(or Ames)(6 July 1855-3 Sept. 1922), physician and entrepreneur. (Dr A.F. Rogers) Born at Bradford, Ont., of U E Loyalist descent. He attended Bradford High School, but the report that he attended Upper Canada College seems to be incorrect. After obtaining his medical degree from McGill University, 1874, he studied medicine overseas. From 1876 he had a medical practice in Ottawa. He was president of the Ontario Medical Council, 1896. Dr Rogers became the manufacturer of a successful, widely used, and well-advertised laxative patent medicine called Fruit-a-Tives. He resigned from his medical practice in 1904 on formation of the Fruit-a-Tives Co., of which he remained president to the end of his life. At the time of the 1918 flu epidemic, an advertisement claimed that this medicine “Gives the Power to Resist” Spanish Influenza. (Glengarry News 25 Oct. 1918; this issue also carries obituaries of local victims of the flu)…

     Dr Rogers was married May 1896 to Margaret or Mabel Falkner, the daughter of Dr Alexander Falkner of Lancaster, GC. If a story attributed to a Glengarry maid employed in the Rogers household is true, every so often Dr Rogers and his wife would pull down the blinds and seclude themselves in the kitchen of the house to cook up a new batch of the secret ingredient used in the patent medicine. For patent medicine manufacture, see also A. P. Gardiner.

Obituary Cornwall Standard 7 Sept. 1922 * Morgan (1898) 877, but not , perhaps significantly, given that he left medicine for patent medicine, Morgan (1912) * Ross, Lancaster, 265 (“made a fortune”) * information kindly supplied by Upper Canada College * Fruit-a-Tives advertisements: testimonal of Williamstown resident (with his picture) for Fruit-a-Tives, Cornwall Freeholder 4 Feb. 1910; “The Curse of the Nation Is Constipation,” CF 9 June 1911; testimonial from Western Ontario, “Ever since leaving the army I suffered terribly from constipation,” CF 3 March 1927