Primary Source: Quack Cures in a Time of Need
Hucksters take advantage of a public in search of a fix.
On April 23, in the middle of the Coronavirus pandemic, President Donald Trump took the lectern at the White House press conference and told reporters that he was excited about the possibilities of injecting disinfectants to rid the body of the virus. The reporters emitted a collective “huh?” while companies Clorox and Lysol scrambled to refute the idea.
And yet desperate people without the will or ability to scientifically analyze Trump’s statement already began following his advice. In response, the FDA in Trump’s own government had to warn citizens on its website:
Both sodium chlorite and chlorine dioxide are the active ingredients in disinfectants and have additional industrial uses. They are not meant to be swallowed by people.
Quack cures — cures that purport to be real but really aren’t — show up time and again in American history, especially in times of great anxiety and uneasiness. A pandemic is prime time for fraudulent cures and their hawkers to materialize, but even “normal” life produces its fair share of head-scratching claims.
How did the following historical examples of quackery take advantage of desperate consumers? Have we gotten any smarter about spotting the frauds?
A former cowboy adapts a cure that actually works. (1905)
At the 1893 Chicago World’s Fair, former cowboy Clark Stanley plucked a live snake out of a sack and, in front of a crowd of spectators, sliced it open and plunged it into boiling water. He then skimmed the fat that rose to the top and used it on the spot to create Stanley’s Snake Oil. The liniment, according to historians, “was immediately snapped up by the throng that had gathered to watch the spectacle.”
Snake oil was an ointment that actually worked. It originated in China and was made from the oil of the Chinese water snake, which contained high quantities of omega-3 fatty acids that helped relieve inflammation, arthritis and bursitis. Americans learned of it from Chinese railroad workers who rubbed their joints with it after a long day of work.
Stanley was one of many entrepreneurs who sought to profit off this cross-cultural sharing of knowledge. Without Chinese water snakes nearby, however, he substituted far-less-effective rattlesnakes; after a while, his concoction didn’t even include that. In 1917, federal investigators ran a test and found that it contained mineral oil, beef fat, red pepper and turpentine — but not a drop of snake oil. He was fined $20 (around $430 today), and “snake oil salesman” became the go-to term to describe a huckster selling a worthless product as a cure-all.
A tonic promises to restore your blood with blood. (1890)
Patent medicines — over-the-counter medicines with sometimes dubious or even harmful effects — were wildly popular in the 1800s. Many were untested yet made wild claims about what they could cure (see the snake oil ad above) and disregarded any and all side-effects. One such popular product was Bovinine, a product guaranteed to renew your energy, soothe your infant’s stomach issues, relieve women of “female complaints,” and cure soldiers with open wounds. The key ingredient? Cow’s blood (and lots of salt and alcohol). At the time, drinking blood was considered as restorative as a transfusion, and doctors paid by the Bovinine Company sang its praises.
Eventually the veneer and the allure of drinking beef blood was stripped away by scientists. “Is Bovinine a fake?” wrote a reader to Journal of the Outdoor Life in 1917. The editor answered yes: “The conclusions reached by the Council [on Pharmacy and Chemistry of the American Medical Association] from their analyses were that any physician who depended upon Bovinine to supply nourishment in case of serious illness was deceiving himself, starving his patients, and possibly lessening their chance for recovery.”
When held to the light, this Bovinine advertisement revealed a woman waking up with her rescuer materializing in her window.
Look on me in my lassitude reclining
My nerveless body languid, pale and lean;
Now hold me up to where the light is shining
And mark the magic power of BOVININE.
A soda company calls its drink “liquid sunlight.” (1913)
Charles Alderton, a pharmacist in Waco, Texas, created Dr. Pepper in 1885, predating Coca-Cola by a year. In 1904 the carbonated soft drink went national and the name, like many patent medicines of the era, included the word “Dr.” to suggest that it contained healthful properties. Its advertisements certainly strained to give it that impression, insisting it provided “vim, vigor, vitality” and could be used as a “brain tonic.” In the 1950s the company removed the period from “Dr.”, presumably to distance itself from its previous claims of medicinal benefits.
Scientists tell us that all space is on ocean of ether in our solar system swims, and that all life, animal and vegetable, is derived from the sun’s energy, transmitted to our planet by this ether. Plant life organizes this energy for us in nature’s laboratory. As animals we then partake of nature’s bountiful store and the sun’s energy. Certain fruits, nuts and sugar cane represent this energy and vitality best. We have found this great natural law, and combine these substances with distilled water. The name we give our combination is Dr. Pepper.
Dr. Pepper is liquid sunlight. As the sun rules and governs the day, so should you govern your appetite. Eat and drink to build up the cells that are broken down by fatigue, mental or physical. Drink a beverage that promotes cell building, not one that simply deadens the sensory nerves. Drink Dr. Pepper. Solar energy liquid sunshine. Vim, vigor, vitality — that is what Dr. Pepper means. Try it.
A doctor touts the “excellent results” of light therapy (Spanish Flu edition). (1919)
Ultraviolet light has long been known and used as a disinfectant, and one hundred years ago, flummoxed Spanish Flu victims looked for cures anywhere they could. Doctors (or so they claimed) offered myriad “medical” advice; milk diets, vinegar baths and ice-chewing were among the more dubious suggestions. UV light, however, does kill bacteria and viruses. The problem with using it as a cure, then as now, was how to get it beyond the surface of the skin and into the patient, without meanwhile doing damage to the patient him/herself. One doctor in the midst of the Spanish Flu didn’t bother with those details.
Dr. Bjoernson of Stockholm, claims to have obtained excellent results in influenza cases by treating the patient with powerful electric light and heat. Perspiration is subsequently produced by compresses. The picture shows the doctor using the light on a patient whose eyes are protected by pads.
A president touts the “interesting” idea of light therapy (Coronavirus edition). (2020)
President Trump’s medical ruminations didn’t end at bleach injections. In the same address on April 23, he likely unknowingly jumped on the UV light bandwagon that others had fraudulently promoted before him. After Bill Bryan, the head of the science and technology directorate at the Department of Homeland Security, discussed some research about how COVID-19 reacted to sunlight, the president offered his own thoughts to the cause, arguing that we ought to get that UV light into patients’ bodies and clean out the virus. After harsh reaction to his statement, the next day Trump insisted he was being sarcastic.
So, supposing we hit the body with a tremendous, whether its ultraviolet or just very powerful light, and I think you said, that hasn’t been checked but you’re gonna test it. And then I said, supposing it brought the light inside the body, which you can either do either through the skin or some other way, and I think you said you’re gonna test that too, sounds interesting. And I then I see the disinfectant, where it knocks it out in one minute, and is there a way you can do something like that by injection inside, or almost a cleaning. Because you see it gets in the lungs, and it does a tremendous number on the lungs. So it’d be interesting to check that. So you’re going to have to use medical doctors, but it sounds interesting to me, so we’ll see. But the whole concept of the light, the way it goes in one minute, that’s pretty powerful.
I am currently working on a book about Ah Toy, the first Chinese brothel madam in gold rush San Francisco.
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