The Great American Fraud: The Patent Medicine EvilAdams, Samuel Hopkins
Science
The Great American Fraud: The Patent Medicine Evil
Adams, Samuel Hopkins
Patent medicines; Quacks and quackery
That day reporters were assigned to secure testimonials with photographs
which subsequently appeared in the full-page advertisement as
promised. As for the men who permitted the use of their names for this
{006}purpose, several of them afterward admitted that they had
never tasted the "Compound," but that they were willing to sign the
testimonials for the joy of appearing in print as "prominent citizens."
Another Chicago newspaper compelled its political editor to tout for
fake indorsements of a nostrum. A man with an inside knowledge of the
patent-medicine business made some investigations into this phase of the
matter, and he declares that such procurement of testimonials became so
established as to have the force of a system, only two Chicago papers
being free from it.
[IMAGE ==>] {006}
To-day, he adds, a similar "deal" could be made with half a dozen of
that city's dailies. It is disheartening to note that in the case of
one important and high-class daily, the Pittsburg _Gazette_, a trial
rejection of all patent-medicine advertising received absolutely no
support or encouragement from the public; so the paper reverted to its
old policy.
[IMAGE ==>] {007} A WINDOW EXHIBIT IN A CHICAGO DRUG STORE.
{008} The control is as complete, though exercised by a class of
nostrums somewhat differently exploited, but essentially the same.
Only "ethical" preparations are permitted in the representative medical
press, that is, articles not advertised in the lay press. Yet this
distinction is not strictly adhered to. "Syrup of Figs," for instance,
which makes widespread pretense in the dailies to be an extract of the
fig, advertises in the medical journals for what it is, a preparation
of senna. Antikamnia, an "ethical" proprietary compound, for a long
time exploited itself to the profession by a campaign of ridiculous
extravagance, and is to-day by the extent of its reckless _use_ on the
part of ignorant laymen a public menace. Recently an article announcing
a startling new drug discovery and signed by a physician was offered to
a standard medical journal, which declined it on learning that the drug
was a proprietary preparation. The contribution was returned to the
editor with an offer of payment at advertising rates if it were printed
as editorial reading matter, only to be rejected on the new basis.
Subsequently it appeared simultaneously in more than twenty medical
publications as reading matter. There are to-day very few medical
publications which do not carry advertisements conceived in the same
spirit and making much tin same exhaustive claims as the ordinary quack
"ads" of the daily press, and still fewer that are free from promises
to "cure" diseases which are incurable by any medicine. Thus the medical
press is as strongly enmeshed by the "ethical" druggers as the lay press
is by Paine, "Dr." Kilmer, Lydia Pinkham, Dr. Hartman, "Hall" of the
"red clause" and the rest of the edifying band of life-savers, leaving
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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