In Richmond, Virginia, a museum simply known as The Valentine tells the story of the city’s 400-year past. Set in a beautiful neoclassical building that dates to 1812, it was founded on the fortune one man made from his meat juice—which is exactly what it sounds like.
Before it became a museum, The Valentine was the home of dry goods merchant Mann S. Valentine II. In the fall of 1870, Valentine’s wife Anne Maria fell ill, apparently suffering from a “severe and protracted derangement of the organs of digestion,” as Valentine later wrote. Doctors had given up hope of curing her, and Valentine himself had been holed up in their basement for weeks.
But when Valentine emerged from the basement, he brought with him a potential cure that he’d cooked up. Knowing that Anne Maria couldn’t stomach solid food, but that she was in desperate need of nutrients, Valentine had concocted a tonic from beef juice and egg whites. The tonic was more effective than beef broth, he reasoned, because boiling meat for broth alters its proteins and leaves it “impaired in value.” By gently cooking the beef at a low temperature and then pressure-cooking it, he extracted juice from the meat that retained more of its nutritional value and “was acceptable to the most irritable stomach,” he wrote.
Valentine administered his tonic to Anne Maria, and in the following days, watched as she began to recover. Thrilled with his success, Valentine returned to his basement. He made more meat juice, sent samples off to doctors, and started to bottle and sell the tonic out of his home. Valentine’s Meat Juice company was born.
“I have been using your ‘Meat Juice’ on different cases in this hospital,” one New York Surgeon wrote to Valentine. “It has more than answered my expectations. I find that patients improve rapidly in appetite and strength under its administration.”
By 1874 Valentine had published a booklet filled with similar testimonials from doctors, who swore to its efficacy in curing everything from nausea to dysentery and cholera. Several doctors described administering Valentine’s Meat Juice to patients who refused any other form of nourishment, liquid or solid, and witnessing signs of recovery.
“One of my patients, seriously ill with typhoid fever, was nourished exclusively by it for two weeks, and daily increased in strength from its use, until firmly convalescent,” wrote one Virginia physician.
“I have found that this preparation stimulates the stomach when enfeebled from almost any cause, not only in dyspepsia and chronic gastritis, but in seasickness, the sickness of pregnancy, and such kindred complications,” another physician wrote. He claimed that he used the tonic by enema, to achieve better absorption, and found that it “exhibits its nutrient qualities in a remarkable degree.”