: The Great American Fraud The Patent Medicine Evil by Adams Samuel Hopkins - Patent medicines; Quacks and quackery

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Our national quality of commercial shrewdness fails us when we go into the open market to purchase relief from suffering. The average American, when he sets out to buy a horse, or a house, or a box of cigars, is a model of caution. Show him testimonials from any number of prominent citizens and he would simply scoff. He will, perhaps, take the word of his life-long friend, or of the pastor of his church, but only after mature thought, fortified by personal investigation. Now observe the same citizen seeking to buy the most precious of all possessions, sound health. Anybody's word is good enough for him here. An admiral whose puerile vanity has betrayed him into a testimonial; an obliging and conscienceless senator; a grateful idiot from some remote hamlet; a renegade doctor or a silly woman who gets a bonus of a dozen photographs for her letter--any of these are sufficient to lure the hopeful patient to the purchase. He wouldn't buy a second-hand bicycle on the affidavit of any of them, but he will give up his dollar and take his chance of poison on a mere newspaper statement which he doesn't even investigate. Every intelligent newspaper publisher knows that the testimonials which he publishes are as deceptive as the advertising claims are false. Yet he salves his conscience with the fallacy that the moral responsibility is on the advertiser and the testimonial-giver. So it is, but the newspaper shares it. When an aroused public sentiment shall make our public men ashamed to lend themselves to this charlatanry, and shall enforce on the profession of journalism those standards of decency in the field of medical advertising which apply to other advertisers, the Proprietary Association of America will face a crisis more perilous than any threatened legislation. For printers' ink is the very life-blood of the noxious trade. Take from the nostrum vendors the means by which they influence the millions, and there will pass to the limbo of pricked bubbles a fraud whose flagrancy and impudence are of minor import compared to the cold-hearted greed with which it grinds out its profits from the sufferings of duped and eternally hopeful ignorance.

THE PATENT MEDICINE CONSPIRACY AGAINST THE FREEDOM OF THE PRESS.

Reprinted from Collier's Weekly, Nov. 4, 1905.

"Here shall the Press the People's rights maintain. Unawed by influence and unbribed by gain."

--Joseph Story: Motto of the Salem Register.

In the Lower House of the Massachusetts Legislature one day last March there was a debate which lasted one whole afternoon and engaged some twenty speakers, on a bill providing that every bottle of patent medicine sold in the state should bear a label stating the contents of the bottle. More was told concerning patent medicines that afternoon than often comes to light in a single day. The debate at times was dramatic--a member from Salem told of a young woman of his acquaintance now in an institution for inebriates as the end of an incident which began with patent medicine dosing for a harmless ill. There was humor, too, in the debate--Representative Walker held aloft a bottle of Peruna bought by him in a drug store that very day and passed it around for his fellow-members to taste and decide for themselves whether Dr. Harrington, the Secretary of the State Board of Health, was right when he told the Legislative Committee that it was merely a "cheap cocktail."

The Papers did not Print One Word.

In short, the debate was interesting and important--the two qualities which invariably ensure to any event big headlines in the daily newspapers. But that debate was not celebrated by big headlines, nor any headlines at all. Yet Boston is a city, and Massachusetts is a state, where the proceedings of the legislature figure very large in public interest, and where the newspapers respond to that interest by reporting the sessions with greater fullness and minuteness than in any other state. Had that debate been on prison reform, on Sabbath observance, the early closing saloon law, on any other subject, there would have been, in the next day's papers, overflowing accounts of verbatim report, more columns of editorial comment, and the picturesque features of it would have ensured the attention of the cartoonist.

Now why? Why was this one subject tabooed? Why were the daily accounts of legislative proceedings in the next day's papers abridged to a fraction of their usual ponderous length, and all reference to the afternoon debate on patent medicines omitted? Why was it in vain for the speakers in that patent-medicine debate to search for their speeches in the next day's newspapers? Why did the legislative reporters fail to find their work in print? Why were the staff cartoonists forbidden to exercise their talents on that most fallow and tempting opportunity--the members of the Great and General Court of Massachusetts gravely tippling Peruna and passing the bottle around to their encircled neighbors, that practical knowledge should be the basis of legislative action?

Silence is the Fixed Quantity.

Does this throw any light on the silence of the Massachusetts papers?

Naturally such large sums paid by the patent-medicine men to the newspapers suggest the thought of favor. But silence is too important a part of the patent-medicine man's business to be left to the capricious chance of favor. Silence is the most important thing in his business. The ingredients of his medicine--that is nothing. Does the price of goldenseal go up? Substitute whisky. Does the price of whisky go up? Buy the refuse wines of the California vineyards. Does the price of opium go too high, or the public fear of it make it an inexpedient thing to use? Take it out of the formula and substitute any worthless barnyard weed. But silence is the fixed quantity--silence as to the frauds he practices; silence as to the abominable stewings and brewings that enter into his nostrum; silence as to the deaths and sicknesses he causes; silence as to the drug fiends he makes, the inebriate asylums he fills. Silence he must have. So he makes silence a part of the contract.

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