Disposable Lit Reviews

Macmillan, 1959
302 pp.
No ISBN

Out of Print
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When was the “golden age” of quackery? No, it’s not the current Metabolife generation. According to Stewart Holbrook, it was the century immediately preceding the enactment of the Federal Pure Food and Drug Act, which went into effect January 1, 1907. From that point on, the manufacturers of patent medicines had to list ingredients on the label (including proportion of alcohol), and make no claims for their nostrums beyond what could actually be proven. (Nobody had yet thought up the disclaimer, “These statements have not been evaluated by the FDA. This product is not intended to diagnose, treat, cure or prevent any disease.”) For the enterprising capitalist without a shred of ethical decency, it was indeed the end of an era.

As often befits the description of a golden age, Holbrook begins with the ending, brought about largely by a series of expose articles in Collier’s Magazine under the collective title “The Great American Fraud” by investigative journalist Samuel Hopkins Adams. Adams gave the nation an exhaustive survey of the popular and well-established medicinal products of the day: tracking their originators, disproving their testimonials, and having their ingredients lab-analyzed. The series managed to provoke enough public uproar that even the powerful patent medicine lobby was shouted down in Congress.

Holbrook then takes us back through different categories of quack cures, and pauses for in-depth treatment of some of the most popular or most outrageous in their claims: the regional favorites (the Deep South always had a suspicious of “Yankee” medicine), to the various fad ingredients like celery, to cures meant for vaguely-worded “men’s ailments,” to the “bracers” — medicines with enough alcohol content that they would override whatever pain you were feeling, at least temporarily. (In a Temperance-heavy climate, these manufacturers could get their point across delicately by saying that their formulation was “well-suited to storage in a northern climate,” meaning that there was enough alcohol that the darned stuff wouldn’t freeze.) There were medicines revealed by God, passed on by Indian medicine men, discovered by preacher’s wives, and formulated at universities that existed only in the back room of the proprietors’ offices. Drugstore shelves were full of Hops Bitters, Peruna, Swamp Root, Lydia E. Pinkham’s Vegetable Compound, Dr. Steers’ Chemical Opodeldoc, Extract of Sarsaparilla, Cherry Pectoral, and Perry Davis’ Celebrated Painkiller. And newspapers were full of their ads — so much so, in fact, that the impetus for government regulation took several decades to reach sufficient momentum largely because most papers could afford to expose some of their biggest advertisers.

And because the range of quack cures went beyond the purely medicinal, Holbrook also surveys the various curative instruments also available: the Oxydonor, the I-ON-A-Co, magnetic belts, and radium-infused water vessels (which, even today, bear a significant level of radiation — collectors of quack paraphernalia are cautioned to handle and store these with care).

Through it all, Holbrook maintains a delightful authorial voice of dry academic wit in describing the enthusiasm of pitchmen and patients and the creativity with which local laws and regulations were dodged. There was a certain genius to pulling in the common man, who would show marked skepticism when buying a horse but would swallow an unsubstantiated claim of miraculous healing with money at the ready. There was, and is, a certain romantic thrill to taking one’s gullible fellow men for a ride, especially when it lines one’s own pockets, and Holbrook keeps that aspect of the story front and center.

If there is one glaring deficiency to the book, it’s the complete lack of any kind of illustration at all. In a field in which image and ad appeal were literally everything, it’s a gaping black hole to have Holbrook forced to describe the packaging, newspaper ads, and billboards for us (especially when he surveys the facial hair of the proprietors featured on the packaging and draws a direct correlation to consumer confidence in the product). The only illustrations are the collage of newspaper ads which forms the background of the cover and the endpapers. Today, such a book would be published in coffee table format.

But looking back and seeing that as much time has passed since the writing of Holbrook’s book as the end of the era he chronicles, I can see that those same impulses to defraud one’s fellow man are as much alive and well as they were in the days of the itinerant medicine show. (Just check the contents of my email inbox. And no vaguely-worded cautions about “men’s infirmities,” either.)

And although Holbrook studiously avoids speaking in politically-charged economic terms, his book can be seen as evidence against a complete laissez-faire approach to the free market. Sometimes, goverment regulation and intervention is the only recourse of public protection when people discover just how easy and profitable it is to fleece their credulous fellow citizens.

Nathan Shumate