available, but the drugstore was down the street, then why not believe that health and miracles could be bought?

Whether or not Vicks VapoRub actually works to suppress a cough is unclear. I asked a few friends how they apply it and what they use it for, and overwhelmingly the answer was right before bed, when they had congestion. Eucalyptus and peppermint oils have a similar effect; when I’m feeling particularly stuffy, these essential oils can temporarily clear my sinuses. So can spicy food.

According to the Mayo Clinic, “the strong menthol odor of VapoRub may trick your brain, so you feel like you’re breathing through an unclogged nose.” Camphor, one of the main ingredients in both Vicks VapoRub and Bengay, is likely the main culprit behind the strong, distinctive smell of VapoRub.

If healthcare wasn’t available, but the drugstore was down the street, then why not believe that health and miracles could be bought? 

Menthol and camphor have been the subjects of a scientific study commonly known as pain gate, introduced by researchers Ronald Melzack and Patrick Wall in 1965. The gate control study theorized that the transmission cells in your body that perceive pain and send those signals to the brain can be triggered by a non-painful sensation. This can close off the “gate” from perceiving the pain caused by other stimulants.

In the case of Bengay and Vicks VapoRub, the user applies the product where they are feeling an ache or a congestion blockage, and the menthol and camphor causes that tingly feeling on the skin. That mild burning sensation triggers the transmission cell, making it more difficult for the actual pain or congestion sensation to be perceived by the brain. The unpleasantness of the pain, at least to our brains, feels like it has subsided.

Unsurprisingly, parts of Melzak and Wall’s study have been proven incorrect since publication. Still, the two informed so much of pain theory today, likely because their findings gave the less science-inclined a clear metaphor for what might be happening in our bodies.

These days, I’m finding it difficult to know what I really, truly find soothing. I’ve been thinking about the paingate theory and the idea that when our bodies are alerting us to immediate danger, we are able to interfere with that message. We can effectively tell our bodies to stop hurting with the alchemy of soothing. Melzack and Wall believed their theory explained why we’re inclined to rub an ache or bruise, that the touch sensation would interrupt the message’s path to the brain, reducing the perception, and therefore the feeling, of the pain.

To soothe, then, is somewhat of a trick. To rub a salve like Vicks VapoRub where your breathing is tight is to say to yourself, focus instead on the sharpness of eucalyptus and the softness of petroleum; let the coolness of the mint make breathing feel fresh and new.

With all the dull pain I’m feeling from being alive at this particular moment, paired with the familiar sadness of longstanding clinical depression, soothing feels both in and out of my control. The trick is mine to conjure. Sometimes, I think, I get the trick wrong—that I choose instead to fall back on what I know makes me feel bad, in an attempt to distract from all the other badness that I have less influence over. I binge-watch for hours, or stress shop, or drink too much; these things make me feel more distracted than soothed, but I willingly trade in one pain for another.

On a FaceTime call with my parents, my dad recalled how he used to put Vicks on me whenever I had sipon, the snot that drips down from a runny nose. For maybe the fourth time since my in-person social life paused, he instructed me not to drink cold water because it might make my throat scratchy. Hot water is good, preferably with lemon. I rolled my eyes in my head, then felt a little sad and a little moved by how he is just doing what he can. His pleas and advice are something rather than nothing. And right now, something rather than nothing is just about all I can offer to the ones I love.

His pleas and advice are something rather than nothing. And right now, something rather than nothing is just about all I can offer to the ones I love.

I say “stay safe out there” to my friends and family, even though I know that the factors we can’t control outnumber the ones we can. After hanging out six feet apart in the park, my friends and I say “text me when you get home” with our goodbyes, as if to speak ‘getting home safe’ into existence for each other. I tell my cousin who is a doctor and my aunts who are nurses to “please be careful,” even though I know that even care, with all its power, cannot guarantee health, or safety, or recovery, or resources, or tests, or medicine, or protection against the lack of care from others. Then again, maybe these home remedies, coping practices, superstitions, and well-wishes aren’t just tricks or distractions. Maybe they are insistences: insistences on our well-being, insistences on the safety of our loved ones, insistence on moments of peace, of reprieve, insistences on joy, of plain fun.

My Nanay was insistent on her soft skin, her free breath. Even my own tendencies to disassociate are perhaps indicative of an insistence on a different world where my life feels less precious and endangered. Maybe the miracle isn’t a product, but the insistence on choosing life in the face of what feels like endless deceit and violence. If a miracle is something that is difficult to explain, then showing up tomorrow when we know what happened yesterday feels pretty supernatural.

I think for a long while from now, there will be intense pain; loss that sits at the bottom of our stomachs, that peeks in and spills on the floor like a ray of light shining through a frosted window. The pain will subside and return again. Hopefully, there will be healing that lasts, one that doesn’t just soothe the pain but removes the danger altogether. I have to insist on it.

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