Episode 12: Everything About Snake Oil

Hurry Hurry Hurry, step right up and witness the incomparable healing powers of this elixir! Why, it cured me of my gout and set my mother on the road to healthfulness. Two sips in the morning and you too will have a bright shine to your eyes and a bloom on your cheeks!

image: Western Fictioneers

Snake Oil: A substance with no real medicinal value sold as a remedy for all diseases.

Quackery: Dishonest practices and claims to have special knowledge in some field, typically medicine.

Origin of the term snake oil

• 1860s Chinese laborers immigrating to the US transcontinental RR

• Rubbed their sore muscles with an ointment made from the Chinese water snake – it worked

• full of Omega 3s which sooth inflammation

• Hucksters got wind of the Chinese lotion and decided to make their own

  • to give their elixir credibility many claimed the recipes came from Native healers

    • turns out rattlesnake grease was used by some tribes like the Choctaws to alleviate arthritis pain but…

 

The rattlesnake was used to heighten danger and excitement during pitches

Most famous was Clark Stanley —  dressed like a cowboy and wowed crowds at the 1893 World’s Columbian Exposition in Chicago battling rattlers before their eyes

His wife played a role in his traveling show, donning an outfit made of rattlesnake skin from head-to-toe, as seen in this rare postcard from Dr. Nickell’s collection:

Photo courtesy Ceros.com

https://www.ceros.com/originals/strange-true-marketing-stories-snake-oil-truth-advertising/

Public outrage over hucksters, medical quackery and the like led to the Pure Food and Drug Act in 1907

A footnote to Clark Stanley;s Snake oil Liniment. A shipment was seized by the US gov in 1917 and tested. It contained mineral oil, red pepper (which heats the skin) traces of turpentine or camphor and 1% of fatty oil but probably from cattle, not snakes.

He was fined $20 ($429 in today’s dollars) for mis-branding his product by falsely and fraudulently representing it as a remedy for all pain.

 

Image: The Henry Ford Museum medicine collection (Smithsonian photo)

What was actually in some of these medicines? Smithsonian magazine article on Snake Oil

The Great American Fraud: Quacks and quackery in medicine

http://mentalfloss.com/article/85554/15-curious-quack-remedies-age-patent-medicine

https://www.neatorama.com/2012/07/02/the-golden-age-of-quackery/

 

• Mrs. Winslow’s Soothing Syrup

  • Morphine – habit forming

    • affect breathing dosage is important

• Make-Man tablets: Iron converts puny weaklings into husky men

  • 50 cents a tin

  • early casualty of the US Food and Drug Act 1907

    • potassium sulfate (laxative nausea etc), ferrous carbonate(slightly toxic), iron oxide/ferrous oxide (stomach pain), aloes and poisons

 

• Lydia E. Pinkham’s vegetable Compound for “female complaints”

  • Made in Lydia’s kitchen in 1873. A mix of alcohol and herbs

    • 20% alcohol

      • beer 5% wine about 12% A shot is 40%

End of Snake Oil

Upton Sinclair’s investigation and subsequent public outcry led Teddy Roosevelt to

and his administration to pass two important pieces of legislation: The Meat Inspection Act and the Pure Food and Drug Act of 1906.

The Act would later evolve into the modern day Food and Drug Administration in 1930, but at the time it only applied to food and drugs moving in interstate commerce.

the “Progressive Era”—that saw a push towards more protections for consumers against unfair business practices.

Modern Snake Oil:

What makes it work?

• The appropriation of scientific teminology to tout snake oil.
• Misrepresented research from real scientists.
• A website slathered in testimonials.
• Vague medical claims about pain relief, blood pressure and curing headaches. https://www.wired.com/2007/11/10-awesome-gadg/

Sea Monkeys

Hans Hillewaert, Wikimedia Commons // CC BY SA-4.0

http://mentalfloss.com/article/56755/16-amazing-facts-about-sea-monkeys