Swaim's Panacea

[3][4] Swaim was originally a bookbinder, and the popular story went that he discovered the recipe on the page of a book he was binding at his New York shop.

Quackinboss was using a formulation previously published by a Dr. McNeven which originated from France, where a remedy called the "Rob de Laffecteur" invented by the French apothecary Pierre Boyveau was very popular.

Respected physicians who had endorsed the product as promising in the beginning, such as Nathaniel Chapman who later founded the American Medical Association, disavowed their early approvals.

"[25] And in an 1849 letter to the Southern Literary Messenger, Edgar Allan Poe defended the poetry of Bayard Taylor against critics "who possess little other ability than that which assures temporary success to them in common with Swaim's Panacea or Morrison's Pills."

Abolitionist William Lloyd Garrison mentions "taking my third bottle of Swaim's Panacea" for scrofula in an 1836 letter.

[26] One of the most comprehensive accounts of the story of Swaim's Panacea is in the 1961 book The Toadstool Millionaires: A Social History of Patent Medicines in America before Federal Regulation by James Harvey Young.