Charles Alfred Tyrrell

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Charles Alfred Tyrrell (1843–July 2, 1918) was an English promoter of medical devices, best known for an enema device called the J. B. L. Cascade. He claimed it could cure almost all diseases through a theory of auto-intoxication, but doctors labeled it quackery.

Born in England, he traveled widely—to India, China, South Africa, New Zealand, and Australia—before moving to New York City in 1889. He later earned a medical degree at age 57 in 1900 from the Eclectic Medical College of New York, after years of calling himself a physician. He started the Tyrrell Hygienic Institute in New York to sell his books and products; his wife Emma W. Tyrrell was the corporate secretary.

His main product, the J. B. L. Cascade, used a rubber bag filled with an antiseptic tonic that was inserted into the rectum and pushed in by body weight. He sold related items like Rectal Soap and J. B. L. Antiseptic Tonic. The American Medical Association later found that Henry M. Guild had invented the device in 1903 and Tyrrell had acquired the patents, not that he invented it. Tyrrell claimed the device could cure many ailments, from appendicitis and rheumatism to malaria and typhoid, but there was no medical basis for these claims. By 1922 the AMA stated it would neither prevent nor cure disease and that leading physicians did not endorse it.

In 1894 he published The Royal Road to Health, a book that promoted his ideas and sold widely (it continued through hundreds of editions). By 1943 a writer associated with Tyrrell’s Institute claimed authorship. He also published Health: A Home Magazine devoted to physical culture and dieting, which the AMA criticized as a fad publication promoting pseudoscience. The institute also published other works, such as Alcinous Burton Jamison’s Intestinal Ills. The AMA continued to critique Tyrrell in its Journal, and later reviews noted his fraud and pseudoscience. The Ideal Sight Restorer, another Tyrrell device, was criticized in 1986 in Ophthalmology.

Charles Tyrrell died at his home in Manhattan on July 2, 1918. He had a son, Ernest Alfred Tyrrell, from his first marriage to Eliza or Lillie Glaister, who had disappeared; Tyrrell later learned she was alive and made arrangements to support her. Tyrrell’s Hygienic Institute seems to have remained in operation at least into the late 1930s. In later years, scholars and critics described Tyrrell as a proponent of auto-intoxication and a quack.