Patent medicine
The safety and effectiveness of patent medicines and their sale is controlled and regulated by the Food and Drug Administration in the United States and corresponding authorities in other countries.
[2][1][3] The term is sometimes still used to describe quack remedies of unproven effectiveness and questionable safety sold especially by peddlers in past centuries, who often also called them elixirs, tonics, or liniments.
[1][2] Current examples of quack remedies are sometimes called nostrums[5][6] or panaceas, but easier-to-understand terms like scam cure-all, or pseudoscience are more common.
[8] Patent medicine advertising often marketed products as being medical panaceas (or at least a treatment for many diseases) and emphasized exotic ingredients and endorsements from purported experts or celebrities, which may or may not have been true.
Patent medicine sales were increasingly constricted in the United States in the early 20th century as the Food and Drug Administration and Federal Trade Commission added ever-increasing regulations to prevent fraud, unintentional poisoning and deceptive advertising.
"The medicine man’s key task quickly became not production but sales, the job of persuading ailing citizens to buy his particular brand from among the hundreds offered.
Homeopathy, the notion that illness is binary and can be treated by ingredients that cause the same symptoms in healthy people, was another outgrowth of this early era of medicine.
"Anderson's Pills" were first made in England in the 1630s; the recipe was allegedly learned in Venice by a Scot who claimed to be physician to King Charles I. Daffy's Elixir was invented about 1647 and remained popular in Britain and the USA until the late 19th century.
"Muscle man" acts were especially popular on these tours, for this enabled the salesman to tout the physical vigour the product supposedly offered.
According to text on a wrapper on every box of pills, Dr. Morse was a trained medical doctor who enriched his education by travelling extensively throughout Asia, Africa, and Europe.
"Violet ray machines" were sold as rejuvenation devices, and balding men could seek solace in an "electric fez" purported to regrow hair.
Albert Abrams was a well known practitioner of electrical quackery, claiming the ability to diagnose and treat diseases over long distances by radio.
In 1913 the quack John R. Brinkley, calling himself an "Electro Medic Doctor", began injecting men with colored water as a virility cure, claiming it was "electric medicine from Germany".
Most notoriously, steel heir Eben McBurney Byers was a supporter of the popular radium water Radithor, developed by the medical con artist William J.
[citation needed] Until the twentieth century, alcohol was the most controversial ingredient, for it was widely recognised that the "medicines" could continue to be sold for their alleged curative properties even in prohibition states and counties.
Some examples include: When journalists and physicians began focusing on the narcotic contents of the patent medicines, some of their makers began replacing the opium tincture laudanum with acetanilide, a particularly toxic non-steroidal anti-inflammatory drug with analgesic as well as antipyretic properties that had been introduced into medical practice under the name Antifebrin by A. Cahn and P. Hepp in 1886.
[22] After several conflicting results over the ensuing fifty years, it was ultimately established in 1948 that acetanilide was mostly metabolized to paracetamol (known in the United States as USAN: acetaminophen) in the human body, and that it was this metabolite that was responsible for its analgesic and antipyretic properties.
Bonnore's Electro Magnetic Bathing Fluid claimed to cure cholera, neuralgia, epilepsy, scarlet fever, necrosis, mercurial eruptions, paralysis, hip diseases, chronic abscesses, and "female complaints".
William Radam's Microbe Killer, a product sold widely on both sides of the Atlantic in the 1890s and early 1900s, had the bold claim 'Cures All Diseases' prominently embossed on the front of the bottle.
This took no small courage by the publishing industry that circulated these claims, since the typical newspaper of the period relied heavily on the patent medicines.
[citation needed] In 1905, Samuel Hopkins Adams published an exposé entitled "The Great American Fraud" in Collier's Weekly that led to the passage of the first Pure Food and Drug Act in 1906.
In 1936 the statute was revised to ban them, and the United States entered a long period of ever more drastic reductions in the medications available unmediated by physicians and prescriptions.
Morris Fishbein, editor of the Journal of the American Medical Association, who was active in the first half of the 20th century, based much of his career on exposing quacks and driving them out of business.
While their advertisements are careful not to cross the line into making explicit medical claims, and often bear a disclaimer that asserts that the products have not been tested and are not intended to diagnose or treat any disease, they are nevertheless marketed as remedies of various sorts.
Their ingredients may have changed from the original formulas; the claims made for the benefits they offer have typically been seriously revised, but in general at least some of them have genuine medical uses.
