Samuel Hopkins Adams
Throughout the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries the public was inundated with nostrums, tonics, pills, potions, and powders collectively known as patent medicines. Patent medicines were hawked by peddlers, sold in stores and apothecaries, and sometimes by doctors. As the magazine industry grew it became dependent on revenues, and patent medicines became one of the first products to be advertised nationally on a major scale. The products promised relief from everything which could be considered an ailment, with many of the products promising immediate relief from a multitude of problems.
Patent medicines were for the most part unregulated, their contents proprietary and their promises unverified. They were one of the first products to seek celebrity endorsements in their advertising, and one of the earliest to be compounded of ingredients which could be matched by most pharmacists, who could locally create a similar product far more cheaply than the national brand. Many of the medicines were potentially toxic, contained addictive ingredients, and could do more harm than good to the health of the consumer. Nearly all of the liquid tonics and nostrums contained some level of alcohol in their mixture, others contained opium and cocaine. Some contained all three.
Samuel Hopkins Adams produced a series of article for Collier’s Magazine beginning in the autumn of 1905, which was titled The Great American Fraud. The series ran for eleven installments, with the first running that October announcing the intent of the series, and the exposure of the false claims of the manufacturers of patent medicines over the efficacy of their products. The series entailed some risk for the magazine as patent medicines were a major source of its revenue. In the introductory article Adams described products which were sold as medicines as “in reality practically cocktails.” Adams primary motive was exposure of false advertising.
The ensuing series was sensational and gained a wide following as Adams meticulously examined numerous nationally known patent medicines, explaining the components from which they were made, and gaining the support of much of the temperance movement in condemning the products. Several patent medicines which advertised themselves as a cure for consumption, as tuberculosis was then called, were revealed to contain opium and alcohol. Nerve tonics for children were also found to contain opium and hashish, others contained a healthy dose of alcohol. None demonstrated any effectiveness against the illnesses they purported to cure.
The series was a forerunner of both the Pure Food and Drugs Act and to laws restricting what advertisers could and could not claim regarding the benefits of using their products. False claims in advertising became illegal, although the Supreme Court later found that the proscription against false claims applied to the ingredients of a product, but not the compounded product itself. The American Medical Association published the entire series in a book which sold more than half a million copies, but the patent medicine business continued relatively unscathed until regulation of the industry began after the First World War.