Samuel Hopkins Adams wrote The Great American Fraud as a series of investigative articles for Collier’s in the mid-1900s, later gathered into book form. It is expository journalism—muckraking reportage rather than narrative—and its subject is the American patent-medicine industry: the nostrums sold by the million, the advertising machinery that pushed them, and the newspapers, magazines, and even medical journals that took their money. Adams writes as a reporter with a case to make, naming firms, quoting labels and contracts, and following the trade from the drugstore counter to the halls of Congress.
The book’s central claim is blunt. The proprietary-medicine business, as Adams describes it, is “founded mainly on fraud and poison.” Americans were spending some seventy-five million dollars a year on preparations that were, in his accounting, either harmless frauds or active drugs—alcohol, opium, cocaine, acetanilid—sold under false colors. He insists there are no honest internal remedies among the heavily advertised brands, and that the press, dependent on patent-medicine revenue, had become the industry’s accomplice. The remedy he presses is exposure: make the situation familiar enough, and the worst of the evil will end.
How the Case Against the Nostrums Builds
The Fraud and Poison at the Heart of the Trade
Samuel Hopkins Adams opens his series with a blunt thesis: the patent-medicine industry is “founded mainly on fraud and poison,” and his aim is to make the situation so familiar that its worst aspect ends speedily. He notes early results—action by the National Government, some states, and a few more reputable newspapers. Gullible America, he reckons, will spend some seventy-five million dollars this year on nostrums, swallowing alcohol, opiates, narcotics, and above all undiluted fraud, peddled by skillful advertising “bunco men.” Were newspapers, magazines, and medical journals to refuse such advertising, the business would within five years be as scandalously historic as the South Sea Bubble, and the nation richer in lives and money, with drunkards and drug-fiends saved.
He refuses to lump all proprietary medicines together, though he finds a lamentable lack of qualified sheep. Honest external remedies may exist, but not among much-advertised ointments: Cuticura rivals the loudest cure-all in advertising extravagance, and Pond’s Extract ran “display” advertisements headed “Meningitis” during a New York epidemic scare—witch-hazel being about as effective against that disease as molasses. Peruna, he adds, ghoul-like exploited the yellow-fever scourge in New Orleans, aided by southern newspapers that printed as news an “interview” with Dr. Hartman, the company’s president.
Internal remedies fall under two heads: harmless frauds or deleterious drugs. Laxatives do what they promise but become a baneful necessity; acetanilid relieves certain headaches yet can stop the heart and enslave its users; cocain and opium hide in “cough remedies,” “soothing syrups,” and “catarrh powders”; alcohol, fed daily in increasing doses to women and children, makes for drunkenness—better labeled whiskey than alcohol-laden “bitters,” “sarsaparillas,” and “tonics.” None of these cures really cures serious disease, though most users recover, as most sick people recover anyway.
Testimonials and the Red Clause
The grateful patient writes testimonials; the man who dies says nothing. Only favorable results get recorded because advertisers control publicity, and printed testimonials represent the most glowing opinions obtainable, generally from a low order of intelligence—yet the public treats them as typical. An expert for a prominent cure-all explains the mechanism: patients see advertising, read testimonials, are convinced, gain faith in Peruna, receive a gentle stimulant, and get well. In self-limiting diseases only money is lost; with rheumatism and sciatica, added pangs; with consumption and Bright’s disease, perhaps needless death—but no proof ties the bottle to the death, and newspapers won’t publish injurious items about advertisers.
With few honorable exceptions, Adams writes, the U.S. press stands at the beck and call of patent medicines. F. J. Cheney, proprietor of Hall’s Catarrh Cure and president of the Proprietary Association of America, devised the “red clause”: printed in red letters on every advertising contract, it voided the agreement upon hostile legislation. He boasted of using it as a club against an Illinois legislator who tried to hold him for three hundred dollars on a strike bill—writing some forty papers that if the law passed they must stop doing business, whereupon every one ran an article and “Mr. Man had to go.” Many large firms adopted the clause; a facsimile contract with the Emporia Gazette is reproduced. Firms have also used newspapers against price-cutting, forcing refusal of advertising to cut-rate stores.
Fake Indorsements and the Medical Press
In a Chicago newspaper campaign, the agent for Paine’s Celery Compound offered a full-page advertisement with blank spaces, demanding four or five strong testimonials from local politicians; reporters were assigned to secure them with photographs, and several men admitted never having tasted the Compound, signing for the joy of appearing as prominent citizens. Another Chicago paper compelled its political editor to tout for fake indorsements; one insider says only two Chicago papers were free of the system. The Pittsburg Gazette’s trial rejection of all patent-medicine advertising drew no public support, so it reverted.
Control of the medical press is as complete, though by “ethical” preparations not advertised in the lay press. “Syrup of Figs,” pretending in dailies to be fig extract, advertises to doctors as senna; Antikamnia, an ethical compound, is a public menace through reckless lay use. An article on a “new drug discovery” was declined by a standard journal upon learning the drug was proprietary; offered payment at advertising rates to run as editorial matter, it was rejected again—then appeared simultaneously in over twenty medical publications. Few medical journals lack advertisements making quack-like claims or promising to cure incurable diseases.
Cocaine in Catarrh Cures
The book turns first to the catarrh remedies that carried cocaine. A quoted defense calls the dose “very small and harmless” and cocaine “the most valuable addition to modern medicine.” Birney’s Catarrh Cure, the author reports, ran as high as 4 percent cocaine. He prints a Birney testimonial from William Thompson of Chicago, obtained “without solicitation or payment,” in which Thompson says that three years earlier he was a strong man and now is “without money, health, home, or friends.” Thompson describes following directions at first, then increasing the quantity until he bought the stuff by the dozen bottles.
A famous drink-and-drug cure in Illinois had as a patient a fourteen-year-old boy enslaved to the Birney brand of cocaine and $300 in debt to his father. Chicago settled the matter: a downtown druggist, Mr. McConnell, noticed shop girls from a great department store buying catarrh powders at noon. His clerk warned them the powders contained deleterious drugs, but purchases increased. He sent word to the store superintendent, who remarked, “That accounts for the number of our girls that have gone wrong of late.” An analysis by the Board of Health showed the most-called-for powder was nearly 4 percent cocaine; McConnell threw it and similar powders out of stock, the girls went elsewhere, and he traced them and started a movement that produced an ordinance forbidding their sale. Birney’s Catarrhal Powders then brought out a cocaine-free powder, which had the briefest sale; for weeks haggard young men and women begged for “the old powders,” and as much as a dollar premium was paid for the 1 percent cocaine species. In Illinois a druggist selling cocaine in this form is liable to arrest, yet in New York at Forty-Second Street and Broadway the author saw a show-window display of the Birney cure.
If mendacious advertising were stopped and ingredients plainly published, the author argues, the trade might claim legitimacy in many phases; but no label of opium or cocaine excuses selling products never safely used except by expert advice. He believes the Chicago method is right: restrict the drug by the same safeguards when sold under a lying pretense as when it flies its true colors. Only then will law prevent a trade that “stupefies helpless babies and makes criminals of our young men and harlots of our young women.”
Preying on the Incurables
Incurable disease, the book continues, is a stronghold of the patent medicine business; the ideal patron is the victim of a slow, wasting ailment in which recurrent hope inspires repeated experiments. Newspapers carry promises to cure consumption, which is absolutely incurable by any medicine, though an increasing percentage of consumptives are saved by open air, diet and methodical living—a fact understood by all medical and scientific men. A set of harpies deliberately fosters in tuberculosis sufferers the belief that a fraudulent nostrum can save them. Many consumption cures contain drugs that hasten the disease—chloroform, opium, alcohol and hasheesh; others are comparatively harmless but delude the sufferer into neglecting rigidly careful habits of life. All who advertise medicines to cure consumption deliberately traffic in human life.
Members of the Proprietary Association of America, the patent medicine “combine,” urged that some firms are above criticism, naming H. E. Bucklen & Co. of Chicago, makers of a salve. The salve did not interest the author, but taking up consumption cures he ran on a trail: country and small-city newspapers lavishly advertise “Dr. King’s New Discovery for Consumption,” proclaimed “the only sure cure for consumption” and said to “strike terror to the doctors.” It is a morphin and chloroform mixture, well calculated to strike terror to doctors or any class except perhaps undertakers—a diabolical concoction for a consumptive. Chloroform temporarily allays cough, checking Nature’s effort to throw off dead matter from the lungs; opium drugs the patient into deceived cheerfulness; the combination is designed to shorten the life of any consumptive taking it steadily. Nothing on the label warns the purchaser, which would decrease profits. The makers are H. E. Bucklen & Co.
Another “cure” that does not print its formula is “Shiloh’s Consumption Cure,” made at Leroy, N. Y., by S. C. Wells & Co.; it contains chloroform and prussic acid among other ingredients. The makers write that after taking the medicine awhile, if not convinced of improvement, the buyer should get back his money; the author replies that a consumptive would be less interested in recovering money than in getting back his wasted chance of life.
Strychnin is the important ingredient of Dr. Bull’s Cough Syrup; the United States Postoffice Department transmitted a dose through the mails from A. C. Meyer & Co. of Baltimore. The firm writes that they do not claim Dr.
The Post Office Closes In on the Healers
The segment opens with a college head whose credentials ran through oyster-shucking, spiritualist mediumship, and peddling patent medicine. His book of knowledge drew five hundred to a thousand letters of inquiry a day, promised to teach the self-healing of every disease, and was billed as “the key of everlasting life.” The Post-Office Department investigated “Dr.” White’s scheme; he could not answer the inquiries, a fraud order stopped his mail, and prosecution and conviction followed. His book, the author notes, is a hash of old witch-lore, alchemy, and modern spiritualism stolen from various sources. His mantle appears to have fallen on Prof. F. T. McIntyre of New York City, who exploits “Uechatana and Bidwesana,” teaching people to heal the sick without doctors or drugs and pretending to do so free until the fraud-order section acts.
Adkin and the Vitaopathy Institute
Some months earlier the authorities moved against “Prof.” Thos. J. Adkin, formerly of Rochester, where he established the “New York Institute of Physicians and Surgeons” for “Vitaopathy.” His method consisted chiefly of persuading newspapers to print sensational headings such as “DEAD MEN TALKED BACK TO LIFE.” He claimed eminent physicians as associates but paid them at most thirty dollars a week, and outside specialists about five dollars a month. His advertisement said chemists extracted a life-and-health principle from rare vegetables, fruits, and plants; pressed for details, he could produce no laboratory, chemists, fruits, or plants, and admitted his “treatment” was tablets made to his order by Parke, Davis & Co. of Detroit—an “ethical” manufacturer. The author asks how their ethics comport with supplying a self-convicted quack. When the Post-Office acted, the Rochester medical profession did not escape unscathed: Adkin, believing local physicians were behind his discomfiture, sent decoy letters to them, and a dozen or more agreed to prescribe by mail for cases they had never seen—a sharp but salutary lesson. Present at the hearing was Hon. James K. O’Beirne, holder of several posts of honor in New York City and one of conspicuous dishonor, the presidency of the Force of Life Company, a swindle whose whitewashing by a prominent Federal official caused amazement; one of its fakes was a “Life-Kay Capsule,” said to contain radium but actually corn starch and calcium sulfid.
Rupert Wells and the Radium Racket
Science perverted, the author observes, makes the miracle-working quack’s agent; if scientists announced a method of conserving the sun’s light and heat, the papers would soon advertise “Bottled Sunlight” as a cure-all. Rupert Wells, M.D., appointed himself Professor of Radio-Therapy in the “Post-Graduate College of Electro-Therapeutics of St. Louis,” a chair with no existence in a mythical college. Wells is religious in his advertisements, favoring church papers with pious editorials and no conscience about paid advertising. His “come-on” letters are a series of lies: profound studies in radium administration, his professorship, curing consumption and cancer, a free method, Radol (radium in fluid form) which he discovered, and cures with testimonials. A Philadelphia woman who consulted him by mail received a form letter in which only the cancer’s location was typed in—”temple.” Attempts to buy Radol direct proved unavailing; he sent it only by mail after receiving a diagnosis blank. The Lederle Laboratories obtained Radol for analysis, which showed it contains as much radium as dishwater and is about as efficacious for cancer or consumption.
Radium Rings and the Claremore Wells
The author received a circular inviting investment in the Dr. Warner Remedy Co. of Chicago, proprietors of Radium Rings and Radiozone. Radium Rings are circular adhesive plasters claimed to cure all germ diseases; Radiozone tablets carry radio-active properties internally. Visiting the company, the author found it consisted of one Bird Collins, a graduate of the fraudulent nostrum school exemplified by Wine of Cardui. In dialogue, Collins admitted the rings and Radiozone contain no radium—”It’s a trade name”; no Dr. Warner was present or in the company—”It’s a trade name”; the remedies are made by Seabury and Johnson, another “ethical” concern; asked if there is anything in them, Collins said earnestly, “There’s money in ’em if they’re pushed right.” The Post-Office issued a fraud order against him. Radium Radia is a patent medicine containing no radium, its name typical of its swindling purpose; the same is true of Radiumite, a cure-all of zinc sulfid and lead. The Claremore Radium Wells Co.
The “Harmless” Infant Remedies
The segment opens with a label claim that a medicine “contains nothing injurious to the youngest babe” and is safe for continual use by infants. Adams argues that if a man were commissioned by the devil to deprave and slaughter helpless infants, he could hardly devise a more skillful method than this product. The “non-injurious” medicine, safe for the youngest babe continually, is a composite of alcohol, chloroform, and morphin. Any baby brought up on such an “infernal concoction,” he writes, would almost infallibly develop a craving for morphin, if it survived the repeated doses indirectly advised on the label. The Fahrneys were found guilty and fined $100—hardly excessive, considering the facts.
Hodnett’s Gem Soothing Sirup bore the “murderous legend” “Guaranteed perfectly harmless” when authorities took cognizance of it. The preparation contained nearly five grains of opium to the fluid ounce. The courts naturally held that opium is not harmless, and the “Gem” was declared misbranded.
Mrs. J. F. Marshall Smith of Minnesota, wishing to engage in the patent medicine business, got up a diphtheria “cure” and marketed it under the title “Humbug Oil.” The United States authorities took no exception to the name but cited Mrs. Smith to justify the labeled statement that her invention “relieves diphtheria of the most malignant type.” She did not justify; she confessed that the truth of the label was in the name and not in the claim. Adams asks what is to be said of a public that will purchase a nostrum cynically announcing itself as “Humbug.”
Another misbranded “cure” for children was Dr. Winchell’s Teething Sirup, labeled as “the best medicine for diseases incident to infancy,” promising to “positively cure every case if given in time” and to “cure diphtheria.” All these statements were found by the court to be false and misleading, and the defendant was fined. Such “cures,” even without dangerous drugs, are deadly when advertised for diphtheria, since they divert the sick from antitoxin, the genuine cure, until often too late.
Stuart’s Tablets and the Plea of Nolo Contendere
The passage turns to Stuart’s Dyspepsia and Catarrh Tablets, naming the F. A. Stuart Co. of Marshall, Michigan, as conspicuous in the “Rogues’ Gallery of Quackery.” Advertisements suggested their pills could repair a disordered stomach with the ease and certainty of a tinker mending a kettle; the advertising booklet claimed the tablets “cure dyspepsia in all its varied forms,” which Adams calls a wholesale lie. Knowing this, the concern made no claims of cure on the label, offering merely to relieve. Meanwhile Stuart’s Catarrh Tablets were exploited on the label as a “new and effective cure for nasal catarrh, catarrh of the throat,” other catarrhs, and hay fever, asserting that regular daily use “will cure catarrh.” The government invited the company to explain how a mixture of talc, calcium carbonate, sugar, and starch “will cure catarrh.” The concern answered with a nolo contendere—in effect admitting it was lying and would not oppose the case. The company then instituted a useful reform: it withdrew the preparation from the market, but the stomach swindling tablets still remain.
Label material for Hall’s Catarrh Cure (alcohol 14 percent; F. J. Cheney & Co., Toledo, Ohio; label revised February 1918; price 75 cents) is included, noting the presence of alcohol admitted but a misleading name retained.
Peruna’s Change of Front
Under “Peruna’s Change of Front,” Adams says he has left “our old friend, the sorely beset Pe-ru-na,” mainly because its decline points the true moral of “patent-medicine” fakery. Chastening reduced this former claim-all and cure-all to a humble frame of mind. In old days Dr. Hartman’s disguised booze went forth to the temperance trade promising to cure about everything from heart failure to measles, including rheumatism and dyspepsia. With the Pure-Food Law, Peruna entered a new existence with a new formula, label, and radically changed advertising. From a 1909 Peruna Co. advertisement Adams quotes confessions: “No one claims Peruna is a cure for dyspepsia”; “It is not claimed that Peruna will cure rheumatism”; “Peruna does not cure.” Had that last statement ornamented the Peruna bottle from fifteen years earlier onward, millions of dollars would have been saved to gullible America and thousands of lives preserved by proper medical care. The advertisement goes on to assert Peruna is “helpful,” “assists Nature,” and that “slight derangements …
Taking Stock of the Aftermath
Nearly two years after the series began and four months after the last installment, Adams counts the damage. Ten long articles and countless minor paragraphs had attacked 264 patent medicines, quack doctors, firms, and institutes. Of that whole roster, only two libel suits reached the docket and two personal protests were filed; the scores of threats and lawyer letters demanding $300,000 damages dissolved into nothing. The editors had resolved from the start to give every man his day in court, and only two minor corrections of fact ever came of it. “Lawyer letters” became office comedy, answered with the address of Collier’s own attorney. The Proprietary Association never sued but bombarded the magazine through newspapers it controlled, until most papers dropped such material as a brand of shame. Peruna’s expected suit never arrived; Piso’s protest was met with an offer to argue in court that chloroform, alcohol, and hashish cannot cure tuberculosis. The St. Louis journal hired to call Adams a liar died within weeks, its editor later surfacing in a corrupt lobbying scandal. Rupert Wells, whose “Radol” held as much radium as dishwater, admitted he was advised to prosecute but restrained by Collier’s wealth. Dr. Coffee of Des Moines answered with an abusive pamphlet and a lawyer’s hint that his client might seek vengeance under the code duello.
Blosser’s Letters Bought and Printed
J. W. Blosser of Atlanta denied selling the confidential letters of the sick. A Collier’s man walked into a New York letter-broker’s office and bought packages from a lot of at least 113,013 letters written to Dr. Blosser—photographed and quoted, they came from a county representative of the Department of Agriculture, a bankruptcy referee, a telegraph superintendent, a publisher, a milliner, and a clergyman, among others. Of the two libel suits, Pink Pills for Pale People used subsidized press and legal technicalities to spread the impression it had won its hundred-thousand-dollar claim; the other complainant will never bring the case to trial. Adams closes by noting his work’s praise from a score of medical societies and its permanence in state statutes, hoping public opinion will make patent medicine money unprofitable for newspapers.
The Pure Food Law and the Great Evasion
With the Food and Drugs Act passed, the frauds mostly conformed while evading the law’s spirit. Bull’s Cough Syrup, linked to babies’ deaths, dropped its morphin rather than disclose the amount, substituting codein—as bad, but a less frightening word—while warning buyers to “beware of substitutes.” Bucklen & Co. hastily shed the morphin from Dr. King’s New Discovery when “Let the label tell” took effect, still selling it as the old physician’s formula. Mrs. Winslow’s Soothing Syrup and Boschee’s German Syrup kept their morphin and printed it; Chamberlain’s Diarrhea Cure showed six grains of opium to the ounce. Kopp’s Baby’s Friend swapped “Warranted Harmless” for “Pleasant to Take” after the Menolich twins died, and reduced its morphin to one-eighth of a grain. Shiloh’s Consumption Cure shipped into New Jersey with alcohol, chloroform, and morphin all omitted from the label, while Ayer’s Cherry Pectoral printed a full open formula—fair dealing by contrast.
Ugly Disclosures and the Fight in Indiana
Hughes’ Rheumatism Remedy hid two grains of opium per ounce; Dr. Fahey’s “Absolutely Harmless” Pepsin Anodyne confessed its chloral and morphin only in tiny type on a flap. Headache remedies swapped acetanilid for near-identical substitutes—Bromo-Seltzer, Antikamnia, Kohler’s Powders, which a coroner’s jury blamed for James Tobias’s death—while Orangeine brazenly quoted Dr. Wiley as endorsing the drug he fought. The segment ends in the Senate: Beardsley of the Miles Medical Company, chairman of the Proprietary Association’s press committee, worked underground against the Pure Food bill through Senator Hemenway of Indiana, whose telegram promised, “Cheer up; Hemenway is looking out for us.”
The Machinery of Deception
Adams returns again and again to the same instruments of fraud: advertising and the testimonial. More than ninety percent of a nostrum’s earning power, he argues, lies in advertising, and the testimonial is its counterfeit coin. He shows how they were manufactured—agents paying five or ten dollars for a signed endorsement, sheets of letterhead signed in blank by “happy users,” congressmen and admirals wheedled by Washington fixers, a dead man’s letter running in a Doan’s Kidney Pills advertisement nearly a year after his death from kidney disease. The “Red Clause” devised by F. J. Cheney of Hall’s Catarrh Cure—a contract provision voiding advertising the moment a paper supported hostile legislation—illustrates how the trade disciplined the press. Adams’s point is structural, not anecdotal: the nostrum seller did not merely buy space, he bought silence, and the same grip extended to the “ethical” preparations that dominated the medical journals while posing as scientific pharmacy.
Alcohol, Cocaine, and the Hidden Drug
The book’s most damning chapters concern what the bottles actually contained. Peruna, Adams reports, was alcohol and water with a half of one percent of mild drugs, marketed under a definition of “catarrh” so elastic it swallowed pneumonia, consumption, and measles. He documents “Peruna drunks” in dry towns, a camping party that drank nine bottles after the whiskey ran out and left one man dead, and an Indian Office order absolutely prohibiting the sale of Peruna to Indians because as an intoxicant it was “too tempting and effective.” The acetanilid headache powders—Orangeine above all—produced a death record Adams compiles name by name from newspaper accounts, including a Philadelphia girl dead within three hours of following the printed directions. The catarrh powders ran as high as four percent cocaine; when a Chicago druggist warned department-store girls off them, the store superintendent replied, “That accounts for the number of our girls that have gone wrong of late.” Adams’s argument is that concealment is the business model: the habit-forming nature of the drug is precisely what makes the customer return.
The Quacks of the Incurable
A long stretch of the book maps the specialists who preyed on diseases medicine could not cure. Consumption “cures” laced with morphin and chloroform, cancer doctors with purchased diplomas and imaginary sanatoriums, the Liquozone promoter who claimed his product was liquid oxygen (which, Adams notes, cannot exist above 229 degrees below zero), radium rings containing no radium, mail-order oculists who diagnosed a nonexistent “paralysis of the optic nerve” and promised to cure it. What unites these figures is not gullibility but calculation: they know the disease is incurable, they know the remedy is worthless, and they sell hope by the bottle. Adams’s recurring test for the reader is simple—offer to deposit the fee payable only on a cure, and watch the negotiations cease.
Why the Exposure Mattered
Adams was writing at a moment when the ground was shifting. He notes early that the National Government and some states had already begun to act, and the book closes in the shadow of the Pure Food and Drugs Act, whose labeling clause he treats as the first real check on the trade—requiring habit-forming drugs to be named on the label would, he argues, strip the disguise from the morphine “cures” and the alcohol “tonics” alike. The articles themselves did visible damage: the Collier’s series helped push Congress toward the 1906 law, and Adams’s method—named firms, reproduced contracts, followed the advertising money—became a template for later consumer journalism. Read now, the book is less a period piece than a case study in how advertising, credulity, and legal loopholes can combine to sell poison with a clean conscience, and in what it takes to make a democracy look.
