Thanks for this information, I didn't know the full story, I heard once that Rockefellers oil industry was selling kerosene and it was used for cancer treatment, like more than a hundred years ago..Posted by gord (here)
A reminder of what that refers to from How & Why Big Oil Conquered The World:Posted by palehorse (here)
Rockefellers started selling kerosene as a cancer cure before chemotherapy exist.
“Dr. Bill Livingston, Celebrated Cancer Specialist”, also known as "Devil Bill", was William Avery Rockefeller, John D. Rockefeller's father. Before he was in Cayuga, he lived just outside of Albany, and had a house less than a mile from where I grew up. The local historical society has an old map showing it as his residence. When I was a teenager, it had already been abandoned and falling apart for a long time. We used to go there and shoot up the walls with a 22 calibre pellet rifle, and nobody ever said a word as we walked through town with it. It has since been restored, and has a historic site plaque.But that story, properly told, begins somewhere unexpected. Not in Pennsylvania with the first commercial drilling operation and the first oil boom, but in the rural backwoods of early 19th century New York State. And it doesn’t start with crude oil or its derivatives, but a different product altogether: snake oil.
“Dr. Bill Livingston, Celebrated Cancer Specialist” was the very image of the traveling snake oil salesman. He was neither a doctor nor a cancer specialist; his real name was not even Livingston. More to the point, the “Rock Oil” tonic he pawned was a useless mixture of laxative and petroleum and had no effect whatsoever on the cancer of the poor townsfolk he conned into buying it.
He lived the life of a vagabond, always on the run from the last group of people he had fooled, engaged in ever-more-outrageous deceptions to make sure that the past wouldn’t catch up with him. He abandoned his first wife and their six children to start a bigamous marriage in Canada at the same time as he fathered two more children by a third woman. He adopted the name “Livingston” after he was indicted for raping a girl in Cayuga in 1849.
Off topic, with no intent to hijack the thread, so carry on.
and that's cool you shot the devil's old house
The elders in my family used kerosene for many different things, my granpa used to take a small spoon of it periodically, the smell is strong enough to keep anyone out of it, but he did anyway his entire life, he always said the liniment was great for kill parasites.