



Produced by David Widger








THE GREAT AMERICAN FRAUD

By Samuel Hopkins Adams


A Series of Articles on the Patent Medicine Evil, Reprinted from
Collier's Weekly

     I-----The Great American Fraud     3
     II----Peruna and the Bracers      12
     III---Liquozone                   23
     IV----The Subtle Poisons          32
     V-----Preying on the Incurables   45
     VI----The Fundamental Fakes       57

     ALSO

     THE PATENT MEDICINE CONSPIRACY AGAINST THE FREEDOM OF THE PRESS




I. THE GREAT AMERICAN FRAUD.

Reprinted from Collier's Weekly, Oct. 7, 1905. {003}

This is the introductory article to a series which will contain a full
explanation and exposure of patent-medicine methods, and the harm done
to the public by this industry, founded mainly on fraud and poison.
Results of the publicity given to these methods can already be seen
in the steps recently taken by the National Government, some State
Governments and a few of the more reputable newspapers. The object
of the series is to make the situation so familiar and thoroughly
understood that there will be a speedy end to the worst aspects of the
evil.

[IMAGE ==>] {003}

Gullible America will spend this year some seventy-five millions of
dollars in the purchase of patent medicines. In consideration of this
sum it will swallow huge quantities of alcohol, an appalling amount of
opiates and narcotics, a wide assortment of varied drugs ranging from
powerful and dangerous heart depressants to insidious liver stimulants;
and, far in excess of all other ingredients, undiluted fraud. For fraud,
exploited by the skillfulest of advertising bunco men, is the basis of
the trade. Should the newspapers, the magazines and the medical journals
refuse their pages to this class of advertisements, the patent-medicine
business in five years would be as scandalously historic as the South
Sea Bubble, and the nation would be the richer not only in lives and
money, but in drunkards and drug-fiends saved.

"Don't make the mistake of lumping all proprietary medicines in one
indiscriminate denunciation," came warning from all sides when this
series was announced. But the honest attempt to separate the sheep from
the goats develops a lamentable lack of qualified candidates for the
sheepfold. External remedies there may be which are at once honest in
their claims and effective for their purposes; they are not to be found
among the much-advertised ointments or applications which fill the
public prints.

Cuticura may be a useful preparation, but in extravagance of advertising
it rivals the most clamorous cure-all. Pond's Extract, one would
naturally suppose, could afford to restrict itself to decent methods,
but in the recent {004}epidemic scare in New York it traded on the
public alarm by putting forth "display" advertisements headed, in heavy
black type, "Meningitis," a disease in which witch-hazel is about as
effective as molasses. This is fairly comparable to Peruna's ghoulish
exploitation, for profit, of the yellow-fever scourge in New Orleans,
aided by various southern newspapers of standing, which published as
_news_ an "interview" with Dr. Hartman, president of the Peruna Company.




Drugs That Make Victims.

When one comes to the internal remedies, the proprietary medicines
proper, they all belong to the tribe of Capricorn, under one of two
heads, harmless frauds or deleterious drugs. For instance, the laxatives
perform what they promise; if taken regularly, as thousands of people
take them (and, indeed, as the advertisements urge), they become an
increasingly baneful necessity. Acetanilid will undoubtedly relieve
headache of certain kinds; but acetanilid, as the basis of headache
powders, is prone to remove the cause of the symptoms permanently by
putting a complete stop to the heart action. Invariably, when taken
steadily, it produces constitutional disturbances of insidious
development which result fatally if the drug be not discontinued, and
often it enslaves the devotee to its use. Cocain and opium stop pain;
but the narcotics are not the safest drugs to put into the hands of the
ignorant, particularly when their presence is concealed in the "cough
remedies," "soothing syrups," and "catarrhal powders" of which they are
the basis. Few outside of the rabid temperance advocates will deny a
place in medical practice to alcohol. But alcohol, fed daily and in
increasing doses to women and children, makes not for health, but for
drunkenness. Far better whiskey or gin unequivocally labeled than the
alcohol-laden "bitters," "sarsaparillas" and "tonics" which exhilerate
fatuous temperance advocates to the point of enthusiastic testimonials.

None of these "cures" really does cure any serious affection, although
a majority of their users recover. But a majority, and a very large
majority, of the sick recover, anyway. Were it not so--were one illness
out of fifty fatal--this earth would soon be depopulated.




As to Testimonials.

The ignorant drug-taker, returning to health from some disease which he
has overcome by the natural resistant powers of his body, dips his pen
in gratitude and writes his testimonial. The man who dies in spite of
the patent medicine--or perhaps because of it--doesn't bear witness to
what it did for him. We see recorded only the favorable results: the
unfavorable lie silent. How could it be otherwise when the only avenues
of publicity are controlled by the advertisers? So, while many of the
printed testimonials are genuine enough, they represent not the average
evidence, but the most glowing opinions which the nostrum vender
can obtain, and generally they are the expression of a low order of
intelligence. Read in this light, they are unconvincing enough. But the
innocent public regards them as the type, not the exception. "If that
cured Mrs. Smith of Oshgosh it may cure me," says the woman whose
symptoms, real or imaginary, are so feelingly described under the
picture. Lend ear to expert testimony from a certain prominent cure-all:

"They see my advertising. They read the testimonials. They are
convinced. They have faith in Peruna. It gives them a gentle stimulant
and so they get well."

There it is in a nutshell; the faith cure. Not the stimulant, but the
faith inspired by the advertisement and encouraged by the stimulant
does the work--or seems to do it. If the public drugger can convince his
patron {005}that she is well, she _is_ well--for his purposes. In the
case of such diseases as naturally tend to cure themselves, no greater
harm is done than the parting of a fool and his money. With rheumatism,
sciatica and that ilk, it means added pangs; with consumption, Bright's
disease and other serious disorders, perhaps needless death. No onus of
homicide is borne by the nostrum seller; probably the patient would have
died anyway; there is no proof that the patent bottle was in any way
responsible. Even if there were--and rare cases do occur where the
responsibility can be brought home--there is no warning to others,
because the newspapers are too considerate of their advertisers to
publish such injurious items.




The Magic "Red Clause."

With a few honorable exceptions the press of the United States is at the
beck and call of the patent medicines. Not only do the newspapers modify
news possibly affecting these interests, but they sometimes become their
active agents. F. J. Cheney, proprietor of Hall's Catarrh Cure, devised
some years ago a method of making the press do his fighting against
legislation compelling makers of remedies to publish their formulae, or
to print on the labels the dangerous drugs contained in the medicine--a
constantly recurring bugaboo of the nostrum-dealer. This scheme he
unfolded at a meeting of the Proprietary Association of America, of
which he is now president. He explained that he printed in red letters
on every advertising contract a clause providing that the contract
should become void in the event of hostile legislation, and he boasted
how he had used this as a club in a case where an Illinois legislator
had, as he put it, attempted to hold him for three hundred dollars on a
strike bill.

"I thought I had a better plan than this," said Mr. Cheney to his
associates, "so I wrote to about forty papers and merely said: 'Please
look at your contract with me and take note that if this law passes you
and I must stop doing business,' The next week every one of them had an
article and Mr. Man had to go."

So emphatically did this device recommend itself to the assemblage that
many of the large firms took up the plan, and now the "red clause" is a
familiar device in the trade. The reproduction printed on page 6 {p006}
is a fac-simile of a contract between Mr. Cheney's firm and the Emporia
_Gazette_, William Allen White's paper, which has since become one
of the newspapers to abjure the patent-medicine man and all his ways.
Emboldened by this easy coercion of the press, certain firms have since
used the newspapers as a weapon against "price-cutting," by forcing
them to refuse advertising of the stores which reduce rates on patent
medicines. Tyrannical masters, these heavy purchasers of advertising
space.

To what length daily journalism will go at the instance of the business
office was shown in the great advertising campaign of Paine's Celery
Compound, some years ago. The nostrum's agent called at the office of a
prominent Chicago newspaper and spread before its advertising manager a
full-page advertisement, with blank spaces in the center.

"We want some good, strong testimonials to fill out with," he said.

"You can get all of those you want, can't you?" asked the newspaper
manager.

"Can _you?_" returned the other. "Show me four or five strong ones from
local politicians and you get the ad."




Fake Testimonials.

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