A patent medicine (sometimes called a proprietary medicine) is a non-prescription medicine or medicinal preparation that is typically protected and advertised by a trademark and trade name, and – often falsely – claimed to be effective against minor disorders and symptoms, as opposed to a prescription drug that could be obtained only through a pharmacist, usually with a doctor's prescription, and whose composition was openly disclosed. Many current over-the-counter drugs were once obtainable only by prescription and thus are not patent medicines.
The ingredients of patent medicines are incompletely disclosed. Antiseptics, analgesics, some sedatives, laxatives, antacids, cold and cough medicines, and various skin preparations are included in the group. The safety and effectiveness of patent medicines and their sale is controlled and regulated by the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) in the United States and corresponding authorities in other countries.Medicine patent medicine. merriam-webster.com
The term is sometimes still used to describe quack remedies of unproven effectiveness and questionable safety sold especially by peddlers in past centuries, who often also called them elixirs, tonics, or liniments. Current examples of quack remedies are sometimes called nostrums or panaceas, but easier-to-understand terms like scam, cure-all, or pseudoscience are more common.
Patent medicines were one of the first major product categories that the advertising industry promoted; patent medicine promoters pioneered many advertising and sales techniques that were later used for other products.See Conroy (2009), pp. 138–141, for an account of E. Virgil Neal, patent medicine manufacturer and promoter (e.g. the tonic, nuxated iron, which was supposedly used by Ty Cobb, Jack Dempsey, and Pope Benedict XV), Madison Avenue pioneer, and mentor of Carl R. Byoir. Patent medicine advertising often marketed products as being medical panaceas (or at least a treatment for many diseases) and emphasized exotic ingredients and endorsements from purported experts or celebrities, which may or may not have been true. Patent medicine sales were increasingly constricted in the United States in the early 20th century as the FDA and Federal Trade Commission added ever-increasing regulations to prevent fraud, unintentional poisoning and deceptive advertising. Sellers of liniments, claimed to contain snake oil and falsely promoted as a cure-all, made the snake oil salesman a lasting symbol for a charlatan.
Origins and advertising
The phrase "patent medicine" comes from the late 17th century marketing of medical elixirs, when those who found favour with royalty were issued letters patent authorising the use of the royal endorsement in advertising. Few if any of the nostrums were actually patented; chemical patents did not come into use in the United States until 1925. Furthermore, patenting one of these remedies would have meant publicly disclosing its ingredients, which most promoters sought to avoid.
Advertisement kept these patent medications in the public eye and gave the belief that no disease was beyond the cure of patent medication. "The medicine man's key task quickly became not production but sales, the job of persuading ailing citizens to buy his particular brand from among the hundreds offered. Whether unscrupulous or self-deluded, nostrum makers set about this task with cleverness and zeal."Young, James Harvey. 1961. The Toadstool Millionaires: A Social History of Patent Medicines in America before Federal Regulation. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press. p. 166
Instead, the compounders of such nostrums used a primitive version of branding to distinguish their products from the crowd of their competitors. Many extant brands from the era live on today in brands such as Luden's cough drops, Lydia E. Pinkham's vegetable compound for women, Fletcher's Castoria and even Angostura bitters, which was once marketed as a stomachic. Though sold at high prices, many of these products were made from cheap ingredients. Their composition was well known within the pharmacy trade, and druggists manufactured and sold (for a slightly lower price) medicines of almost identical composition. To protect profits, the branded medicine advertisements emphasized brand names and urged the public to "accept no substitutes".
At least in the earliest days, the history of patent medicines is coextensive with scientific medicine. Empirical medicine, and the beginning of the application of the scientific method to medicine, began to yield a few orthodoxly acceptable herbal and mineral drugs for the physician's arsenal. These few remedies, on the other hand, were inadequate to cover the bewildering variety of diseases and symptoms. Beyond these patches of evidence-based application, people used other methods, such as occultism; the "doctrine of signatures" – essentially, the application of sympathetic magic to pharmacology – held that nature had hidden clues to medically effective drugs in their resemblances to the human body and its parts. This led medical men to hope that, say, walnut shells might be good for skull fractures. Homeopathy, the notion that illness is binary and can be treated by ingredients that cause the same symptoms in healthy people, was another outgrowth of this early era of medicine. Given the state of the pharmacopoeia, and patients' demands for something to take, physicians began making "blunderbuss" concoctions of various drugs, proven and unproven. These concoctions were the ancestors of the several nostrums.
Touting these nostrums was one of the first major projects of the advertising industry. The marketing of nostrums under implausible claims has a long history. In Henry Fielding's Tom Jones (1749), allusion is made to the sale of medical compounds claimed to be universal panaceas:As to Squire Western, he was seldom out of the sick-room, unless when he was engaged either in the field or over his bottle. Nay, he would sometimes retire hither to take his beer, and it was not without difficulty that he was prevented from forcing Jones to take his beer too: for no quack ever held his nostrum to be a more general panacea than he did this; which, he said, had more virtue in it than was in all the physic in an apothecary's shop. Within the English-speaking world, patent medicines are as old as journalism. "Anderson's Pills" were first made in England in the 1630s; the recipe was allegedly learned in Venice by a Scot who claimed to be physician to King Charles I. Daffy's Elixir was invented about 1647 and remained popular in Britain and the US until the late 19th century. The use of "letters patent" to obtain exclusive marketing rights to certain labelled formulas and their marketing fueled the circulation of early newspapers. The use of invented names began early. In 1726 a patent was granted to the makers of Dr. Bateman's Pectoral Drops; at least on the documents that survive, there was no Dr. Bateman. This was the enterprise of a Benjamin Okell and a group of promoters who owned a warehouse and a print shop to promote the product.
Several American institutions owe their existence to the patent medicine industry, most notably the older almanacs which were originally given away as promotional items by patent medicine manufacturers. Perhaps the most successful industry that grew up out of the business of patent medicine advertisements, though, was founded by William H. Gannett in Maine in 1866. There were few circulating newspapers in Maine in that era, so Gannett founded a periodical, Comfort, whose chief purpose was to propose the merits of Oxien, a nostrum made from the fruit of the baobab tree, to the rural folks of Maine. Gannett's newspaper became the first publication of Guy Gannett Communications, which eventually owned four Maine dailies and several television stations. The family-owned firm is unrelated to the Gannett which publishes USA Today.
An early pioneer in the use of advertising to promote patent medicine was New York businessman Benjamin Brandreth, whose "Vegetable Universal Pill" eventually became one of the best-selling patent medicines in the United States. "...A congressional committee in 1849 reported that Brandreth was the nation's largest proprietary advertiser... Between 1862 and 1863 Brandreth's average annual gross income surpassed $600,000..." For 50 years Brandreth's name was a household word in the United States. Indeed, the Brandreth pills were so well known they received mention in Herman Melville's classic novel Moby-Dick.
Another publicity method – undertaken mostly by smaller firms – was the medicine show, a traveling circus of sorts that offered vaudeville-style entertainments on a small scale and climaxed in a pitch for some sort of cure-all nostrum. "Muscle man" acts were especially popular on these tours, for this enabled the salesman to tout the physical vigour the product supposedly offered. The showmen frequently employed shills, who stepped forward from the crowd to offer "unsolicited" testimonials about the benefits of the medicine. Often, the nostrum was manufactured and bottled in the wagon in which the show travelled. The Kickapoo Indian Medicine Company became one of the largest and most successful medicine show operators. Their shows had an American Indian or Wild West theme and employed many American Indians as spokespeople such as the Modoc War scout Donald McKay. The "medicine show" lived on in American folklore and Western movies long after they vanished from public life.
In popular culture
Patent medicines were often praised or parodied in popular culture. An example is "The Great Wahoo Polka" by J.N. Pattison, a speedy dance jig in praise of a family of products known as "Wahoo Bitters". The remedy's active ingredient was the purgative Euonymus atropurpureus, commonly known as Wahoo.Lester S. Levy, "Grace Notes in American History", Norman, OK: University of Oklahoma Press, pp. 146–148.
Walt Disney produced a comic "Mickey Mouse and the Medicine Man" about Mickey and Pluto discovering a stimulant patent drug "Peppo", which they sold in Africa.
Ingredients and their uses
Supposed ingredients
Many promoters desired to lend their preparations a sense of exoticism and mystery. Unlikely ingredients such as the baobab fruit in Oxien were a recurring theme. A famous patent medicine of the period was "Dr. Kilmer's Swamp Root"; unspecified roots found in swamps had remarkable effects on the kidneys, according to its literature.
Native American themes were also useful: natives, imagined to be noble savages, were thought to be in tune with nature and heirs to a body of traditional lore about herbal remedies and natural cures. One example of this approach from the period was Kickapoo Indian Sagwa, a product of the Kickapoo Indian Medicine Company of Connecticut (completely unrelated to the Kickapoo Tribe of Oklahoma), supposedly based on a Native American recipe. This nostrum was the inspiration for Al Capp's "Kickapoo Joy Juice", featured in the comic strip, Li'l Abner.
Another benefit of claiming traditional native origins was that it was nearly impossible to disprove. A good example of this is the story behind Dr. Morse's Indian Root Pills, which was the mainstay of the Comstock patent medicine business. According to text on a wrapper on every box of pills, Dr. Morse was a trained medical doctor who enriched his education by travelling extensively throughout Asia, Africa, and Europe. He supposedly lived among the American Indians for three years, during which time he discovered the healing properties of various plants and roots that he eventually combined into Dr. Morse's Indian Root Pills.