Patent-Medicine Advertisements

PATENT-MEDICINE ADVERTISEMENTS

The Poison Trust

The 1900 census reported that eighty million Americans spent a total of $59 million each year on patent medicines. More of that money went to pay the cost of advertising in newspapers and magazines and on billboards than into either production costs or profit. These tonics, elixirs, and syrups contained up to 80 percent alcohol and often had morphine, cocaine, or the heart stimulant Digitalis as a basic ingredient. Naturally they sold well. Paine's Celery Compound, Burdock's Blood Bitters, Doctor Pierce's Favorite Prescription, and Colden's Liquid Beef Tonic promised to cure maladies ranging from a baby's fussiness to cancer. Many people trusted these nostrums as an inexpensive alternative to visiting doctors, and even church publications printed their advertisements.

Protests Grow

In 1892 Edward Bok, editor of the influential Ladies' Home Journal, had decreed that his magazine would no longer accept ads for patent medicines. By 1904, when the industry's success showed no signs of flagging, he began to print the contents of some of the most popular cures. He ran incorrect information about Doctor Pierce's Favorite Prescription and was forced to print a retraction and pay damages, but he continued his editorials, calling upon all decent people to boycott the medicines. He appealed to the temperance movement to fight them as if they were cocktails, which indeed many were. Bok hired a young lawyer and journalist named Mark Sullivan to check his facts and carry on the research. Lydia Pinkham's remedy for women had been a staple of the patent-medicine market for several decades, and the ads invited women to write to Pinkham for advice. Sullivan took a photograph of her tombstone in Lynn, Massachusetts, showing that Pinkham had been dead for more than twenty years. He interviewed people in the industry and described how they laughed, passing around letters to nonexistent quacks from sick and desperate people. Sullivan published two articles in the Ladies' Home Journal but Bok felt that the bulk of his research was not appropriate for his audience. Sullivan sent it along to Collier' s.

"The Great American Fraud."

Editor Norman Hapgood at Colliers appreciated the fine investigative work of distinguished muckrakers such as Lincoln Steffens and Ida Tarbell but wanted nothing to do with their sensationalistic imitators. He recognized the value of Sullivan's research and assigned an experienced health journalist, Samuel Hopkins Adams, to continue researching patent medicines. In June 1905 Colliers printed a full-page cartoon labeled "Death's Laboratory," showing a death's-head with medicine bottles as teeth, suggesting that the remedies poisoned children. On 7 October 1905 Adams's long-awaited series began to appear under the headline "The Great American Fraud." With documents, illustrations, and wit, Adams made a devastating case against the noxious cures. Collier's was criticized for joining the ranks of irresponsible muckrakers, but the magazine's popularity picked up, encouraging Hapgood to pursue other important investigations.

The Pure Food and Drug Act of 1906

While bills proposing to regulate the food and drug industries had been proposed for many years in Congress, the work of the muckrakers in 1904-1906 created an irresistible public demand for action. The early 1906 publication of Upton Sinclair's novel The Jungle, detailing the horrifying conditions in Chicago's meatpacking plants, dominated the headlines. President Roosevelt joined the American Medical Association, the Woman's Christian Temperance Union, and the National Consumer's League in fighting for this bill. The legislation required the label of any product to list harmful ingredients such as alcohol or narcotics, but it did not require disclosure of other ingredients. While an important step, the Pure Food and Drug Act ensured only minor improvements. Within a few years Samuel Hopkins Adams was again publishing articles on patent medicines, condemning the government for its failure to enforce the Pure Food and Drug Act.

Sources:

Samuel Hopkins Adams, The Great American Fraud (book reprint) (Chicago: American Medical Association/Colliers, 1907);

David Mark Chalmers, The Muckrake Years (New York: Van Nostrand 1974);

Louis Filler, The Muckrakers (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1976).