Patent medicine
Patent medicines were for the most part actually trademarked medicines, not patented. The word is given to various medical compounds sold under a variety of names and labels. It has become particularly associated with the sale of drug compounds in the nineteenth century under cover of colourful names and even more colourful claims.
Patent medicines were sometimes called nostrums, a Latin word meaning "ours" or "our own." This refers generally to any proprietary mixture of drugs.
Patent medicines and advertising
The phrase patent medicine comes from the early days of the marketing of medical elixirs, when those who found favour with royalty were issued letters patent authorising the use of the royal endorsement in advertising. The name stuck well after the American Revolution made these endorsements by the crowned heads of Europe obsolete. Few if any of the nostrums were actually patented; chemical patents came into use in the USA in 1925, and in any case attempting to monopolize a drug, medical device, or medical procedure was considered unethical by the standards upheld during the era of patent medicine.
Instead, the compounders of these nostrums used a primitive version of branding to distinguish themselves from the crowd of their competitors. Many familiar names from the era live on in brands such as Luden Brothers' cough drops, Lydia E. Pinkham's vegetable compound for women, Fletcher's Castoria, and even Angostura bitters, which was once marketed as a stomach remedy.
Touting these nostrums was one of the first major projects of the advertising industry. A number of American institutions owe their existence to the patent medicine industry, most notably a number of the older almanacs, which were originally given away as promotional items by patent medicine manufacturers. Perhaps the most successful industry that grew up out of the business of patent medicine advertisements, though, was founded by William H. Gannett in Maine in 1866. There were few circulating newspapers in Maine in that era, so Gannett founded a periodical, Comfort, whose chief purpose was to propose the merits of Oxien, a nostrum made from the fruit of the baobab tree, to the rural folks of Maine. Gannett's newspaper became the first publication of the Gannett Corporation, whose flagship newspaper today is USA Today.
Another method of publicity undertaken mostly by smaller firms was the "medicine show," a travelling circus of sorts which offered vaudeville style entertainments on a small scale, and which climaxed in a pitch for the nostrum being sold. Muscleman acts were especially popular on these tours, for this enabled the salesman to tout the physical vigour offered by the potion he was selling. Shills were frequently employed by the showmen, who would step forward from the crowd and offer "unsolicited" testimonials about the benefits of the medicine for sale. Oftentimes, the nostrum was manufactured and bottled in the same wagon that the show travelled in. The Kickapoo Indian Medicine Company became one of the largest and most successful medicine show operators; their shows had an American Indian or Wild West theme, and employed many Native Americans as spokespeople. The medicine show lived on in American folklore and Western movies long after they had vanished from public meeting places.
Ingredients and their uses
Some level of exoticism and mystery in the contents of the preparation was deemed desirable by their promoters. Unlikely ingredients such as the baobab fruit in Oxien were a recurring theme. A famous patent medicine of the period was Dr. Kilmer's Swamp Root; unspecified roots found in swamps had remarkable effects on the kidneys, according to its literature.
Native American themes were also useful; Natives, being noble savages, were in tune with Nature and heirs to a body of traditional lore about herbal remedies and natural cures. One example of this approach from the period was Kickapoo Indian Sagwa, a product of the Kickapoo Indian Medicine Company, supposedly based on a Native American recipe. This nostrum was the inspiration for Al Capp's "Kickapoo Joy Juice."
Other promoters took an opposite tack from timeless herbal wisdom. Just about any scientific discovery or exotic locale could be used as a key ingredient in a patent medicine. Consumers were invited to invoke the power of electromagnetism to heal them. In the nineteenth century, electricity and radio were gee-whiz scientific advances that found their way into patent medicine advertising, especially after Luigi Galvani showed that electricity influenced the muscles. Devices meant to electrify the body were sold; nostrums were compounded that purported to attract electrical energy or make the body more conductive. Various schemes were devised to diagnose and treat disease via radio waves were promoted.
Towards the end of the period, a number of radioactive medicines, containing uranium or radium, were marketed. These apparently actually contained the ingredients promised, and there were a number of tragedies among their devotees; most notoriously, Eben McBurney Byers, a steel heir, died horribly after taking more than a thousand bottles of "radium water." Water irradiators were sold that promised to infuse water placed within them with radon, which was thought to be good for you at the time.
What were they good for? Just about everything. Nostrums were openly sold that claimed to cure or prevent venereal diseases, tuberculosis, and cancer. 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." A panacea so universally effective cannot be bought today at any price. Every manufacturer published long lists of testimonials in which all sorts of human ailments were cured by the compounds. Fortunately for both their makers and users, the illnesses that they claimed were cured were almost invariably self-diagnosed, and the claims of the writers to have been healed of cancer or tuberculosis by the nostrum should be considered in this light.
What was in them? While various herbs, touted or alluded to, were often mentioned, more often they contained opium extracts, cocaine, and grain alcohol. Until the twentieth century the 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. Many of the medicines were in fact liqueurs of various sorts, flavoured with herbs said to have medical properties. Peruna was a famous "Prohibition tonic," weighing in at around 18% grain alcohol. A nostrum known as "Jamaica ginger" was ordered to change its formula by Prohibition officials; to fool a chemical test, some vendors added a toxic chemical, cresyl phosphate, an organophosphate compound that had effects similar to a nerve agent; Unwary imbibers suffered a form of paralysis that came to be known as jake-leg. Some included laxatives or diuretics, in order to give the compounds some obvious medical effects. The narcotics and stimulants at least had the virtue of making the people who took them feel better, and in the eyes of the advertisers this was scored as a "cure."
Clark Stanley the "Rattlesnake King" produced Stanley's snake oil, publicly processing rattlesnakes at the World's Columbian Exposition in Chicago. His liniment when seized and tested by the federal government in 1917 was found to contain mineral oil, 1% fatty oil, red pepper, turpentine and camphor. This is not too unlike modern capsaicin and camphor liniments.
When journalists and physicians began focusing on the narcotic contents of the patent medicines, some of their makers began substituting the toxic analgesic NSAID known as acetanilid, discovered in 1886, for the laudanum they used to contain. This ingredient change probably killed more of the nostrum's users than the narcotics did, since the acetanalid was toxic to the liver and kidneys.
The end of the patent medicine era
Muckraker journalists and other investigators began to publicize instances of death, drug addiction, and other hazards from the compounds. This took some small courage on behalf of the publishing industry that circulated these claims, since the typical newspaper of the period relied heavily on the patent medicines, which founded the U.S. advertising industry. 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. This statute did not ban the alcohol, narcotics, and stimulants in the medicines; it required them to be labelled as such, and curbed some of the more misleading, overstated, or fraudulent claims that appeared on the labels. 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.
The patent medicine makers moved from selling nostrums to selling deodorants and toothpastes, which continued to be advertised using the same techniques that had proven themselves selling nostrums for tuberculosis and "female complaints." One survival of the herbal exoticism that once characterized the patent medicine industry is the marketing of shampoos, which are often promoted as containing perfumes such as vetivert or ylang-ylang, and foods such as mangoes, bananas, or honey; consumers are urged to put these ingredients in their hair.
See also
External links
- The Museum of Questionable Medical Devices
- Dr. Bob's Homepage for Medical Quackery
- Here Today, Here Tomorrow: Varieties of Medical Ephemera at the National Library of Medicine
- The Great American Fraud online exhibit at Vanderbilt Medical Library. Contains an etext of two of the Samuel Hopkins Adams exposés.