Friday, September 25, 2009 11:28 AM CDT
USA's Yesterdays: Pure Food and Drug Act: Patent medicines down the drain
By Hal Malehorn
The purveying of patent medicines had a long and colorful history in 19th-century America. During those years countless medicine shows traveled the nation, stopping at every crossroads and town, their barkers hawking various powders, potions and pills “guaranteed” to cure all ailments imaginable. And local newspapers (for a fee) similarly touted the merits of sundry patent elixirs.
But there was a problem: these nostrums were not only useless in preventing or curing ailments for which they were claimed to be effective, but their contents were also often harmful to consumers’ health.
Finally, proponents of safe remedies in 1906 convinced Congress to pass a law regulating such “medicines,” and this landmark legislation set in motion a governmental commitment to regulate the trade in such drugs.
At the federal level, legislation regulating the purity of drugs had a paltry beginning in 1848, when Congress enacted a bill solely to prevent the importation of adulterated and questionable drugs. But that bill did nothing to regulate the domestic trade.
Then, too, in the years following the Civil War, occasional city councils passed ordinances, and various state legislatures enacted piecemeal measures to regulate local or statewide distribution of patent medicines.
Between 1879 and 1882 several bills were introduced into Congress, for the purpose of overseeing the nationwide distribution of impure drugs in America. Unfortunately, no such bill ever made it out of committee.
Opponents of such statutes were many and powerful. For one thing, the patent medicine manufacturers and purveyors joined forces in a lobby to defeat constraining legislation, for the trade in such potions was a lucrative one. Similarly, many newspapers received up to 40 percent of their revenues from the advertisements they ran on behalf of the patent medicine industry.
In fact, across the nation an estimated 15,000 newspaper publishers, at some time or other, entered into contracts with advertisers of patent medicines. In these binding agreements newspaper publishers agreed never to permit to appear in their columns any news report that was even vaguely critical of patent medicines.
One principal objection to patent medicines that eventually emerged, however, was to the outrageous claims made as to their efficacy. Some nostrums were touted as curing all ailments ranging from asthma to whooping cough. Others elixirs were hyped as curing only specific ailments, such as yellow fever, meningitis, rheumatism, convulsions, pneumonia, tuberculosis, mumps and dozens of other complaints.
Luckily for the purchasing public, non-profit laboratories would eventually reveal that most of the patent medicines not only failed to cure diseases, but were also potentially harmful. In many cases, bottled “remedies” were most often liberally tainted with alcohol, opium, morphine or cocaine. Besides, they were sometimes laced with small amounts of digitalis, mercury, cyanide, hashish, chloroform, prussic acid or strychnine.
True enough, alcohol, for instance, might temporarily have provided the purchaser with a sense of well-being. Likewise, opium, for a time, might have soothed the pain. And cocaine might even have produced short-term stimulation. But these drugs all too often turned occasional innocent users into lifelong drug addicts, as well.
As one commentator of the times observed, “A mother who would have held up her hands in holy horror at the notion of her child drinking beer, which contained from two to five percent alcohol, thought nothing of giving that same child a patent medicine which contained from seventeen to forty-four percent alcohol.”
A further objection to patent medicines was raised by critics who pointed out that by practicing self-medication, consumers thus deprived themselves of the services of a competent physician. After all, folk wisdom had long held that after having survived a long and arduous winter, for example, people needed to take “bracers” to “tone up,” or “purify their blood.”
And so, the ordinary citizen was prone to investing a quarter in someone’s advertised sarsaparilla, or bitters, or vegetable compound, rather than paying a dollar to consult a doctor.
Yet another aspect of the fraud came to light when investigations revealed that supposed endorsements by ordinary citizens were spurious. In truth, the trick of the purveyors was to solicit from users personal statements of their sundry symptoms, and then publish alongside these statements the presumably helpful nature of the remedy at hand. Such letters of supposed endorsements were packaged and passed along, hundreds at a time, to still other purveyors.
At each potentially damaging turn, the purveyors fought back. They organized the pallid-sounding Proprietary Association of America, which established bureaus in many states to keep an eye on statutes prejudicial to patent medications. Whenever such a bill was introduced into the various legislatures, the lobbyists unloosed a flood of telegrams — not to the politicians, but to the various newspapers contracted to editorially oppose such bills.
A turning point came in 1892 when Edward Bok, urban reformer and publisher of “The Ladies’ Home Journal,” became aware of the dangers of many of the ingredients contained in various nostrums. Bok announced that his periodical would no longer accept ads for patent medicines.
Moreover, Bok contacted the Women’s Christian Temperance Union, recommending that they inquire into the advertising practices of periodicals of the nation. These newspapers and magazines were often grossly guilty of accepting paid advertisements for the most glaringly alcohol-laden potions.
Similarly, Norman Hapgood, editor of “Collier’s,” expunged all such ads from his publication. Then he set out to find a hard-hitting reporter to expose the patent medicine industry.
Fortunately, Hapgood came across one Samuel Hopkins Adams, who had written widely regarding medical matters. Adams bought advertised medicines and had them analyzed by expert chemists. He also revealed that an unregulated headache powder was proven to have caused a rise in deaths in New York City.
In time, the collective revelations by “muckraker” journalists of adulterated foodstuffs likewise caught the nation’s attention. Thus the growing public awareness of the need to eliminate rascality and fraud in all aspects of food and drug distribution caused Congress to act. President Teddy Roosevelt promptly signed the bill.
Perhaps the politicians by then were responding favorably to doggerel of the day: “Ere taking a drug, spend just a minute / To find out first what’s truly in it.”
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Mama says wrote on Sep 27, 2009 10:54 PM:
She kept hers in her purse and would feel AN ATTACK COMING ON and sip the bottle. I remember when the pastors wife was feeling poorly, so aunt and her were nipping the elixer. Both were snuckered and wanted to sing. The pastor and uncle quickly took them to the horse and buggys. ISNT ANCESTRY ENLIGHTENING? *SMILINGGGGG. "