Ep 224 Snake Oil: The Great American Fraud

0:00 I was born in Abilene, Taylor County, Texas, and at the age of 14, I took my first trip up the trail and followed the life of a cowboy for 11 years. After the roundup in the spring of 1879, I started with some of my father's best friends to the Hopi Pueblos at Wolpe, Arizona, to witness the snake dance, which takes place once in two years. After my friends and I witnessed the snake dance, they returned to Texas, and I was so much pleased with the dance, I decided to remain with them and see the dance again.

0:33 I lived with the Hopi tribe two years and five months, and during that time, I learned their language and dances and the secret of making their medicines. The medicine that interested me most was their snake oil medicine, as they call it. It is used for rheumatism, contracted cords, and all aches and pains. As I was thought a great deal of by the medicine man, he gave me the secret of making the snake oil medicine, which is now named Clark Stanley's Snake Oil Liniment. After leaving the Hopi Indians, I went to my home in Texas, and seeing some of my friends there who were troubled with rheumatism, I concluded to make my first snake oil liniment, and I gave several bottles away to my friends. And it proved

1:15 such a success in curing them that I began to manufacture it and put it on the market. I traveled through the western and southwestern states and met with unbounded success. And during the World's Fair in Chicago in 1893, as an advertisement, I made my snake oil liniment in full view of the audience, killing hundreds of snakes which were shipped to me by my two brothers from my home in Texas. A druggist from Boston who attended the World's Fair and witnessed my killing of the snakes, and the manufacturing of the liniment, became deeply interested, and through him I was induced to come east, and I settled in the town of Beverly, Massachusetts. There I started to manufacture snake oil liniment for the eastern trade. Finding my factory

2:01 too small, I decided to go to Providence, Rhode Island, where I secured a plant much more suitable for my business, where I am now permanently located.

2:12 Thank you.

2:40 Thank you.

2:56 I want everything, Erin.

2:58 You'll get it.

2:59 I want to know everything.

3:03 So that was an excerpt from The Life and Adventures of the American Cowboy, Life in the Far West by Clark Stanley, better known as the Rattlesnake King.

3:14 Sorry, self-titled rattlesnake king.

3:17 Oh, yes, of course.

3:17 Self-titled American cowboy.

3:19 Self-titled everything. It turns out you can have all the titles you want when you self-title.

3:24 Oh, wow. We should get in on that.

3:26 We should. But, yeah, that is a legitimate salesman of snake oil, a snake oil salesman.

3:38 I can't wait because before we decided to do this episode and you told me, I didn't even know that snake oil was a thing that was like a snake oil.

3:48 Oh, yeah.

3:49 No, snake oil. It is because we use it so much these days to refer to, you know, hucksters and quacks and whatever. Right, junk. But no, it has its roots.

4:00 It has its roots.

4:01 And we'll get into all of it today. I can't wait. Hi, I'm Erin Welsh.

4:05 And I'm Erin Allman-Updike.

4:06 And this is This Podcast Will Kill You.

4:09 Welcome to Snake Oil.

4:11 To Snake Oil. So we're doing something a little bit different for this episode and next episode. So usually we do episodes, if you've listened before ever.

4:20 If this is your first episode, thank you so much for tuning in.

4:24 Wow, thank you. And this is unusual. Usually we take one subject and we kind of split it into two and decide, you know, okay, you do the biology and the current research. I'll do the history and evolution, whatever. And we were like, but some of these topics that we've had on our list for so long are so good and don't really lend themselves to that traditional split.

4:48 And so we were like, let's each pick topics that we want to do and cover them individually.

4:54 So we're just doing whatever we want.

4:56 Yes.

4:58 We're like, can we do this? And then we're like, it's our podcast. We can do this.

5:01 We can do whatever we want, unless you tell us that you hate this, and then we'll have to go back to doing things a different way.

5:05 But today... And we appreciate your feedback.

5:07 We do.

5:08 Thank you. Give it to us.

5:10 Today, Erin Welsh is going to tell us all about snake oil because she wants to and because I want to hear it.

5:16 Yes.

5:17 I've been wanting to do this for so long. And next week, it actually goes really well.

5:21 It ended up working out well.

5:23 It's almost like we've worked together for... Nearly 10 years or something.

5:28 But yeah, next week, Erin Allman Uptake will be doing peptides.

5:32 Peptides.

5:33 Nice. I cannot wait for that. I honestly want to just like skip this and go straight to it.

5:41 I want this, but then I am excited to talk about. I am really excited to talk about those too. Well, before we can do any of this, it's quarantini time.

5:49 It's quarantini time. What are we drinking today, Erin?

5:52 Erin, we are drinking Erin's Elixir.

5:55 Ooh, so mysterious.

5:56 So mysterious.

5:57 What's in Erin's elixir?

5:59 That's proprietary knowledge. I will not be telling you. Sorry. You cannot find the full recipe on our website or on our social media, but you should follow us there anyway.

6:14 But for $ 19. 99, you can buy a bottle that is sure to cure your rheumatism.

6:19 Only six small installments of $ 19.

6:21 99.

6:21 Not including shipping and handling.

6:24 Never.

6:26 Be prepared to give your card number over the phone. Yeah, Erin's Elixir. You can't find it anywhere. It's... It's good for what ails you, I guess.

6:38 It sure is.

6:39 Website stuff. We don't even need to go there. Let's just get started.

6:43 Give it to me, Erin.

6:44 Great.

7:00 Clark Stanley, the rattlesnake king, he holds a special place in the history of quack medicine in the United States, not because he invented snake oil or was the only one to sell it. What Stanley did was help turn snake oil from just a name for a type of medicine to a derogatory term for a worthless pseudoscientific remedy. Yeah.

7:24 What a, like, tagline to have. Yeah, legacy. That's the word.

7:30 Similarly, he helped snake oil salesmen shift from a legitimate career to an insult. In his book, published in 1897, which is where that firsthand account came from, Stanley leaves off having set up shop in Providence, Rhode Island. And there he enjoyed many years of success, hawking his snake oil for 50 cents a bottle and shipping loads of the stuff across the entire country, convincing people that his oil was curing their rheumatism, their gout, their indigestion, their frostbite, their snakebites, and so much more.

8:05 Frostbite, okay.

8:07 Snakebites, interesting. I mean, yeah. With all of this power, no wonder it just flew off the shelves. Of course, it could do anything. It could do anything. But, but, all good things must come to an end.

8:20 Don't they?

8:21 For Stanley, that end came in 1917. It took the feds 11 years since the passage of the 1906 Pure Food and Drugs Act for the feds to catch up to Stanley. And when they did, what they found was that in his snake oil... There was no trace, zero trace of snake anywhere in the concoction that he was selling, which is like good for the snakes.

8:46 Really good for the snakes because like he was killing hundreds of them on stage apparently.

8:51 Yeah.

8:51 I wonder if there's an eyewitness account of that.

8:54 I hope not.

8:55 But instead, what chemists found was that his snake oil was actually a blend of mineral oil, beef fat, capsicum like from pepper, and a touch of camphor and turpentine.

9:06 Okay.

9:07 Okay. So for this misleading advertisement, Stanley was fined a whopping $ 20, which in today's dollars is about $ 523. Oh, okay. Really big.

9:20 Time slap on the wrist.

9:22 Yeah. It's just a little tap, tap on the wrist.

9:26 Beep.

9:27 But his decades-long deception made news, and it gave new meaning to the term snake oil salesman for fraudster, a term that over 100 years later is still alive and well. Some might even say it's more applicable than ever. And, Erin, next week you're going to tell us about some of these modern snake oil salesmen and a particular business. treatment that they're peddling, peptides. But what I want to do today is take us through this first era of snake oil salesmen in the U.S. and how they spread across the landscape like a plague. And I don't just mean snake oil salesmen. I mean all of these quack patent medicine salesmen. Yes. And let me tell you, Erin, the more things change, the more they stay the same. Oh, yeah.

10:13 Does Stanley's fine, does that mark the end of an era where finally medical science and consumer protections forever triumphed over the Wild West of quacks and their elixirs?

10:25 No.

10:26 No.

10:27 Or was his fine simply an anomaly representative of the very brief window in time where the public and the law saw grifters for what they truly were? You be the judge as we journey through this history.

10:40 Maybe I've made up my mind too quickly, Erin.

10:42 No, I think that. I mean, long story short, skipping to the end, you're right. It's all the same.

10:50 Oh, but I can't wait to hear all about it.

10:52 All right. So let's travel back in time about 200 years. Okay. The United States had just marked its 50th year as an independent nation. And in those five decades had seen quite a bit of change. The population was growing rapidly, not just within cities, but also expanding westward. And the political atmosphere was shifting in response. Okay. Okay. can do the law. You just got to think about things logically.

11:41 You just got to use common sense.

11:43 Okay.

11:43 Not like learn the law.

11:45 Correct.

11:46 Okay.

11:46 Cool. So physicians ranked among those professions not to be trusted and they faced enormous backlash, both from the general public, but also when it comes to policy changes. So, for example, in the first couple of decades of the 1800s, many states had implemented a medical licensing system, kind of like we have today. Right. But over the 1820s into the 1840s, most states repealed those licensing laws.

12:16 So they had them in place.

12:17 They had them.

12:17 They were like, you have to do a certain amount of training and be licensed.

12:21 Yeah.

12:21 And then they were like, never mind.

12:23 Never mind.

12:24 Okay.

12:25 By 1845, only three states still had licensing in place.

12:28 Okay.

12:28 Cool, cool, cool.

12:29 Yeah.

12:30 So this is like a major reaction. Wow. Yeah. This is not just public sentiment. This is like actually in policy changes.

12:38 Yeah.

12:39 Why was there such an intense reaction? Why was there all this hate for physicians?

12:43 Yeah.

12:45 Three major factors contributed. The first is that there was a growing need for medical practitioners, especially as people moved into more rural or remote areas. And the medical schools out east, which is where they all were, simply could not produce enough trained physicians to meet that demand.

13:02 Kind of sounds familiar.

13:04 Okay.

13:05 And so there was also a resurgence of women in medicine or women who acted as medical practitioners. like midwives, whose profession had been begun to be edged out as licensing became more of a thing. Okay. Experience was valued more highly than education, but it went far beyond a matter of supply and demand. Education or expertise was seen not just as not necessary, but as a drawback, where the more trained or credentialed a physician, the more untrustworthy they became in the eyes of the public.

13:38 Interesting.

13:39 To be fair... all that education didn't seem to be doing much for the patient. Like this is factor number two.

13:47 Right.

13:47 When it comes to medicine and medical knowledge, this era was still very much steeped in centuries-old theories and practices, like the humoral theory of disease and like heroic medicine, which held that the more aggressive the treatment, the better. Things like excessive bloodletting, purging, sweating. High doses of drugs.

14:08 The goal was to shock the body to induce recovery. As an example, Benjamin Rush, who was a very famous leading American doctor and founding father, said that, yeah, sometimes you've just got to drain someone of about 80% of their blood to get any sort of progress.

14:25 80%. 80%? Yeah.

14:27 Oh, that's not a good idea.

14:29 It's not a good idea.

14:34 Yeah, especially in the era before blood transfusions, before any.

14:39 Cool, cool, cool.

14:40 Yeah, yeah.

14:41 Heroic medicine. Heroic medicine.

14:43 So it's like there's not enough of them. They don't know what they're doing anyways.

14:46 They don't know what they're doing. So does that education actually mean anything?

14:50 Yeah, fair.

14:51 Yep. Germ theory was still decades away. And without antiseptic technique, surgery was only for the most desperate. So the sciences in general were about to undergo... an enormous revolution that would shed so much light on how the natural world functioned. But that knowledge would take some time to trickle into public awareness, and medical science was especially behind the curve.

15:14 So yeah, the bottom line is that medicine and medical science was extremely limited in its ability to affect any actual improvement in a patient. And so did intervention actually do anything? Experience probably was a better substitute for education. So, okay, we've got a physician supply issue. We've got medical training not actually probably making much of a difference. And we've got the third factor, which is a general sentiment that expertise itself was undemocratic.

15:47 Interesting.

15:48 Jackson and others of a similar mindset disdained those experts who claimed authority by essentially saying, you know, oh, it's too complicated. You wouldn't understand. Just trust me on this. Like that was looked down upon. That was like, that's not democratic. That's not it should be available knowledge for all.

16:06 This should be understandable by all. And so they felt that A, medical knowledge should be available to anyone, not obscured behind a veil of mystery up on this ivory tower.

16:14 Okay.

16:15 And B, it actually wasn't that complicated. They're just making it more complicated so that they feel like they can be special. Okay. Yeah. Okay. Common sense is going to get you most, if not all the way there. Okay.

16:25 Okay.

16:25 So they saw medical licensing as more of a reflection of wealth and status than it was of actual knowledge or expertise.

16:32 Interesting, Erin.

16:33 And that accusation does have some merit. They believe because it was reserved for super elite people who were wealthy, people who had, you know, privilege, were born with privilege.

16:44 I mean, even still today, how much does it cost to go to medical school in the U.S.? How many hundreds of thousands of dollars of student loans do you have to take out? And then What specialties are you going to choose and where are you going to work in order to pay those loans off?

16:55 Yeah, I mean, it's all. In some ways, still have the same problems.

17:00 The more things change, like I've been saying.

17:02 Yeah.

17:03 But they also believed that anyone not just had the ability to treat themselves but had the right, should have the right to treat themselves the way they felt was the best course. Okay. And it's true that physicians at the time then and often now expected total respect and deference and did not tolerate questioning. I know what's best.

17:23 How dare you question my approach.

17:25 I'm very patriarchal.

17:26 I've been trained.

17:27 Exactly.

17:27 Yep.

17:28 So natural, quote unquote, natural remedies and homeopathy approaches that were available to anyone who wanted to use them and had very simplistic explanations. These were embraced over heroic medicine and humoral theory, which were still kind of obscured atop this ivory tower.

17:44 Okay.

17:44 Okay. So these three factors all fed into each other to form what's called the popular health movement, which took place from basically Jackson's election in 1828 to around the middle of the 1800s.

17:55 Okay.

17:55 Okay. It was a rejection of medical expertise and an emphasis on DIY medicine. Okay.

18:04 Huh. So you said 1828. Yeah.

18:06 Not 2020.

18:09 Okay.

18:09 1828. So yeah, as the author of The Toadstool Millionaires puts it, which is the book where I got, I loved this book. It was phenomenal.

18:21 Okay.

18:21 As he puts it, quote, medical democracy indeed was what Americans seem to desire. They might not decide to treat themselves, but they wanted no restrictions on their right to choose the method by which they would be treated. It was this quote-unquote common sense, anti-expertise, medical freedom atmosphere that patent medicines found their footing and flourished beyond any expectation. Of course, the sale of proprietary elixirs and ointments was not an invention of the 19th century. The patent medicine has a long, long tradition in cultures around the world, And self-styled healers had found success selling their wares on American shores since the early days of the colonies. The word charlatan, for example,

19:05 comes from the Italian word charlatano, which referred to someone who sells salves or other drugs in public places and maybe pulls the occasional tooth. Really? Really. I didn't know that. I did not either. Isn't that funny, though?

19:22 So it wasn't just like a total faker, which is like what I think of a charlatan as now.

19:27 It was like, I'm selling you your, and I'm pulling your teeth.

19:30 And I'm pulling your teeth. Public tooth pulling.

19:33 Hey, prior to fluoride A.

19:35 Yeah, exactly. With the popular health movement, it provided an opportunity unlike any that had ever been seen before. As the public turned away from traditional medicine and licensed physicians, they turned towards those purveyors. of patent medicines, like Dr. Elisha Perkins, who sold metal tractors, which were little metal rods that were rubbed over painful spots on a patient's body, their tooth, their joints, their stomach, wherever, to relieve pain or gout or epilepsy or animal bites.

20:05 Okay.

20:06 Or Mrs. Sibylla Masters and her Tuscarora rice, which allegedly cured consumption, tuberculosis, but was actually just ground maize. Initially, most of the patent medicines that found success in the U.S. were imported from Europe. But after the Revolutionary War and during Jackson's presidency... there was a push for American-made elixirs, marking a shift in the marketing of these medicines where they appealed to certain customers, like made in the USA.

20:37 Good old homegrown snake oil.

20:41 And without any regulation or desire for regulation, the floodgates opened. In line with the common sense's king feeling of the time, patent medicines escaped any sort of regulatory oversight. It was like, just let the market figure it out with this idea that if a medicine really worked, it would sell. And if it didn't, no one would buy it.

21:02 No one would buy it.

21:03 Use your common sense, right? To place restrictions on the sale of quack medicines would hamper the American economy. This was what Jackson and the popular political sentiment at the time. Yeah.

21:16 Capitalism will always win out.

21:18 Will prevail. Yeah. If a customer couldn't tell the difference between legit snake oil and fake snake oil, that was on them. Caveat emptor. Buyer beware. So whether the medicine worked or was safe was of minor importance. What really mattered was how convincing you could be as a salesman. Quack medicine sellers took varied marketing approaches, many of which feel identical to those used today. So, like, it's so– the number of parallels that I've seen throughout this– I've been wanting to talk about the popular health movement for years.

21:51 For so long, I know.

21:52 I love– this period of time is so fascinating to me because I'm just like, it's happening. Are we living it? Yeah.

21:57 We are.

21:57 Yeah. Yep, yep, yep. Okay. Okay, so– but these parallels– For instance, they capitalized on the anti-physician sentiment by either proudly proclaiming that they were not trained physicians or that this medicine had been denounced by traditional medicine, both of which were selling points. So one quack doctor, Swaim, who sold a panacea, which was basically just sarsaparilla, said that most of his peers had been, quote unquote, merely despised by traditional medicine while he had, quote, risen to the dignity of being hated, end quote.

22:32 I'm the one who will tell you what no other doctor wants to tell you.

22:36 Yes. Yes. They accused physicians of keeping the public in the dark and of being angry when these closely guarded secrets were revealed. Like your doctor doesn't want you to know about this.

22:47 No, that's every single headline on CNN ads.

22:50 I know.

22:50 I know.

22:52 Quack medicine sellers also played on very reasonable fears. Like there was a cough syrup bottle that warned, have you a cough? Do not neglect it. Thousands have a premature death from the want of a little attention to the common cold, end quote. They especially appealed to parents of children, which were extremely vulnerable to the many diseases circulating at the time. Men concerned about their masculinity or women concerned about their femininity were other targets. The fears preyed on were not just death, but also having bad breath or going bald or looking unattractive. Like without this elixir, no one will want to court you.

23:32 That kind of thing.

23:34 Without this elixir, without the solve, you won't be manly.

23:38 You're losing your hair. That's going to be a problem for you. Yep. I can fix it.

23:42 They loved a before and after. Like they would have before and after illustrations or like testimonials. Others offered secrecy. You could buy this medicine without consulting a physician about an embarrassing or shameful condition.

23:56 No one has to know.

23:57 Just get it in the mail. Well, this is before mail, but yeah. They promised a simple, painless road to cure or an easy mode of prevention. Against what? Anything and everything.

24:09 Everything.

24:11 The quack medicine seller of the 1800s can best be summed up by this quote from Toadstool Millionaires. Quote, There was no end to the quack's effrontery. He pretended to be a trained physician when he was not. He fabricated testimonials. He created diseases. He gave his nostrums foreign names and said they were imported from abroad. He asserted they were made of rare and expensive ingredients. He used the poor as decoys for the rich, trumping up a false philanthropy and claiming to treat the indigent for nothing. He crept under the mantle of all the persecuted scientists in history, asking self-righteously if Galileo and Harvey, Copernicus and Franklin had not been treated with skepticism by the learned of their day.

24:58 He faked statistical evidence of alleged cures. He insisted that his nostrims could cure with dispatch diseases that could be cured only slowly. He boasted that his remedies could cure with certainty diseases that could not be cured at all. Quacks were adept at prescribing for general symptoms as well as for specific diseases. Patent medicine promoters listed dozens of symptoms, some of which might occur in a person not really sick at all. All of this had the most disastrous consequences.

25:28 People who were not really sick were frightened into the medicine habit. Once started, they kept on, if only to get their money's worth from what they had bought, end quote. It's all the same, Erin.

25:40 It is.

25:41 It really, really, really is. It really is. Like, don't listen to your physician, your oncologist about cancer therapies. They're just going to tell you that it's incurable. Change it with this. I've got a cure for you. I've got a cure and it's painless and it's fast. And it's easy. And it's less expensive.

25:59 And you can buy it from me. Yeah.

26:00 Yeah.

26:02 It's so depressing because it plays on so much of.

26:07 Our real, like our fears, our anxieties.

26:10 Our humanity.

26:11 Our humanity.

26:12 And like all of the failures of the medical system, which are very real. And it's just going to exploit those.

26:18 Yep. Yeah, that's the sentiment I felt throughout reading all of this, writing all of this.

26:25 Yeah.

26:26 So, okay, let's keep going on the quacks, though. Yes, please. Because I feel like it just reveals a lot about, I think, today's quacks as well. Okay, so many quacks thought local, selling just to their town or their surrounding area. But others began to think big, promoting their product nationwide.

26:44 Vivid advertisements, patient testimonials. direct-to-consumer advertisement through mailings, traveling medicine shows, patent medicines were revolutionary for advertising in this country. You couldn't get to be like Clark Stanley without shelling out some dough for advertisements, and a sizable chunk of newspaper profit came from patent medicine ads. It was like a mutualistic relationship.

27:10 We're going to sell more papers. You're going to sell more oils. Everyone's happy.

27:14 I mean, without these medicines, some newspapers would simply have just folded like they would not have existed. And of course, when a newsworthy event was happening, patent medicines leapt onto it and they incorporated it into their messaging. During the Civil War, they would advertise to both the Union and the Confederacy. depending on where the newspaper was located. They would claim, like, Lincoln used this ointment to help his whiskers grow in a matter of days. They would promise a cure for GI, for gastrointestinal illness, which raged in wartime.

28:00 Of course it did.

28:01 There was a type of bitters called the soldier's safeguard that was supposed to protect you from typhoid, I guess, from dysentery, I guess.

28:08 Geez.

28:08 Not going to do it. If an outbreak of yellow fever was making headlines, you can be sure that an elixir that had previously been toted as a consumption cure would be now advertised as a yellow fever preventative.

28:20 Okay.

28:21 Yep.

28:22 In the South, they also advertised to enslavers, saying that this ointment or pill would, quote, protect their wealth. Patent medicines, yep, also used these earliest clickbait tactics. So like an ad was designed to look like a shocking headline. For example, this is a real example, great excitement in South Carolina, Beauregard a prisoner. But when you read it more closely, it was actually, quote, great excitement in South Carolina was caused before the war by the wonderful cures of bronchitis, asthma, sore throat consumption, et cetera, et cetera, affected by Wishart's pine tree tar cordial in and around Charleston. Beauregard himself might as well be a prisoner as to be confined with a distressing cough or sore throat and not be

29:05 able to obtain Wishart's cordial, end quote. Clickbait. Clickbait. Advertising in America was driven forward by patent medicines. It, quote, offered the ad writer his greatest opportunity, end quote, and, quote, medicines were worthless merchandise until a demand was created, end quote, according to one ad writer of the time.

29:31 Wow. Now I want, like, a Mad Men of, like.

29:34 The 1820s. Oh, my gosh. Can you imagine? I love that. Let's write that show.

29:41 Okay.

29:43 One of my favorites, and I think you'll see immediately why it became one of my favorites, was this ad, quote, Nothing in God's world is the matter with most of you, but worms, worms, worms, end quote. I immediately was like, goop, 19th century goop.

30:01 A hundred percent. Here's how to get rid of your parasites. Here's how to use your parasites to lose weight.

30:09 God.

30:11 I mean, and newspapers were just one medium through which people learned about different patent medicines. I remember I was a kid visiting Mammoth Cave in Kentucky, and the ranger pointed out an advertisement etched into the walls of the cave that we were in. I looked it up to make sure that my memory was correct. And yes, it was for, quote, Hoofland's Tonic, 1869, July 29th, O. Mill, Richmond, Virginia.

30:36 So someone had actually- Carved it into the cave wall? Into the cave, yeah. I mean, creative.

30:47 It's definitely- Get points for that.

30:48 Yeah, yeah. Over the 19th century, quack medicine sellers grew more and more creative, not just in terms of the tagline or backstory, but also in how these ads were delivered. Door-to-door salesmen, traveling shows, mailers, pamphlets in drugstores, trading cards, joke books, coloring books, songbooks, paperbacks, and especially almanacs, which were free and could be found in every home. There were volumes of promotional media. So as dystopian as it feels to be Like sitting on the beach and see a boat pass by with a huge digital screen advertising something.

31:25 We've been living in this dystopia forever.

31:27 Yeah.

31:28 To find it in a cave wall. Yeah. A cave wall! And it wasn't just newsworthy events that sold medicines. It was also a good backstory, like Clark Stanley and his snakes. Right. Stanley likely drew inspiration slash outright stole the idea from Chinese snake oil. So in the mid-19th century, 180,000 people immigrated from China to the United States and brought with them remedies like snake oil, which had long been made from the Chinese water snake and was used topically actually to treat sore joints.

32:02 Okay.

32:03 Later research has shown that oil from these snakes, these specific snakes, these water snakes, actually does contain omega-3 acids, which could have an anti-inflammatory effect. But rattlesnakes don't have as much omega-3, even if Stanley was making it from snakes.

32:19 And he wasn't.

32:20 But he was.

32:20 You said capsaicin was in there. And like that, we still use that in medicine today. So it probably made people feel tingly and might have helped a little bit.

32:28 As long as it makes you feel something different, right?

32:30 As long as you feel something.

32:31 Yeah.

32:32 Yep.

32:33 And Stanley wasn't alone in this type of appropriation. Native American remedies were stolen or repackaged to turn a profit, or they were just slapped with, like, I learned this from the medicine man, that kind of thing. Right, exactly. Exotic places or cultures were invoked to lend this air of legitimacy, along with mythical figures, animals, and grandmas. It's like, this is a secret family recipe handed down over the generations.

33:00 Or Jack has slain the giant constipation, like that kind of thing. As the popular health movement waned by the mid-19th century, science, although still untrustworthy, then began to be used as a selling point. So once expertise, once people began to have more Trust in science, then it was like, now we can use this again.

33:23 Now we'll call on you and use your labels to sell the same exact things.

33:28 Yes.

33:29 When iron was king during the Industrial Revolution, it became a featured ingredient in pills and elixirs, offering unparalleled strength and power as a panacea. Of course. Iron is everything. Many Americans probably first learned about germ theory not in the classroom, but from the labels of patent medicines. Does that not blow your mind?

33:51 That's so interesting, Erin. But it also makes so much sense.

33:55 So much sense. Because Quack's entirely capitalized on this discovery and the new jargon that they could now use.

34:02 Right. Sounds so science-y.

34:04 Yeah. So they sold their products like Microbe Killer. Science has discovered that all of these diseases are caused by these little creatures called microbes. Your body is right now riddled with them. I used to be the same until I took this medicine every day for six months. It took a long time, but now I'm a whole new person.

34:21 A microbe is a microbe and all are susceptible to my potion. Any doctor who says different is deceiving you and just wants to take your money. Louis Pasteur's favorite medicine. All of these types of things. Yes, they would absolutely invoke Pasteur and Coke and all of them.

34:35 But it's all the exact same. I mean, it's painful how much it is literally exactly.

34:44 We're doing the same thing today, Erin.

34:47 I know. I don't need to do an episode next week. We're doing it right now. It is 2026.

34:56 The number of times where I was like, I just had to take a second and just stop and sit there and realize that it's the same. History is repeating itself over.

35:07 And over again.

35:08 Does that make us feel better or worse?

35:09 I don't know.

35:11 I have a little bit at the end where I reflect on this. So we'll Let's get to the whole story of it because it does, yeah.

35:18 There's more.

35:19 It wasn't just germ theory, by the way, that was invoked. It was also botany, atmospheric science, chemistry, physics. Any new development was leveraged to sell snake oil. And by snake oil, I mean quack medicines.

35:30 Everything, yeah.

35:32 And so they were embracing science while at the same time rejecting it. They were stealing the prestige of physicians by using the title doctor while at the same time disparaging the profession. They felt free to use scientific knowledge to their advantage while ignoring any shortcomings of scientific knowledge.

35:51 They couldn't say, I don't know. They couldn't say is likely to. They would say guaranteed.

35:56 This will do the thing.

36:05 Or creating and selling their own proprietary elixirs.

36:08 Because they could make a lot of money doing it.

36:11 They could make a lot of money.

36:12 That is so much easier than seeing patients all day.

36:15 Yep. And saying, I don't know. Let me actually listen to you and let's figure this out together. And I want to give you everything that I know.

36:23 Yep. Yep.

36:23 Yep.

36:24 Yep.

36:25 There was.

36:26 No end to the tactics employed by snake oil salesmen. But whatever the approach, step number one was to get them to reject traditional medicine. Once you had planted that seed of doubt, then you could concentrate on separating yourself from the rest of the pack. So given all this, it totally makes sense that people gobbled up these patent medicines.

36:49 I mean, who doesn't want to take one sugar-coated pill to instantly cure all existing ailments and prevent any future ones? Buying it once, sure. But why did people keep falling prey to these medications after they failed to do what they promised? Sometimes the promises were so vague and sweeping that it was difficult to say whether the drug had actually succeeded or failed. If it did fail, the snake oil salesman had either long fled town or if he was still around, he would just wave it away by saying user error or accusing them of seeing a physician which had, of course, disrupted the course of treatment. Like, oh, this didn't work because you saw a physician, didn't you?

37:30 You did something.

37:31 You did something. You did it. It was you. Medical knowledge was still quite limited, but even as it grew, it remained incredibly complex, more complex, and difficult to explain to the general public. And so patent medicine sellers could cherry pick their explanations and tailor them to specific ailments.

37:49 And I'm sure many of them believed in what they were saying. At least I think that's possible.

37:56 It's a generous interpretation, I think.

37:58 Yeah, it is. I mean, a handful of them, two or three.

38:02 But I'm sure, right?

38:03 Like some maybe took something and then they did feel better. And so then they wanted for people to have access to this, whether or not that was the thing that actually helped them.

38:13 Exactly.

38:13 Yeah.

38:14 Yeah.

38:15 And in addition to this, certain diseases have a really unpredictable course. And so quacks could take credit for the cure and avoid any blame for the worsening of symptoms. Like tuberculosis is one of these. Maybe somebody got better after taking an elixir. Was it because of the medicine?

38:32 No.

38:33 It was just really this waxing and waning disease. That's how it kind of plays out often. And we also can't. We can't ignore or forget the placebo effect, which undoubtedly played a major role in the popularity of these medicines. How the placebo effect works and just how powerful it is, it's truly fascinating. Basically, if someone takes an inert substance, something that does not work, does not have any sort of physiological basis, with the expectation and belief that it will help, they can experience actual improvement in symptoms like pain, anxiety, and fatigue.

39:09 Major, major improvements.

39:11 Major improvements. And it's not clear how this happens, but some of these medicines had success because of the placebo effect.

39:19 And it's not that like, it is that it is working in that you feel better, which means that your symptoms are better.

39:28 Right.

39:28 So it's not just like you feel better. think that it's working no the placebo effect is that like your body is actually responding to something that has no physiologic basis in that substance doing the thing your body does it yeah.

39:41 Because your brain is so powerful it is really really cool the placebo effect is really cool and if only we could like harness harness it yeah yeah But many of these drugs had no active ingredients while others did have a.

39:54 Little something like alcohol or cocaine or opium.

39:58 Yeah.

39:59 And these were these ones that had these more alcohol, cocaine, opium. Those were a big hit for many people.

40:06 Of course.

40:06 And otherwise they would have often a toxic substance, something like belladonna or mercury or arsenic. Forming a dependency in your customers, abhorrent as it is, it makes certain sense, right? But why would anyone risk poisoning their customer base? Medicines were supposed to change the way that you felt. And it was thought that the nastier a medicine tasted, the greater its curative power.

40:31 Interesting.

40:32 So you needed nasty, like strychnine, to fight nasty. And the more ingredients, the better. But did these medicines actually contain what they professed to? as we saw with Clark Stanley, rarely. Ultimately, this fraud would usher in the downfall of snake oil salesmen, at least this iteration of him. Over the 19th century, the patent medicine industry flourished, so starting out with local producers and door-to-door salesmen and eventually flooding the market with quacks hoping to make their fortune with the next ointment or tincture. The production aspect and advertisement necessary to even break into the market grew so that only those who were wealthy to begin with could stand a chance.

41:15 That's interesting.

41:17 And the public, because everyone was like, this is so easy to do it. I'm just going to make a patent medicine and sell it. Right.

41:23 And then everyone was doing it. Everyone was.

41:25 Yep.

41:25 Yep.

41:25 Yeah.

41:26 And so then the public, faced with this unceasing flow of patent medicines, became oversaturated. and began to train their skepticism away from physicians and instead towards snake oil salesmen. With groundbreaking discoveries like germ theory, science was finally delivering answers to long-held questions, bolstering confidence once again in education and expertise. But this played a minor role in the rejection of patent medicines. For the most part, the discoveries being made were so complex that they weren't easily explainable to the general public. And the application of that knowledge was still some years away. People were still dying from tuberculosis and typhoid and influenza, and the sales of patent

42:10 medicines were at their height as germ theory was gaining traction. So it was like, you see germ theory emerged, and it's not just like a sudden drop-off. It's like, it just keeps going up. So it might not have been biological or medical science that finally checked the growth of quack remedies, but it was a science. Specifically... analytical chemistry. Ooh, we can see what's in it. Exactly. So with analytical chemistry, you could see behind the curtain of foods and drugs, what ingredients were present and in what quantities.

42:46 Yes.

42:47 And so then there was this forced transparency. And now quack medicine sellers became frantic, knowing it was only a matter of time until their fraud was revealed. Like Radom with his extremely popular new and improved fumigating composition for preserving and purifying purposes, aka microbe killer. It was a pink liquid alleged to be chock full of germ-fighting compounds.

43:11 It was found to be 99.381% water. The rest was a dash of red wine to give it its color. That is my Aaron's elixir.

43:26 By the way.

43:27 Just replicating that. So if you listen this far, you know the ingredients now. Yes.

43:34 That is amazing.

43:36 Yep.

43:37 Yep. And so state's began to employ analytical chemists to test food and drugs, trying to curb the widespread fraud that had infiltrated every corner of the market. Not just drugs. Like, this is also food. So check out a last Book Club episode with Dr. Deborah Blum about her book, The Poison Squad, for more on food adulteration. It's really good. Yeah.

43:58 Fascinating book. Ground bricks sold as cinnamon, right? Milk preserved from formaldehyde, medicines that were basically water. It was clear that the market was not just sorting itself out. The consumer needed protection in the form of regulation. Beginning in the late 1800s and early 1900s, no longer was it just a few physicians sounding the alarm about patent medicines.

44:24 as states published their findings in widely distributed pamphlets, it would be like, check out this thing that you commonly found at the market. Check out this drug, this food. This is what we have found with analytical chemistry. And journalists were writing these scathing exposés of these fraudsters. There was this local outcry that grew and grew into national outrage over the so-called Great American Fraud, which was the title of a famous expose about patent medicines.

44:53 Fascinating.

44:55 So we need a new Great American Fraud. Yes.

44:58 Who's going to write that?

44:58 Who's going to write that? I think many people are writing it all the time, unfortunately. But the tides had finally turned. In June of 1906, Harvey Wiley's Pure Food and Drugs Act was passed, a landmark moment in regulatory oversight in this country. When it came to patent medicines, this act required patent drug manufacturers to include on the label the amounts of certain dangerous ingredients like alcohol, opiates, etc.

45:26 And they had to indicate where it was made. But that was basically it. If you omitted things or lied on the label about quantities, you would be fined. Basically, though, it was a slap on the wrist.

45:37 Right.

45:37 This act did target some of the more dangerous practices of patent medicine manufacturers, but it didn't really do much for the overall market. In 1905, the year before the Food and Drug Act was passed, 28,000 patent medicine names were listed. The following year, which is the year the act was passed, there were more than 50,000 sold in just the U.S.

45:59 Alone. Oh, wow.

46:01 So from my perspective, it seems that what really changed things, albeit temporarily, was public sentiment towards snake oil salesmen. Consumers more wary of these alleged panaceas were slightly less likely to shell out their hard-earned cash. And as medical science finally provided solutions in the early 20th century in the form of sanitation, vaccines, antitoxin, antiseptic technique, antibiotics, truth and expertise was slowly restored. Interesting. And it's really funny because I'm still reading, it's taken me a long time, but I'm reading a book called Aerosmith by Sinclair Lewis, where the hero of the book, the main character, is someone who's a microbiologist. And I'm like, it's just that it

46:44 was a Pulitzer Prize winner. It was like hugely popular. And I just think of the time of when that was written and gained such popularity among general public.

46:54 Anyway.

46:55 So interesting. But the snake oil salesman was not and will never be vanquished. And Clark Stanley is not a quaint figure of times gone by. Oh, that Clark Stanley and his little autobiography.

47:11 What did he call himself?

47:12 Snake? The Snake King? Rattlesnake King, I think. But he's alive and well in the form of every supplement producer. The podcast bros hawking smart rings and peptides, chiropractors, wellness influencers with their biohacking, government officials weakening the already pathetic guardrails on proprietary medicines. Snake oil salesmen have just changed their tactics to stay within the bounds of the law while selling empty promises. Still using scientific language to appear legitimate.

47:42 Still preying on fears and inventing illnesses. Still disparaging mainstream medicine and expertise. Still using paid testimonials and inventing statistics. And still getting away with all of it. Successfully.

47:57 That's my next week's episode.

47:58 Done, Erin.

48:02 Yes. In 1904, the proprietary medicine industry was valued at $ 74. 5 million, comparable to today's value. So it's similar to today's value of $ 228 billion adjusted for inflation. It is projected to reach nearly half a trillion U.S. dollars in 2033. The reason for this continued growth is not poor legal barriers, although that certainly helps the growth of this. It's human nature.

48:32 It's the lure of a cheap and easy and painless and fast-working panacea is simply too tempting. And the public has reason to mistrust science and medicine.

48:43 So much.

48:44 So many reasons. Outrageous health care costs, dismissing their patients' concerns. the long-existing paternalism in medicine, particularly towards women and people of color, and the fact that science has solved many problems in health and disease, but far from all of them. Yep. Whereas the leading fears of 1880 might have been tuberculosis, now it's cancer or heart disease, still painful, still fraught, still open to exploitation. In most meaningful ways, nothing has changed when it comes to quack medicines. In 1800, the year 1800, someone wrote that, quote, perhaps no past age in the history of this country has teamed with such a multitude of medical mountebanks as the present, end quote.

49:32 In 1961, which is when Toast to Millionaires came out, the author, James Harvey Young, wrote, quote, Quackery is not only not vanquished, never in previous history has medical quackery been such a big business as now, end quote. And how many times have you heard someone, us on the podcast probably, say that medical misinformation has never been so rampant or that the wellness supplement industry has never been so booming as it is right now?

50:01 And do you know what?

50:04 Each time is probably true, right? Because it just keeps growing. It just keeps growing.

50:10 And, you know, I at first, like you, Erin, I was like, this is so depressing. This is So depressing. I cannot believe that this is the same. Like, literally, Goop is using taglines from traveling medicine shows about worms.

50:26 Yeah.

50:27 Maybe not literally, figuratively. You know, everything is lifted. Pretty close to it. All of the strategies. Right. It's wild, the parallels. So, yeah, I was really depressed at first. But then I have come, as I thought more and more about it, I've come to find this oddly reassuring. Because... If snake oil salesmen are a constant, if they are unavoidable, that means that they are predictable. So what can we do about it, right? We can, at least individually, I think, we can learn to recognize the signs of a fraudster, the sales pitches, the empty promises behind the jargony words.

51:07 Is someone guaranteeing the same results as a prescription medication or therapy, but with zero side effects? Is someone telling you that big pharma or your doctors are keeping secrets from you? Is someone preying on your fears and anxieties around health and disease? Is someone using medical jargon while not adequately explaining how something works? And who is that someone?

51:30 Where are you learning about the supplement or that peptide? Do they have any credentials? Might they be getting paid by the company itself? Might they be selling this? Might they be the owners of the company? Even if it's on a forum like Reddit from a friend, from an influencer you follow, consider that their motives are not necessarily pure.

51:50 There are supplement companies astroturfing all over the internet these days, including science subreddits.

51:55 It does make it hard because it is so insidious.

51:58 It is so insidious. But we all have the tools, right? Be skeptical. We are all capable of skepticism. And modern quacks are leveraging that to target medical science. Mm-hmm. But really, we need to be extending that skepticism to the quacks themselves. Medical experts will not guarantee results. They will hedge. They will say it's expensive. They will tell you about possible side effects. They will be willing to tell you when there is nothing left that they can do. Quacks will not.

52:31 But finally... With all of this, I think that we need to acknowledge that we are all susceptible to snake oil salesmen. It's human nature to want to improve our lives and be healthier and live longer and live happier lives. It's not a weakness to keep reaching for that hope. So with that, that's all I've got on snake oils.

52:54 I loved it. I loved it. Also, Toastal Millionaire, how was that written so long ago?

53:02 Do you mean like how was it written in 1961? Yeah. Yeah.

53:05 And it was like so relevant.

53:07 So prescient. Yeah. That and he wrote a follow-up called... The Medical Messiahs. And it's about the 20th century quacks. And I want to read it and maybe do another episode. But it's about a lot of the people who are promising cures for cancer. And I think it came out in the 70s or at some point in the 70s, maybe late 60s.

53:29 About like slightly more modern versions.

53:31 The 20th century version of Clark Stanley. But I loved it. It was one of the best books I've read. Like it blew my mind. It was great. And it's available on archive.org, Internet Archive. So I was like, heck yeah. But yeah, that's what I've got. It really, I mean, it did make me think a lot about today and how things don't change and how so much of it is realizing that we are all susceptible to this.

54:01 It's so true. Like, even I know I have bought things that, like, I know there's no way that this does anything.

54:08 But everyone seems to be saying that they're doing it and, like, it's 20 bucks.

54:12 What's the harm?

54:12 Right. What's the harm?

54:13 You know?

54:13 What's the harm?

54:14 Yeah. And, yeah, it's everywhere, too. It's so inescapable. It is so in your face everywhere.

54:22 Yeah.

54:23 That it is impossible to not get influenced by all of the influencers.

54:28 Well, it also made me, because like, I feel like there's been, I have felt a lot of doom and gloom about like the world and all of the different things that are happening. And many things are unprecedented, but I do think that at least when it comes to the misinformation, the lack, the mistrust in expertise, the rejection of medical science and the growth of patent medicines and supplements, that's not unprecedented. And that to me feels reassuring in a way, because I'm like, we've been here before, we'll come out of it.

55:04 We'll come out.

55:05 Exactly. I think that's what it is. And there were people throughout, there were medical doctors throughout who were doing what they could trying to inform those around them saying, hey, don't listen to these people. Right. But yeah, so.

55:19 So we'll keep trucking on.

55:20 We'll keep trucking on. So tune in next week. For now, I've just, honestly, my source for this, I have a few, but I would say my number one source is The Toadstool Millionaires by James Harvey Young. Great book. Wonderful. Love it.

55:35 Yeah.

55:36 Well, next week, we'll get deep into peptides.

55:38 Yeah, we will.

55:39 So if you've seen them on your newsfeed... Come over.

55:42 Come over.

55:43 I'll tell you the real deal.

55:44 I can't wait.

55:45 What your peptide dealer doesn't want you to know.

55:50 Oh, my God. That's the title of our episode. Okay. Thank you to Bloodmobile for providing the music for this episode and all of our episodes.

55:59 Thank you to Liana and Tom and Mark and Pete and Jessica and Christina and everyone else at Exactly Right for all that you do to make this podcast possible. Yes.

56:09 Thank you. Thank you. And thank you to you listeners and watchers. Let us know what you think about this new kind of thing that we're trying, at least for these couple of episodes. Yeah. Did you like it?

56:20 Tell us if you like it.

56:21 I liked it.

56:22 So I want to keep doing it. I like to learn from you, Erin.

56:24 I like to learn from you.

56:26 And thank you, as always, to our patrons for your support over on Patreon. It really does mean so, so much that you support us over there. So thank you.

56:35 It does. Well, until next time, wash your hands.

56:38 You filthy animals.