On the Side: At the home of soda's pop

South by a few blocks of the lines for the Liberty Bell on the day after the Fourth a sign hand-lettered on orange construction paper directed you to turn east off (coincidentally) Fourth Street into the lovely, brick-walled back garden of the Physick House.

This was the grand, Federal-style home more than 200 years ago of Dr. Philip Syng Physick, whose medical accomplishments (pioneering the use of the stomach pump, performing early cataract surgeries, introducing the use of catgut sutures) were groundbreaking though not so entertaining as to be the chief inspiration for the earnest homage going on in the garden.

The occasion at hand was the Third Annual Philly Phyzz Phest.

Physick may have been the "Father of American Surgery." But along the way (in 1807) he'd also "invented," almost inadvertently, what some consider to be America's first soda pop. (He'd added fruit syrup to the bubbly waters to disguise the carbolic taste.)

So past a table where children were invited to use quill pens to add their signatures to those of the original signers on facsimiles of the Declaration of Independence were demonstrations (involving balloons, baking soda and vinegar) of carbon dioxide production and two-ounce samples of a Physick descendant's approximation of the old-fashioned soda.

It is called Dr. Physick Black Cherry Soda, a refreshingly fizzy, if otherwise unremarkable soft drink (available at the house, the Franklin Fountain, and Christ Church Burial Ground, among other outlets) whose claim to fame, ostensibly, is that it cribs from the doctor's recipe and employs, as was the custom at the time, cane sugar, not high-fructose corn syrup.

It is more than a little ironic, when you consider the history, that sodas (Dr. Physick's among them) that began life as curatives - Physick's fizz was for gastric distress - would grow to become agents of sickness (obesity and diabetes among them).

They were victims, in a sense, of their own excess: Sodas that Physick once instructed local pharmacist Townsend Speakman to hand-mix each day, supplying one unsweetened (at first) glass daily to patients who paid $1.50 for a month's regimen, soon became heavily and incessantly marketed.

Advances in carbonation, whose sole provenance once was natural mineral waters, proceeded apace: One nudge came from spin-off technology from a U.S. Navy contract in 1875 to develop a torpedo propellant.

A year later pharmacist Charles Hires introduced his root beer extract - rejiggered from a traditional herbal tea - at Philadelphia's sprawling Centennial Exposition in Fairmount Park.

Soon Charles Lippincott & Co., another Philadelphia concern, was turning out some of the first, and rather ornate, carbonating soda fountains.

Then came better bottling. And better capping and sealing (the need for which was often demonstrated by exploding bottles of yeast-activated root and birch beers).

Coca-Cola, also first peddled as a patent medicine, was just around the corner. And by the 1970s, so was an out-of-control soft-drink ethos. Soda wasn't just at the fountain anymore. It was barely out of arm's reach. Bottle sizes inflated (along with super-sizing consumers) from 6.5 ounces, to 12 ounces, to 20 ounces.

The less said about cup sizes, the better.

Thus did the soda that got its start innocently on Fourth Street gradually expand its agenda from the pursuit of health to the pursuit (in the words of those copies of the Declaration) of unquenchable happiness.

It would have been instructive in the lovely back garden at Physick House to hear the noble doctor's take on how the former of those pursuits came to be imperiled by the latter.

Physick House