Thus as the present century opened, the old English patent medicines were still being sold. City druggists were dispensing them over their counters, and the peddler's wagon carried them to remote rural regions.[114] But the medical scene was changing rapidly. Improvements in medical science, stemming in part from the establishment of the germ theory of disease, were providing a better yardstick against which to measure the therapeutic efficiency of proprietary remedies. Medical ethics were likewise advancing, and the occasional critic among the ranks of physicians was being joined by scores of his fellow practitioners in lambasting the brazen effrontery of the hundreds of American cure-alls which advertised from newspaper and roadside sign. Journalists joined doctors in condemning nostrums. Samuel Hopkins Adams in particular, writing "The Great American Fraud" series for _Collier's Weekly_, frightened and aroused the American public with his exposure of cheap whiskey posing as consumption cures and soothing syrups filled with opium. Then came a revolution in public policy. After a long and frustrating legislative prelude, Congress in June of 1906 passed, and President Theodore Roosevelt signed, the first Pure Food and Drugs Act. The law contained clauses aimed at curtailing the worst features of the patent medicine evil. [114] Robert B. Nixon, Jr., _Corner druggist_, New York, 1941, p. 68. The Patent Medicines In The 20th Century Although the old English patent medicines had not been the target at which disturbed physicians and "muck-raking" journalists had taken aim, these ancient remedies were governed by provisions of the new law. In November 1906 the Bureau of Chemistry of the Department of Agriculture, in charge of administering the new federal statute, received a letter from a wholesale druggist in Evansville, Indiana. One of his stocks in trade, the druggist wrote, was a remedy called Godfrey's Cordial. He realized that the Pure Food and Drugs Act had something to do with the labeling of medicines containing opium, as Godfrey's did, and he wanted to know from the Bureau just what was required of him.[115] Many manufacturing druggists and producers of medicine were equally anxious to learn how the law would affect them. The editors of a trade paper, the _American Druggist and Pharmaceutical Record_, issued warnings and gave advice. It was still the custom, they noted, to wrap bottles of ancient patent medicines, like Godfrey's Cordial and Turlington's Balsam, in facsimiles of the original circulars, on which were printed extravagant claims and fabulous certificates of cures that dated back some two hundred years. The new law was not going to permit the continuation of such 18th-century practices. Statements on the label "false or misleading in any particular" were banned.[116]