Maintenance Phase - Snake Oil

Episode Date: February 2, 2021

The world of dieting and wellness is full of so-called snake oil salesmen—but what IS snake oil? This week, we take a wild ride through the history of health scams and discover a startling twist about an everyday idiom. Along the way, Aubrey delivers fun facts about sanitation from memory and Mike roasts the state where most of his family lives. Support us: Subscribe on PatreonDonate on PayPalGet Maintenance Phase shirts, stickers and moreLinks:Snake Oil, Hustlers & Hambones by Mary AndersonA History Of 'Snake Oil Salesmen' : Code Switch (NPR)How Snake Oil Got a Bad Rap (Hint: It Wasn’t The Snakes’ Fault) (Collectors Weekly)Thanks to Ashley Smith for editing assistance and Doctor Dreamchip for our lovely theme song!Support the show

[♪ OUTRO MUSIC PLAYING [♪ Hello, welcome to Mania's Phase, a show about diet and wellness and occasionally the things that are pretending to be those things. That was not well written, I'm sorry. As long as you feel bad about it, that's what really matters. We're off to a good start. I am Michael Hobbs. I'm a reporter for The Huffington Post. Hi, I'm Aubrey Gordon.

I'm an author, a columnist and an essayist, and I'm a fat lady who loves research. Yes. You can also find us on Patreon, we're at patreon.com slash maintenance phase. That is also linked in the show notes and on our website, which is maintenancephase.com. You can also find t-shirts from us in both of those locations that are available to you through T-Public.

And if you have designs of your own that you wanna submit, you can do that too. Oh yes, it wouldn't be a millennial greeting if it didn't come with a bunch of URLs. And today we're talking about snake oil, I guess, which I know nothing other than the fact that like at three day intervals for weeks now, you have been texting me like I cannot wait to talk about snake oil. And I'm like, don't spoil me.

All I wanted to do was be like, here's a quote, ma'am, here's a thing, ma'am. This is just all fascinating tidbits that I've been yelling at my friends and family. Yes. I have memorized one of these quotes because I love it so much. Oh my God. So you know nothing about snake oil, yeah?

I assume that it's the oil that you put on your pet snake to keep it hydrated. But you know, you're familiar with the phrase snake oil salesman, yeah? Yes, this is why I'm looking forward to this episode. There's a billion of these random idioms in English. When you remember something, you say it rings a bell. And we all use these things, but we have no idea where any of them come from. So my only knowledge of this is the phrase selling snake oil, which basically means just like selling fraudulent product,

but specifically about sort of health and wellness. Yeah, that's generally how it's used. I will say this is for me personally, some of the most fascinating research I've done for this show today. Oh my God. I will also say I found out that snake oil was a real actual thing.

And in order to learn about sort of the history of snake oil, we're going to take sort of this trip through the really bizarre history of like quackery. Oh good. Yeah, I love it. I will say as a heads up, we're not going to be talking about weight loss or calorie counts or anything like that in this episode, but it's pretty impossible to talk about this story without talking about some pretty serious racism. Just once, I would like to look into one of these historical concepts or like an existing institution, and it's like, no, racism nowhere to be found.

It's weird. It's getting direct. No racism, I get never happens. This was a thing that was like almost all white people, and there was no racism involved is not a thing, historically, like generally speaking, not a thing. Yes. So let's just like get into it, right?

All right, let's dive in. So in order to talk about snake oil salesmen, we have to talk about the history of medicine shows. Are you, have you ever heard of medicine shows, Mike? No, medicine shows. Oh my God, are you kidding me? This is gonna be so much more fun than I thought it was gonna be. I hate shows. So, medicine shows are a tradition, like I know it from the American West,

but they apparently way predate the American West. They are not anything new, they are not unique to the United States. There are examples of medicine shows dating back to ancient Egypt and Greece. Oh wow. And basically a medicine show is a performance that will sell you a health product. Okay. Often in medicine shows there will be like some kind of feigned injury. Often these are all faked, right? That they'll be like, let's bring somebody out of the audience who has a health issue, man, what's your health issue? Oh, you have a limp, drink this tonic. Oh, your limp is gone. Look at that.

So it's like an early infomercial. Yeah, it's a live version of like, there's got to be a better way. Yeah, yeah. So the American Medicine Show has its roots in Medieval Europe. At the height of the Roman Empire, there was a ton of work for entertainers, for like jugulars and for tumblers

and for Commedia del Arte, but at the decline of the Roman Empire, that work kind of dried up, particularly because the Catholic Church went on to ban theater and circus. Continuing the Catholic Church's tradition of just like anything that is fun, just define it as a sin and ban it, like no logic at all. We hate fun. Yeah. So they banned theater and circus performances in 568, but performers kept working. They would just roll into town,

perform in public for as long as they could, and when it looked like they were gonna get caught, they would just pack up and move to the next town. So it's like three-card Monte or something. These things that are sort of illegal, but it takes a while for the cops to get there, basically. During that time in Europe, these were especially popular in England and in Italy,

which is actually where we get the term charlatan. Oh. It is an Italian word, which God, I don't speak Italian, but it looks like charlatano, okay? Which specifically in its early use was used to refer to people who quote, sell saves or other drugs in public places, pulls teeth and exhibits tricks of leisure domain. I'm imagining the same person doing all three of those things. So they do like a circus-alay performance, and then they pull a rabbit out of a hat,

and then they take out one of your molars. Yeah, so teeth pulling was like especially popular. Bok. That people would just go watch someone in public, get a tooth pulled out of their head without any anesthesia. Tooth extractions in public. Popular in medicine shows up until the 1950s, by the way.

Holy shit. So these became so popular in England, this is fully a thousand years later in 1511, that England became the first nation to start banning, quote, unquote, quackery. Oh, that ban didn't work because, you know, that work continued to flourish for hundreds of years in large part because medicine itself was, and I quote, a hotbed of medical malpractice in England at the time. Well, right. I mean, isn't there essentially no scientific method at this point?

Yeah, that's right. It's not even that there aren't effective cures for things. It's like there isn't even a process to determine whether something is an effective cure. Yeah, that's right. We don't know about germs. Right. We think that most things are related to the humors, right?

Right. And even sort of quote unquote legitimate medicine was sort of a crapshoot at the time and it was super expensive. Right. And there's basically no state capacity to provide health care. I mean, this is like,

there's no like hospital that you go to. It's all just a bunch of like private vendors, basically, right? That's exactly right. And you go if you can pay them. Yeah. And when you go, like even if it was state provided, it would be like enjoy your leeches. Right. And when you go, like even if it was state provided, it would be like, enjoy your leeches. Right, right.

So, medicine shows sort of throughout history have a few sort of common elements. One, moon juice. Two. Six dust. One is, it was always a lengthy show. It was often an hour or two that sort of got people into the mode of being entertained, not sold to. So that sort of got people into the mode of being

entertained, not sold to, so it sort of wore people down. Right. You'd be like, oh, I'm just watching a play and then surprised by our health tonic, right, or whatever. Many medicine shows also included some elements of what we later came to sort of define as freak shows. Oh. So they would have little people, disabled people,

disfigured people, fat people on display. Ew. And then a doctor would meet up with you at the end, not actually a doctor, but like a person who said they were a doctor. Someone in a lab coat, yeah. Yeah, basically, would meet up with you at the end of the freak show and essentially say,

like, do you want to end up like that? No, then take our tonic. Right. So when these sort of transition over to the US, medicine shows are also closely linked to Wild West shows. So like Buffalo Bill Cody, as it turns out, Wild West shows were basically a way for white people to put indigenous people on display

and charge other white people to come look at them. Holy shit. Buffalo Bill Cody, probably the most famous Wild West showman got the idea from another favorite that we will talk about quite a bit today PT Barnum. Oh circus folks before PT Barnum was in circus land. He was in Wild West shows medicine shows and freak shows We sound like they're all sort of mixed up together. They're all kind of tied together at this point. It's like the combination pizza hut taco bell.

I mean, it's grim, right? Yeah. Like, here we go. But these shows were massively popular. Buffalo Bill's largest reported show was in Chicago and it drew 41,000 spectators. Holy shit. In addition to all of that, there was often sort of

a pretty spectacular display of what the medicine could do in medicine shows. This is sort of like over time, right wherever you are. And it was usually just a magic trick. Someone would pretend to cut their arm and then heal it. Nice. Or they'd put an able-bodied person in a wheelchair and then be like, look, they could walk. And you're like, well, they could always walk.

You just have them in a wheelchair. I mean, if they're doing this for 41,000 people, a lot of those people are not sitting particularly close. Totally. So it's probably pretty easy to do large crowds like this. Totally. We're just like a couple ketchup packets. Yeah.

Yeah. So I would say the interesting thing about medicine shows is I would have thought that the enlightenment would have kind of killed them off. Yeah. They got more traction during the enlightenment would have kind of killed them off. Yeah. They got more traction during the enlightenment. Oh, interesting. Not because of any new scientific findings

that made more effective products, but because more people were more conversant and more sort of sciencey words. So it sort of legitimated medicine shows in folks minds. So it was like the first TED talks, we're communicating to the public that medicine mattered and that there were these bodily processes that they needed to manipulate to achieve better health. And so instead of debunking the junk science,

the junk science just adopted all these medical scientific terms. Yeah, here's a quote from one of the medicine shows. One of the medicine showmen would say, a doctor will cut out your ambiguous and remove your tweedium. One hundred percent made up words that sound sort of vaguely sciency,

and people would be like, oh, he sounds like he knows what he's talking about. That's great. I was just saying this morning, I spent too much time on the tweedium. So I agree. I agree with this. Medicine shows in the US are a huge deal

from about 1800 through to the 1950s. I think it's important to note, and this was really surprising to me in this research, that medicine shows were sort of about the product, but mostly they were like the only entertainment that was available at the time, especially in small towns and rural communities. Yeah, before TV, there's just not a lot to do in the evenings.

Totally, so you go see a medicine show and there are tumblers and there are actors and there's all this stuff, right? So medicine shows become sort of like the preeminent form of entertainment. And were they free to attend? They were often free to attend, yes. And the trick was like you made your money

on selling your stuff to people, right? Yeah a tights like one of those timeshare conferences. Yeah, absolutely This is where we get into PT Barnum who is like the biggest sort of popularizer of Medicine shows in the US the Ray Crock of circuses. Yes, absolutely It's like a pretty perfect comparison. So I would say in a lot of ways, he's the archetypal sort of medicine showman and was sort of like the velvet underground of medicine showman.

Not everybody saw him, but everyone who did started their own medicine show. So he ran all of this stuff, right? Freak shows, Wild West shows, all of that kind of stuff. His Wild West shows were immensely popularak shows, Wild West shows, all of that kind of stuff. His Wild West shows were immensely popular. In those Wild West shows, white people could come see indigenous people on display. But while he was running those Wild West shows,

he publicly wrote pages and pages and pages of wildly racist screens about the very tribal members who were making him rich. Oh shit. It made him impossibly rich. He was so rich. See, I would describe him using an obscure Italian word, charlotteano.

I know if you know about that. I've known about it for almost six minutes now. I will say his early medicine show. He sort of pulled it together with a partner who was from Germany. They sold Bear Greece, which they said would regrow hair. Okay, so Bear Greece sounds like something like snake oil where it sounds pretty expensive to gather.

I don't know what the Bear Greece was actually made out of, but it sounds like a lot of trouble. What was the actual Bear Greece? It was just Vaseline. Okay, one thing that's interesting to me, the contrast between PT Barnum level scamming and what's going on now with Moonjuice and wellness influencers, et cetera,

is that he knew that he was full of shit. Whereas I feel like what makes it harder now is a lot of the wellness influencers actually believe it. Like they think that taking this pill is gonna make you better at having dusty sex or whatever. I mean, I think the trick is there were definitely some medicine showmen who were like this is garbage and I'm making money on a con

and there were also some who legit thought they were onto something. So I think it is sort of similar to today. Oh. It was also really popular in part because medicine shows were mostly dominated by men. So in the 1800s, live entertainment was seen as this sort of feminine pursuit.

Okay, the arts were sort of something for women, but also women who were professional actors were associated with sex work. Because the idea is that you can just sort of be bought by anyone who can pay the price. It's this really weird turn off stigma. God, it's like the Catholic Church. It's like, here's a fun thing.

Let's fuck it up. Let's ruin it for everybody. Do you want to go to a play or do you want to go to hell? Like hell. Those are your choices. Yeah. So part of the reason that medicine shows were so popular, this is in the 1700s, right, 1700s, was in part because medicine at the time wasn't regulated at all.

So in the US, there were not really sort of structures for medical education, for certification, for any of that kind of stuff. There were just a bunch of people who were just like, yeah, I'm a physician, but it's not until 1846 that the American Medical Association forms. In 1893, the Johns Hopkins School of Medicine was founded and it was a first medical school to require a college degree for entrance.

Prior to that, many doctors weren't literate. Hey, Doc, what does this say in the label? Eh, I don't know. But listen, Mike, we're gonna talk about this in a minute. There weren't labels. Oh, what? There weren't labels on these products. There were labels that were like, here's what it is,

but they didn't tell you what was in it. What? It's just like a liquid in a mason jar, and you're buying it at one of these fares, and that's it. Yeah, and it's like, here it is. Oh, shit. Treatment. Like, medical treatment could come from any number of sources, right? People were like, I don't know I could go to the doctor,

but like they're expensive and not good, or I could like mix up this like herbal tonic in my kitchen, right? Like anybody who offered a solution, like it was all sort of equally good. There is a book that I relied on heavily for this research by Ann Anderson called Snake Oil, Hustlers, and Hamboons.

Ah, hmm. Ann Anderson, the author, calls treatments at the time, quote, a mix of superstition, apocrypha, case histories, and anything that seemed like a good idea at the time. It is infomercials. Yeah, totally, but like everything's an infomercial, right? Anyone anywhere can tell you, this will work well for you, and you'll just kind of believe it because there's not like a source to check it against, right? Right.

Also, it's not like the population is particularly literate and particularly well-versed in sort of science, medicine, history, literate. Like, the education system at this time was not particularly well-developed either. Yeah, that's exactly right. For that same reason at this time, doctors are not particularly well-developed either. Yeah, that's exactly right. For that same reason at this time, doctors are not especially well respected. Many of them, particularly in the West and in more rural areas,

actually had to have multiple jobs. Oh, wow. So they would be like, I'm a doctor and a blacksmith, or I'm like a doctor and a farmer because there just isn't like enough business, right? So the doctors were the original gig workers. Yeah.

Now what I was expecting. This is the quote that I memorized. I love it so much. Tell me close your eyes and tell it to me. Okay. So this is from Snake Oil, Hustlers and Handbounds. The Midwest harbored quacks as manure does flies. Indiana was called quote,

a sinkhole in the medical practice, and Ohio quote, a paradise for the incompetent. It was a freewheeling medical environment in which the medicine showmen with his tall silk hat and folksy manner could operate unrestrained. Dude, keep going.

Let's roast all 50 states. What else you got? Illinois. I love the idea of just like senselessly dunking on a stage. And I told my mother, I was like, I kind of wanted to be sure that says Ohio a paradise for the incompetent music.

It should be their license plate. I mean, it's better than those states that are terrible for incompetent people. We are incompetent inclusive. Come incompetent, join us. incompetent inclusive come incompetence join us So again like at this time doctors are like not especially good at what they do There's this doctor Benjamin Rush. He treated everything by bleeding his patients, right? Oh, yeah, that's right. He was based whatever right yeah

So in the process of bleeding them he killed a a lot of his patients. And this became like, especially bad news during a yellow fever outbreak. Yellow fever spread by mosquitoes. Yeah. So this dude is bleeding patients into open container. Because these are patients who have yellow fever. Mosquitos are swarming drinking that blood. Like, it's essentially like a super spreader event.

People need blood to live. Don't take it away from people. That yellow fever outbreak ended up killing 10% of the population of Philadelphia. Oh, what? So this was like not an insignificant super spreader event. Man, you've got competition, Ohio. Philodelphia, a paradise for the incompetent.

So in addition to medicine being garbage, nobody knew anything about health and sanitation at the time. This is a pretty lengthy quote from snake oil, hand bones and hustlers. It's my next to memorize from this book. Close your eyes. I'll only listen if you close your eyes. I'll write them later.

Too bad, because I can't. Ignorance of the causes of disease and workings of the body made for some appalling conditions. There was no sanitation because there was no perceived need for it. Sewage was dumped into the streets, sometimes right onto the heads of unfortunate passers-by. What didn't flow into the gutters was consumed by swine, which were in turn consumed by people. On farms, outhouses were located near wells, and clothing was caked with manure and worn until it fell apart.

Even the beds of the wealthy were infested with vermin. Bathing was considered an eccentricity. Night air was thought to be poison. Almost everyone. Even children drank oceans of liquor. Sickness was thought to be unavoidable. Even when vaccinations were available, many farmers rejected them as contrary to the will of God.

It is amazing that people managed to have sex in these conditions. This was a time when the birth rate in America was like nine children for every woman, which means people are having sex at least nine times in their like vermin infested poop-caaked cult. No showers afterwards. Like it is amazing to me constantly that the human race has like made it this far. It's really gross. Oh. Imagine their breath.

You have to kiss somebody with that breath. Oh. It's really upsetting. Yeah, dude. So you can see how like in this time, right? When like just everything related to health and wellness is pretty broken, you can understand how somebody like rolling into town

who sounds confident and makes definitive claims that their thing will help you. You'd be like, yeah, sure, sign me up. Or I think I might be. You're also just drowning in people just say and stuff. I feel like the relationship to truth and falsehood back then was very different as well.

Absolutely. So, medicine shows would also employ all kinds of extremely garbage tactics to sell their stuff. So, for example, one medicine showman who was pretty famous at the time, Thomas Kelly, would set up his stage and line the edge of the stage with jars of pickled tapeworms. Okay. And then would sort of like get up on stage and describe a bunch of vague symptoms, right? We hear this in like supplement companies

that are advertised on TV do this, where they're like, do you feel tired sometimes? Are you not always confident? And he would say all those things are the result of having a tapeworm. Ooh. The tapeworm will sort of kill you unless you buy his Shamrock tapeworm remover

for $7, which is $190. In today's money. Frankly, jokes on everyone because given the sanitation at the time, a lot of people really did have tapeworms, right? Yeah. What was, what was he actually selling?

Do we know? This one we don't particularly know, I will say a lot of the tonics would have a little bit of turpentine in them. Oh. Which is what would give them, like, it would make it smell like medicine. That's like the dandruff shampoo companies that added something to their shampoos to make it tingle a little bit.

Really? Because otherwise people didn't think that it was working. Uh-huh. And the thing that sort of cures dandruff has nothing to do with the tingling, but it's like it has to be a little bit unpleasant. Otherwise people thing that sort of cures dandruff has nothing to do with the tingling, but it's like it has to be a little bit unpleasant. Otherwise, people think that it must be fake. Oh, yeah.

So there was one of the things that medicine Jim and Woodsell was something called an electric belt or an electricity belt, which was basically just like a belt that on the inside had glue and capsicum, which is what makes peppers spicy. Yeah. So you would put it on and it would feel like spicy and tangly on your skin and you'd be like, that means it works.

It's working. Yeah. But all it was doing was like putting hot peppers on your skin. Right. So Thomas Kelly started off the tapeworm remover stuff, but many other medicine showmen sort of refined that approach. So they would sell people these pills that were in like gelatin capsules, right? Like any gel cap you would take now.

But inside the pill was tightly wound up string. Do you see where this is going by? Also people would like poop out a little string. Yup, shut up. And then they'd come back to the medicine show and be like, this was amazing. I didn't think I had a tapeworm and then I took this pill and I had totally out of tapeworms.

Oh, where is the better business bureau? It's living at the wheel. There's no better business bureau, but. Oh. So this became such a popular approach that there's a whole business, like a factory based in Kansas City that just makes artificial tapeworms. There was another medicine showman

who said that he could cure deafness. Oh no. He worked almost exclusively in rural communities and it was basically just like people had such a buildup of earwax. Oh yeah. So he would like be on stage and be like, this person is deaf for their heart of hearing.

Check out my product. Now they can hear, whoa! Yeah, but at least he's actually providing a fucking service. Yeah, totally. That's all I want. Where it's like, sure man, you used to have earwax in your ears and now you don't. Yeah, exactly. When we talk about medicine shows and when we talk about what we now refer to as snake oil,

what we're actually talking about is patent medicine. Oh, okay. So patent medicine was like very big in the 1800s and like early 1900s. Essentially like anyone could file a patent or trademark for anything and sell it as a cure for anything else. Oh, it's like fucking vitamin supplements now. Yeah, there's no regulation on selling or advertising medicine. Great.

Patent medicines were incredibly heavily advertised and provided the blueprint for a bunch of like advertising tactics that we see now. In 1847, 2000 newspapers ran 11 million patent medicine ads. Whoa. By the Civil War, patent medicine ads were half of all of the newspaper advertising revenue in the country. No way.

So it's like perfume ads in Vogue. Those little flaps that you can pull off? Pat and medicine was pitched at medicine shows, but also on street corners, out of these like suitcases on tripods. And what that allowed medicine showmen to do is show how limited the quantity was. They'd be like, it's going fast. You gotta get it now.

Like a fucking Jeffree Star makeup palette. 100% still doing this now. Limited editions. I'm just saying, I'm very surprised to hear you tapped into Jeffree Star makeup palettes. How dare you. Of course I'm tapped into that. No.

They also use this tactic of sort of negging consumers. Like it's very mystery the pickup artist. Where like they would talk to someone and be like, oh, you probably can't afford this. And then the person would be like, I can't afford it. Here's my money. It's like, yeah, this sports car is only for people that like have a sense of danger, but you wouldn't be interested in that. That's exactly right. Patent medicines, if we talk about sort of what was in patent medicines, some of them were herbal,

but most of them are substances that are pretty heavily regulated today. Okay. There was something called Mrs. Winslow Soothing Serup that was like a cough syrup advertised to kids. Oh no, I forgot about kids. That was liquid heroin. No way.

100% my dude. Dude, lit. It's kids getting fucked. It's like train spotting. Those kids are just like lying down, just like tripping balls. But with babies. Get me another juice box, man.

Oh yeah. It's so fucked. So like, here were some other ones. Seth Arnold's cough killer was morphine. Nice. Farne's teething syrup? Teething syrup. Was morphine and chloroform? Ugh!

Jane's expectorant was opium. How were people getting this fucking heroin? Like, where do you buy heroin in the 1840s? Is it just a round? I mean, so listen, if there's no medical regulation, there's definitely no DEA. Yeah. Right, like none of this has been scheduled.

Yeah. There's not even requirements that you label medication at this point. So I would imagine if you wanted some heroin, you could probably just go get some heroin. At like the heroin store. There were also, this was really, really fascinating to me. There are a bunch of things that we use today that started as patent medicines. Listerine, patent medicine. What? 1879. Bayer Asprin, patent medicine, 1899. Look of Magnesia, 1880, X-Lax, 1905, and Richardson's Coup and pneumonia cure salve.

Created in the 1890s, it's now known as Vix Vaporub. They made Vix Vaporub in the 1890s? It kind of feels like it doesn't it? Yeah, a little bit. Yeah. I would say it's also worth noting that at this time because trust in medicine is so low, because these are being advertised so heavily, right? There's sort of this opening for thinking and talking about different kinds of medicine,

right? Like more white folks in the US seem to be at the time more open to cures and treatments that were developed by people who weren't white. Ah, particularly indigenous remedies at the time, so like tribal members in sort of what is now the US, had like developed these remedies that were often more effective than white folks' remedies, right? Right, this goes back to our conceptions now of Chinese medicine and this sort of othering of exotic cultures that know things that we don't. But there's no real interest in those cultures, or where that medicine comes from, or anything else. It's just this very superficial engagement.

Yeah, absolutely. So, there's this tie between popular conceptions of indigenous medicine start to sort of be on the come up as the genocide of indigenous peoples starts to be sort of like more and more completed. As indigenous people become less of a perceived threat to white folks, they're sort of like, oh, look at these native people who are sort of at one with nature and they've figured all these things out, right? And a bunch of white folks start referring to themselves as like Indian medicine experts. Oh shit.

It's so dark, my dude. Is it too late to cancel those people? 150 years later. I mean, I kind of feel like life expectancy canceled those people. Yeah, that's true. There was a guy named John Daringer who called himself Indian John. There was a company called the Kikapoo Indian Medicine Company

and the owners of the Kikapoo Indian Medicine Company were unsurprisingly like two white dudes. They chose the name Kikapoo Indian Medicine Company because they thought it sounded funny. Oh God, really? Uh-huh. There's something so interesting about how you're able to fetishize a culture and also attempt to destroy it at the same time. This is sort of the beginnings of a lot of how non-indigenous people talk about indigenous folks in the US now, which is like, they're gone now and we can revere them.

These medicine shows in particularly Indian medicine companies, there was an Oregon Indian medicine company, side note, the first company of record to offer a money back guarantee. That seems like a marketing ploy though, because if they're moving on to a different town, how would you even take them up on that? Well, here's the funny thing, are you ready?

Who do it? The Oregon Indian medicine Company created this, they're sort of tonic. It was called Katanka, and they said it was established by the Yumatilla tribe in the woods of Oregon, all of that kind of stuff. It wasn't, it was made by a drug firm in Pennsylvania. Nice.

It shipped west. It was like so deeply not anything indigenous. They sort of launched their business in the spring and traveled all over Oregon to sell it, but didn't count on Northwest Reigns. So their wagons got stuck in the mud. Seriously? For like the rest of the year.

No one told you about Reign in the Northwest. They just like did me with a count for it. What do you guys think? Sleepless in Seattle? Nine out of 10 days. Anyway, it They just like did me with a count for it. What have you guys seen sleepless in Seattle, nine out of 10 days? Anyway, it's just fascinating to me that like all of these sort of templates for advertising, right, these sort of stoke fears

so that you can sell something. You sort of like come up with like branding is a big thing that comes out of this because there are so many different ones that people have to know your brand as like the one that works. Yeah, it is disperiding that we just keep doing the same thing over and over again, and like nothing changes.

We just happened to have forgotten about the last wave of these crazes. Absolutely. So this is actually where we come to actual snake oil. A. And this is also where it gets a little bit you're wrong about. Ooh.

Uh-huh. My favorite. Unlike other patent medicines, snake oil was a real thing and it actually worked. Shut up. I will not, Mike. That's, this is the twist of this episode. Snake oil was real?

It was real and it worked. It was real and it worked. Ha, ha, ha, ha. I love it. So this is why I was like, what I found that out. This is like one of the first things that I sort of discovered in research for this episode. That's when I started texting and was like, this is going to be so good. This is absurd. It's totally absurd. So here's the story. In the 1800s, the US has one of its largest public works projects ever, which

is the building of the Transcontinental Railroad, right? And it's one that was primarily powered by immigrant railroad workers, most of whom were from China. Yes. These Chinese immigrant workers are coming in doing this hard manual labor of building a railroad. So they have a lot of aches and pains.

And to sue that, they used snake oil, which is like a traditional Chinese remedy. Oh! It was a concentrate that was made by boiling a Chinese water snake. What? Uh-huh. And then you would skim off the fat

that had collected off of the top, and that's your snake oil. So it's actual snake oil? It's oil from a snake. No fucking way. I thought it was just gonna be like the bare grease thing. Where it's like, you just pick up some like dirt from the ground or something and you're like,

oh, it's snake dust or whatever. So white people saw that this worked, right? I think overwhelmingly like the white bosses of Chinese railroad workers Saw that this really worked. They may have tried it out and they saw an opportunity to make a bunch of money on American Snake Oil because they were like holy shit. This thing works. Nothing works right now. Everything about health is garbage So it's like an early painkiller. It's like it's like Tylenol. It's kind of like icy hot You rub it on yourself. You don't drink it. Uh-huh. The challenges, these guys want to make American snake oil, America doesn't have the Chinese water snake.

Yeah, we don't have a lot of Chinese water snakes around. So they just start boiling different kinds of snakes, and they're like, this is it. This is a quote from a Peace and True West magazine. There is a guy, that is the reason that we have the term snake oil salesman. Quote, perhaps the best known of these snake oil salesmen was Clark Stanley, the self-proclaimed rattlesnake king, a former cowboy who claimed he had been tutored by Hopi medicine men in Arizona.

Oh God. He deceptively used mineral oil to make his quote unquote snake oil potent, making a show out of his treatment, Stanley pulled a rattler out of a sack, slitted open, and dropped the snake into a pot of boiling water. So people would sort of like watch him like wrestle a rattlesnake, cut its belly, and then boil it. Like that's a pretty amazing show if you don't have TV. Yeah. Yeah. Stanley's snake oil was later seized by the US government and they studied it and they found out that it was just

mineral oil, red pepper, which sort of warms your skin, right? It's capsicum, like we were talking about earlier. Turpentine, so it smelled like medicine and about 1% fatty oil, which they think came from cows. Oh. They're like, there's not even snake in the snake oil. So like, hey, the snake he's claiming it is doesn't work. And be that snake isn't even in it.

So snake oil salesman means counterfeit snake oil. Yeah, it's not that snake oil is counterfeit medicine. Yeah, absolutely. Wow. It'd be like if you made fake aspirin, and people were like, that guy's a real aspirin salesman. Yeah. So aspirin's good. Yeah.

The issue is that it's fake. Oh. It wasn't until 1989 that white people figured out why snake oil worked. They found that it was rich in a particular omega-3 fatty acid. Oh no. Don't reinforce the omega-3 people, Aubrey.

Stop there. They're already talking about that stuff too much. So basically, salmon is sort of our classic best example of where to get Omega 3's. Salmon has a maximum of 18% of this particular fatty acid, this particular Omega 3. Snake oil on average had 20%. Okay, so this is like extremely potent. So when you take an Omega-3 supplement from the store, you're literally taking snake oil. I'm kind of, yeah, you're taking the active ingredient.

Wow. The only purpose of podcasts is to give people ammunition to go, well, actually, when they're dinner parties, and this is the ultimate. The next time someone says, like, Elon Musk is selling snake oil. You're gonna be like, well, actually, snake oil fucking works, but Elon Musk is still trash. We just made you 100% more insufferable. You're welcome. This is our product.

This is our product. This is what we sell. So, of course, most of the sort of snake oil salesman at the time, weren't selling this product. Most of them were selling the rattlesnake variety. Some of them were selling the Clark Stanley version, which is just like, I guess, some cow fat in a bottle. It's also an interesting metaphor for what happens to these sort of exotic, indigenous, medicinal treatments that end up coming to the West, right? Because it's like, oh, snake oil is a real thing, you boil the snake, and then you rub it on yourself, but then they take it to the U.S.

where there's no Chinese water snakes, and it doesn't work anymore. Because there's specific chemical properties of those particular snakes in that particular place, and you can't just like air lift it to this new context and have it work exactly the same way. Yeah, we're referencing Moonjuice a lot here because this feels very Moonjuicey. Yeah. Oh, this thing works.

So I'm just gonna distill these ingredients down without regard to where they come from, without regard to what makes them work. Right, just boil a snake. It doesn't matter what kind of snake. It doesn't matter where you found the snake, it doesn't matter how long you boil it for. Find a snake, boil it, medicine. Boom. Nailed it. Yeah. The last thing I wanted to talk about with snake oil in particular is how it became

sort of our shorthand for this kind of huxterism, right? Yes. To talk about that, we have to talk about sort of the decline and fall of patent medicines and of medicine shows, right? Oh, thank God. Things really start to change in terms of the sort of medical landscape of the U.S. around the turn of the century. There is way more regulation of formally educated and certified doctors, right? There are now, we now have the Johns Hopkins School of Medicine.

We now have these sort of like places that have requirements for entry and require you to pass exams in order to graduate. More and more of those trained doctors subscribe to this emerging germ theory about how diseases spread. There is this emerging alignment amongst large groups of trained doctors. There starts to become some sort of like common knowledge amongst doctors. And those doctors are increasingly sort of skeptical of patent medicines. In 1892, the Senate passes the first federal legislation

to regulate medicine in any way. Oh, thank God. But it fails in the house. Oh, so like they don't pass it, because patent medicine sellers have formed the proprietary association and They're lobbying really hard. This is why we can't get rid of fucking scam phone calls. Yep Uh, and use car dealerships and the penny Like savings time. There's always some like little tiny interest group that fucking ruins it for everybody

Yeah, and they're the people who literally profit off them. Yes, always. In 1905, this is like the beginning of the end. Collier's magazine, a huge magazine at the time, publishes a series of exposés about patent medicines, and the series is called The Great American Fraud. Hell yeah. Remember when people wrote magazine articles and then stuff changed? Imagine.

Ultimately, the Collier's piece is published in 1905 by 1906. Congress passes the Pure Food and Drug Act, and it's signed into law by Teddy Roosevelt. The Pure Food and Drug Act, quote, prohibited the sale of misbranded or adulterated food and drugs in interstate commerce. It didn't prohibit adding narcotics to children's medicine, okay? But it did say that if there was anything addictive in your in your medicine, you had to list it on the label. Okay. So basically, it was like, if there's heroin in this, you have to say there's heroin in it. Giving kids heroin is fine,

but just tell them first. Yeah, that's right. Alright. Getting your PJs little man. Interestingly, it isn't until 1917 that Clark Stanley, who's the Rattlesnake King, like the actual snake oil salesman, is prosecuted under the Pure Food and Drug Act

for selling garbage fake shit. Next stop, Elon Musk, do it. That's sort of the beginning of the end, right? This becomes like a very watched trial, becomes covered heavily in the media, all of this kind of stuff. By the time the 1930s roll around drug stores are now sort of more common, right?

They're more accessible to folks, and they're in more places, and that allows for this sort of centralized local, right? They're more accessible to folks, and they're in more places, and that allows for this sort of centralized local source for drugs, which also allowed for more sort of regulation, and also more like word of mouth, right? Right. Repeat customers.

You finally have an incentive to actually sell people things that work. Yeah, and the sort of fake urgency of a medicine show doesn't quite work in the same way. Right, right? If you're like, buy it now, it's your only chance. Like, that doesn't work when you're like, no, there's a wall green.

Yeah. They also have aspirin. And the 17-year-old's working behind the counter can't give like an hour-long presentation where they're killing a rattlesnake in front of you for every customer. Unfortunately. At this time, movie theaters also start to sort of pop up. So people can find better entertainment

than watching a live tooth extraction. Right, at a medicine show. I'm also assuming that there's also mass literacy at this time and the educational system is also improving. I'm imagining people are getting some messages about that too. Oh, shit, Mike, I left out one of the most important parts about the Pure Food and Drug Act.

It mandated the creation of the FDA. Oh, our old friend, the FDA. This is how we got the FDA. It's like a superhero origin story. This is the bitten by a radioactive spider of regulatory agencies. It wasn't until 1938 that Congress sort of got involved with the next layer of regulation.

That was called the Food Drug and Cosmetic Act of 1938. It required manufacturers to quote, list all active ingredients, make only supportable claims, refrain from creating medicines for life-threatening illnesses, and reveal all relevant facts. Basic stuff. Basic stuff that we rely on today.

I'm sure the patent medicine people were so but hurt about it. Absolutely. I have to sell medicine if I say I'm selling medicine. Yeah. Medicine shows sort of continue on a smaller scale into the 40s and 50s, and the last major medicine show shuts down in the early 1960s.

Wow. So like our parents might have been going to medicine shows. It feels oddly possible, like depending on the part of the country that you're in. Yeah. It's like really fascinating to me that this persisted for so long. That surprised the hell out of me. I mean, people are desperate for medical treatments. The medical system now is a lot better than it was in the 1840s, but like it still has holes.

Absolutely. And I feel like whenever you have holes in these systems, like they're gonna get filled by something, and usually that something is charlotteano. I'm making finger gesturing gestures right now, extremely authentic. So there you go, that's snake oil. I can't believe it works. It worked.

We should stop saying it didn't, probably. When we talk about snake oil salesman, what we're really talking about is racist white people who ran medicine shows and profiteered off of indigenous people and wore black and brown face and gave your kids heroin. And told you what was medicine. And then Chinese people are like, we're gonna use this actually effective medication

and we're like, we'll call it a fucking scam. That's gonna become the synonym for the con artist. The thing that worked that Chinese people did. Yeah, your thing that worked is garbage. And our thing that's garbage really works. Like, hmm, it's fully like the Jedi mind trick. What are your closing thoughts on what this means for now? What should we learn from this?

The thing that I'm stricken by is like, how this simultaneously feels like a distant memory of a long gone past, but also that all of these tactics are still in play now. Extremely in play, yeah. This is the playbook for selling garbage health shit that doesn't work. So that was the thing that was really fascinating to me.

I thought this was just gonna be a fun wacky story about how things used to be. Like it is fun and wacky at times. It's also really sobering and is a reminder of all the things that are still pretty broken now. There's also a lesson here about that when you regulate things, when you crack down on scams like this, you have to keep doing it constantly.

You have to keep iterating on these regulations to make sure that they're working. A lot of these laws are like really not fit for purpose anymore and you have to keep going back to these older laws and be like, well, are there fewer fake medications on the market now than there used to be? Are there cracks that they're falling into and loopholes that they're exploiting?

Well, and as we learned in the FENFEN episode, right, those cracks emerge and then sometimes it's just we don't close the loopholes, right? Sometimes it's we don't fill in the cracks, but also sometimes the institutions that we set up to regulate those cracks and loopholes adapt to reinforce the cracks and loopholes, right? Yeah. and loopholes adapt to reinforce the cracks and loopholes. Exactly. Yeah. During the FENFEN episode, we've found out that like the FDA considers big pharma to be its

customers and that they ought to provide it with customer service. That is not what the FDA was founded to do, but it has sort of moved in that direction over time. Right. It would be great to be like, we passed a law and that fixed it. And sometimes that happens, but for the most part, to be like, we passed a law and that fixed it. And sometimes that happens, but for the most part, it takes like a level of vigilance and sort of constant evaluation and constant sort of rethinking of, was this the approach? Did it do what we meant

it to do? And there's also, there's a vast abyss of desperation for miracle cures, like there is in every human society and across history, and there will always be that desperation, and there will always be somebody that will sell you something to feed that desperation. Yeah. And so, in that context, you just need to have a lot of vigilance and a lot of surveillance about like, what is going on out there? Because the human body ages, and it hurts, and it aches,

and it does things that make no sense, And somebody is going to pop up and say, I can make this make sense, I can fix you. And so we just need to be extremely careful with this kind of regulation and make sure that it's actually doing what is in the spirit of the law, rather than just the letter of the law. And that like, in the absence of that kind of like, constantly updated regulation and regulatory structures,

we sort of end up where we are now, which is that the onus is on the consumer to figure out what's real and what's fake, which is not tenable and most of us don't do that because most of us can't spend four days reading about snake oil, you know? I don't want to have to do all this work myself. I don't have to, I don't want to learn about like yellow five and like blue 42 or whatever

they are and like find out whether they're poisons or not. Like I don't want to do that work. I just want to be able to pull stuff off of shelves and be confident that it's not going to be heroin that I'm feeding my children every night. You want to know that you're not giving your kids heroin? Yeah, I'm dreaming, bud. you