Preface to The Toadstool Missionaires:
A Social History of Patent Medicines
in America before Federal Regulation
James Harvey Young PhD
As a master's student in history at the University of Illinois, I found that my research in the early newspapers of that state was often halted by my inability to keep my gaze fixed purposefully on the news columns. My eyes inevitably sought out the patent medicine advertising, and this interest worked its way into a chapter of my master's thesis. Some years later, I yielded completely to the impulse, persuaded that medical quackery has been—and is—an important theme in American social and intellectual history. Quackery is important because through it vast numbers of our people have sought to bolster or restore their health and because it affords insight into an anti-rational approach to one of the key problems of life.
This book is a history of proprietary medicines in America, from the early 18th-century appearance of patented brands imported from the mother country to the early 20th-century enactment of national legislation intended, in part, to restrain abuses in the packaged medicine industry, Native nostrum production began during the cultural nationalism of the Revolutionary generation, expanded rapidly during the age of the common man, received a new impetus from the Civil War, and reached floodtide in the late 19th century. The critique of patent medicine quackery first became significant as part of the humanitarian crusade accompanying Jacksonian democracy. As medicine became more scientific, the anti-nostrum movement developed a sounder base. During the Progressive period, journalists and civil servants added their support to physicians and pharmacists and created an articulate public opinion in behalf of a regulatory law,
The various stages in the development of patent medicine promotion and criticism form the chapters that follow. An effort is made to relate this particular theme to broader trends in health, education, journalism, marketing, and government. In some chapters case histories are given to illustrate the patent medicine situation prevailing in the period.
Dr. Oliver Wendell Holmes knew well enough that it was difficult to tell a mushroom from a toadstool, that many promoters of nostrums were sincere and kindly men and not unscrupulous rogues, though their handiwork might be hazardous to their customers. Holmes also knew that very few patent medicine makers, whether impelled by motives good or bad, became millionaires. Most of them, nonetheless, hoped to do so.
The author, like Holmes, votes against patent medicines, casting a sad ballot against the gullible entrepreneur during the early years, when medical science and ethics were on unsure foundations and the line was hard to draw between the legitimate and the quack, casting a bold ballot against the charlatan of all ages.
The "why" of quackery is a question that runs through the book, mounting to a paradox near the close: the rise of scientific medicine and the apogee of unrestrained nostrum vending coincide. While it is hoped that in the pages that follow light is shed on this problem, it is admitted that a full answer lies hidden in the complex mystery of human motivation.
Research for this book was done, in part, while I held a fellowship from the Fund for the Advancement of Education of the Ford Foundation and, on another occasion, while I held grants from the Social Science Research Council and from Emory University. For this support, I am most grateful. So too am I grateful for the assistance given me by the many librarians, archivists, and curators at institutions named in the Note on the Sources, in which I found the materials that compose this work. Particular appreciation is due the staffs of the libraries of my own university—the Asa Griggs Candler Library, and the libraries of the Schools of Business Administration, Law, Medicine, and Theology—who have aided me imaginatively and cheerfully around the calendar. My most frequent helpers have been David Estes and Ruth Walling.
I am indebted to the publishers of The South Atlantic Quarterly, the Journal of the Illinois State Historical Society, the London Chemist and Druggist, the Journal of Economic History, the Mississippi Valley Historical Review, the Journal of the American Pharmaceutical Association (Practical Pharmacy Edition), the Emory University Quarterly, and the United States National Museum Bulletin 218, Contributions from the Museum of History and Technology, who have given me permission to use material from articles of mine which first appeared in their pages. Gilbert S. Goldhammer and Wallace F. Janssen of the Federal Food and Drug Administration, and George B. Griffenhagen of the American Pharmaceutical Association, kindly read and criticized the first draft of Chapter 15. R. Miriam Brokaw of Princeton University Press has been most helpful with her counsel and encouragement.
Friends and acquaintances, learning of my interest, have mailed and told me about examples of patent medicine promotion they found in their own reading and research. In many conversations, colleagues have also aided me with suggestions from their own special fields of knowledge. Some, but by no means all, of my benefactors are named in the Note on the Sources. Let me here testify to my gratitude to all those whose interest has contributed to this book.
Above all, I thank my wife, Myrna Goode Young, first reader and key critic.
James Harvey Young
Emory University
October 1960
Table of Contents ||| Chapter 1
This page was posted on April 29, 2002.