It was in my work writing for a local history blog in Danville, Virginia that I ran, quite by accident, into the story of Nanzetta. I was actually researching another story, one about a man named Edgar Stripling who had committed murder in Georgia and was on the run from the law. Having escaped from prison, he fled to Danville where he adopted a new name and was elected Chief of Police in 1907 before eventually being discovered and taken back to Georgia after fourteen years on the run.

In scouring the papers for as much information on the Police Chief Morris as I could gather, I ran into an article that described his arrest of a man wanted for forging a check written by the Indian medicine doctor J.H. Nanzetta. I did little more at the time but make a mental note of the curious name and equally curious occupation.

It wasn’t long after that that, while researching for a post on patent medicines and weird cures of the past, that I ran into Nanzetta again … and again. Not only did he advertise extensively in the papers, but he seemed to be always in trouble with the law. The Edgar Stripling story had taken place during prohibition and during a time of rapidly changing laws around the practice of medicine and the manufacture and distribution of drugs, and so there was quite a lot to be said in the papers and in the courtrooms about Mr. Nanzetta’s wares and his wild claims about them.

I wrote up my piece on Depression Era Cures, but I wasn’t satisfied to just drop it there. I needed to know more about this Nanzetta character.

I did a little more digging and found someone with a similar name who appeared in a Denver hotel in 1903, identically described and weaving wild stories about his origins and adventures. His story, as I continued to dig, grew stranger as his tales grew taller and ever more romantic. Over and over again, the papers described his remarkable arrival and the stories he spun. Sometimes they described his departure, too, when he was chased out of town as a quack doctor selling quack cures.

His story wasn’t purely consistent, though. It morphed and changed over time and as circumstances (and his need to evade the law) demanded. At times, particularly in the early days, Nanzetta presented himself as half-Mexican, but in time he settled on a Native American origin story (though the two are not necessary mutually exclusive). Throughout his thirty-year career as a peddler of patent medicines, he was identified (and identified himself) as Hindu, Italian, or simply and vaguely “foreign”. In one instance, Nanzetta, while on trial for peddling medicine on the streets of San Francisco without a license, claimed he had run away from a cruel step-father who had married his Mexican mother and who had sent him to an Indian Industrial school from which he had likewise escaped. In Danville, he refused to speak of his past.

Even after settling in the south where he maintained storefronts and manufacturing laboratories in South Carolina, North Carolina, and in Danville, Virginia, his true history was a well-crafted mystery and one he exploited. One advertisement offered a third person account of his reticence in speaking of his own past and which was undoubtedly written in his own hand, and read as follows:

When you inquire of Nanzetta as to his nationality, he will tell you that he is half Indian: if your curiosity is still unsatisfied and you ask him about the other half, he will quickly and emphatically give you to understand that that is his business.

This was The Great Nanzetta—that was all the public needed to know—“a real life Indian herbologist”, “the man who knows”, the “King of Dentists” who could pull teeth painlessly with his fingers, and the one to go to for the ointments, elixirs, pills, and unguents that would cure any and all of the “cure for all the ills to which humanity is heir”.

“Dr. Nanzetta with his eldest son, Leonard (who would later become a legitimate doctor) and Nurse Brown with whom he was said to have a romantic relationship.

Eventually, and somehow, Nanzetta found his way to Danville, first as a street pitchman, but later he settled and opened up a shop where he saw clients and prescribed cures behind a storefront decorated with the specimens of the tapeworms and teeth he had removed by aid of his methods. At a time when laws prevented just anyone from practicing medicine, he simply claimed he was “a doctor in his own way,” educated as he was by … Indian medicine men, or Himalayan yack herders, or Buddhists in the sacred city of Lhasa—depending on which fiction he was spinning at the time.

On several occasions he was arrested, sometimes for violence, sometimes for theft or fraud or malpractice, and at least once for sexual assault. He was married thrice, and all three marriages ended in divorce. At last, however, in 1929, the law caught up with him when he was indicted by the North Carolina Attorney General’s office for practicing medicine without a license. When they served him his charges, they did so under another alias, that of a Russian immigrant named Cohen, whose identity included a Jewish wife and children (and a sister) living in the state of New York.

Just weeks before his trial, Nanzetta checked himself into a sanitorium in Baltimore “on account of his nerves” and here, while under twenty-four hour watch, managed to find himself the victim of a gunshot to the head. Though his death was deemed a suicide, speculation regarding the demise of the once-famous Nanzetta flooded the newspapers. But the truth, like so much about the man, was lost in the confusion of untruths and half-truths and blatant truths told too elaborately to be believed and full-blown deceptions.

So how does one write a biography about a man whose history, even his true identity, is so thoroughly and even intentionally obfuscated? Maybe “truth” isn’t really the point, after all. Perhaps it’s the lore Nanzetta created around himself that is the real story here. Perhaps it’s the adventure of discovering what in this case, and perhaps in any other, “truth” means. It’s also possible that the story of the Great Nanzetta, Indian Medicine Man and Doctor-in-His-Way provides us with the opportunity to examine the psychology of belief and why we so often and so readily agree to be deceived. Who wins when a lie is successfully told? And who loses when the illusion falls apart?

Here, I attempt to pull the pieces apart and to expose the man, or men (and possibly women, too) who have made this mystery what it is.

Please join me as I embark upon an adventure that is equal parts historical detective work and biographical narrative, and that of one of the most fascinating characters I have had the good fortune to stumble across in my many years of historical writing and research.

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