Vaseline Inventor Ate Spoonful of Petroleum Jelly Each Day?

On June 28, 2024, a Reddit consumer made a post on the r/Damnthatsinteresting subreddit claiming that the inventor of Vaseline, Robert A. Chesebrough, ate a spoonful of petroleum jelly daily till he died at age 96 and as soon as cured himself of pleurisy, an inflammatory situation of the tissues that line the lungs and chest cavity, by having a nurse cowl his physique in Vaseline.

The submit had acquired round 68,000 upvotes and a couple of,000 feedback on the time of this writing.

A number of hours after the r/Damnthatsinteresting submit appeared, the identical claims had been repeated in the same post by X consumer @historyinmemes. That submit had been preferred round 23,000 occasions and reposted round 3,800 occasions as of this writing.

Snopes was in a position to verify the primary a part of the declare due to a letter he wrote to the Spring Lake (New Jersey) Gazette six months earlier than his loss of life. In it, Chesebrough, then 96, certainly attributed his longevity to consuming “greater than a teaspoon each day” of Vaseline. The related part of the letter may be seen within the Newspapers.com clip under.

Though the a part of the declare that considerations Chesebrough’s each day ingestion of Vaseline is true, we now have to this point been unable to find any main or authoritative secondary sources corroborating the a part of declare regarding Chesebrough allegedly treating a case of pleurisy by having a nurse cowl his physique in petroleum jelly. Because of this, we fee the declare as “Combination.” We are going to replace our ranking if sturdy proof for this second a part of the declare surfaces.

Tracing the Claims

As outlined on the official Vaseline web site’s “Our Historical past” page, Chesebrough developed the thought for petroleum jelly, the generic title for the substance later marketed as Vaseline, when oil drilling started in Titusville, Pennsylvania, in 1859. A chemist with earlier expertise producing kerosene from whale oil, Chesebrough took particular curiosity in a byproduct of petroleum referred to as rod wax, which Titusville oil staff had begun utilizing as a salve for cuts and burns.

In 1865, Chesebrough filed the primary of a number of patents for strategies for purifying petroleum into petroleum jelly, which he started promoting beneath the model title Vaseline in 1870.

The earliest publication to comprise the total declare investigated right here was an article titled “Mr. Chesebrough’s Surprise Jelly,” which was printed in Coronet journal in November 1953. With none point out of how he discovered this info, the article’s creator, Mort Weisinger, wrote,

So nice a religion did Robert Chesebrough have within the therapeutic worth of his product that he swallowed a spoonful daily of his life … In his late fifties, unwell with pleurisy, he made his nurse anoint him with the substance from head to toe — and promptly recovered. Chesebrough died in 1933 at 96. On his deathbed, he boasted that he owed his longevity to his behavior of taking a each day dose of the jelly. 

Over the next many years, these claims appeared in entire or partly in fashionable books, newspaper articles, weblog posts, in “Ripley’s Believe it or Not,” and even on the Britannica website. Nevertheless, none of those appearances pointed readers towards an authoritative or main supply for the declare.

This was the case even for a point out of the declare that appeared in a 2017 issue of JAMA Dermatology, a tutorial journal printed by the American Medical Affiliation. Of their quotation for the declare, the authors of the piece pointed towards “Panati’s Extraordinary Origins of Unusual Issues,” a book first printed in 1987, which does embrace the declare however supplies no supply for it within the “References” part on the finish of the e-book.

Snopes was in a position to monitor down the newspaper article verifying the a part of the declare regarding Chesebrough’s each day consumption of Vaseline by scouring obituaries printed after the inventor died in September 1933. One obituary, printed within the Spring Lake Gazette, famous that Chesebrough, a Spring Lake resident on the time of his loss of life, had “continuously” contributed articles and letters to that paper.

A survey of Chesebrough’s contributions to the Spring Lake Gazette turned up the aforementioned March 2, 1933, letter through which Chesebrough each described his each day Vaseline ingestion and explicitly claimed he believed it was the supply of his longevity. Chesebrough died in September of the identical yr, a number of months after the letter was printed.

None of Chesebrough’s letters to this publication contained any point out of Chesebrough curing himself from an assault of pleurisy by having a nurse slather him in petroleum jelly, and as of this writing we now have not been in a position to find every other sources printed throughout or quickly after Chesebrough’s lifetime which may corroborate this a part of the declare. Because of this, we now have rated the general declare as it’s offered in social media posts as “Combination.”

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