Wisconsin magazine of history: Volume 39, number 4, summer, 1956

              WISCONSIN   MAGAZINE   OF   HISTORY
SUMMER,   1956
but left the boy with a twisted, deformed leg. When he grew older, Tifl became a blacksmith and interested himself in the folk cures em¬ ployed by the Kurschmied who had learned herb doctoring from a hermit monk. Till was told, for example, that the best cure for a rattlesnake bite was to eat the snake's skin; that sour red wine boiled with nettles and honey would stop a lung hemorrhage.
At the age of twenty-eight, determined to "get ahead," the shoemaker's son left his native Austria for a better life in America. In 1898 he entered the United States through Canada and a number of years later located at the Turtle Lake lumber camp where he was "discovered" by Octave Cloutier in 1905.
After Mrs. Cloutier's quick recovery, the services of John Tifl, the "Wonder Healer," became very much in demand. With Cloutier acting as his manager, Tifl at first traveled from Turtle Lake to Somerset once every three weeks for a short visit. At the Cloutier farm¬ house about a mile south of Somerset, he treated all comers with his secret plaster salve and a burning plaster. The salve, which was said to contain a mysterious ingredient known as "4X," was applied to open wounds; and the plaster, composed largely of Croton oil and kerosene, was used for all other afflictions.
Such was the demand for these cure-alls that within a few months Till left Turtle Lake and moved in with the Cloutiers. To accommodate the increasing stream of patients, a wing was added to the old farmhouse and the "Plaster Industry" had begun in earnest.
From Hudson and New Richmond, and from such Minnesota towns as Marine, Taylors Falls, and Stillwater, strings of teams were con¬ stantly Somerset-bound bringing customers by the thousands to what one reporter cafled "that Eldorado of supposed health."^ From other points in Wisconsin and Minnesota, railroads carried patients who hoped that perhaps the "Plaster Doctor of Somerset" could cure them. On and on came the believers, suffering from palsy, paralysis, rheumatism, locomotor ataxia, cancer, appendicitis, dyspepsia, blindness, veri- cose veins, in fact "all the diseases not con¬ tagious that man is heir to."^
Beginning at six in the morning and work¬ ing through until ten o'clock at night, "Plaster John," as he was nicknamed, treated all who sought him. After the patients were seated on the dozen backless kitchen chairs he would go
^Stillwater Messenger, Aug. 3, 1907.
"Hudson Star-Times, Dec. 6, 1907; reprinted in Messenger, Dec. 14, 1907. (This is the best single article about Till and his work.)
In 1905 When John Till Visited the Cloutiers, This Family Picture Was Taken in the Farm Home. Till Is at the Far Left, Cloutier Second from Left, Far Right is Mrs. Clou¬ tier.  She Now Resides in St. Paul Where She Prepares the Plaster Salve.
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