Victoria Woodhull (née Claflin) was born on September 23, 1838, on an Ohio farm. She was married to the physician Canning Woodhull at the age of fourteen, acquiring the name she would use professionally throughout her life. Her husband, an alcoholic, never provided for her or their two children. By the time of the Civil War, Woodhull’s parents were in the business of promoting her younger sister, Tennessee (or Tennie C.) Claflin, as a “magnetic healer,” claiming that she could cure disease through mesmerism, or hypnosis. The family dispersed after the indictment of Claflin for manslaughter following the death of Rebecca Howe, whom she was treating for breast cancer. Woodhull and Claflin struck out for a time on their own, establishing practices in various cities, including Cincinnati, St. Louis, and Chicago. Claflin continued her magnetic healing, to which service Woodhull added consultations as a spirit medium, claiming that she could talk to the spirits of her clients’ dead relatives. The sisters were periodically run out of town either by the authorities or by popular hostility. During these intervals they would travel around frontier towns selling patent medicine— drugs that had little or no actual medical effect. In 1866 Woodhull married Colonel James Harvey Blood in Dayton, Ohio. In 1868 Woodhull settled in New York City together with her husband, her sister, and the rest of her family.