Sawbones: A Marital Tour of Misguided Medicine - Sawbones: Patent Medicines

Episode Date: October 11, 2013

Welcome to Sawbones, where Dr. Sydnee McElroy and her husband Justin McElroy take you on a whimsical tour of the dumb ways in which we've tried to fix people. This week: We slam back some Kickapoo Joy Juice. Music: "Medicines" by The Taxpayers (http://thetaxpayers.net)

Saw bones is a show about medical history, and nothing the hosts say should be taken as medical advice or opinion. It's for fun. Can't you just have fun for an hour and not try to diagnose your mystery boil? We think you've earned it. Just sit back, relax, and enjoy a moment of distraction from that weird growth. You're worth it. that weird growth. You're worth it. Alright, time is about to books. One, two, one, two, three, four. We came across a pharmacy with a toy and that's lost it out. We pushed on through the broken glass and had ourselves a look around.

The medicines, the medicines, the escalators, my cop, for the mouth Hello everybody welcome to Solbund. It's a marital tour of misguided man Just the right one of them co-host and whatever I'm Sydney McElroy and Justin. Are you okay? Oh? You sound really tired. No, I'm okay. I'm a little tired. I mean, like you're yawning a lot, right into the microphone. We've been doing almost comical. We've been doing almost comical. That's our new tag.

We've been doing our musical that we're directing. It's opening tonight in Huntington. It's a British playing superman. You've been working very hard on it. And many tickets still available. That's a birthplace superman. You know, we've been working very hard on it. And, but he tickets still available. That's a great seat. So, come on out to the new Huntington High School. Huntington was Virginia.

At first Tade's Theater. Home of us. Home of us. That's their tagline. You know Michael Servers? He's from Huntington. Love him as the observer and French. Boom.

Huntington. You were saying how tired you were. Brad Dorif. Okay, no, go back to the voice of Chuckie. Okay, you're supposed to talk about how tired you are. Billy Crystal went to school in Huntington for like a year. Jennifer Garner? Well, that was Charles.

That's Charles, but close. So, okay. 45 minutes down the road. Okay, so I'm tired. I'm tired, I don't know, just run down. You got anything in the old doctor bag for the J-man? Well, it's funny you should mention that because- Almost funny.

Almost funny. Because I've been using something myself that, you know, it's, I would call it off label use. Okay, I'm into it. But maybe you'd like to try some Kikapoo Indian Saagwa. Is that like Kikapoo Joy Juice from a little out there? It's funny you should mention that Justin because that's exactly where that term comes from.

Ah, right on. But it's a real great pick me up, at least that's what it says on the bottle. It's also good for, well, pretty much anything. Headaches, leg amputations, tuberculosis. Well, it says that on the bottle, I'm sure it's true. Pretty much anything headaches, leg amputations, tuberculosis. Well, it says it on the bottle, I'm sure it's true. Heart and arms, uh oh. Sleep.

Uh oh, that's a lot of things that it's good for. Female complaints. Female complaints. Sydney, that does not sound real to me. I'm not a medical physician, but that sounds made up. Well, it is, Justin. It falls into the category of what we commonly refer to as patent medicines.

Patent medicines. Now these are medicines that have been taken before the patent office in a country and then giving approval, I guess, for their use by a government body. Nope, not at all. Not even close. Not in the slightest. Give it a best.

It's a total misnomer. Okay. Patent medicines are not really the slightest. It's a total misnomer. Patent medicines are not really patented. They're just trademarked. So this is the name we came up for for this thing. You can't call your thing this because it's our thing. But that's it. Patents weren't actually a thing, at least in the US, until 1925.

And patent medicines in the US were around way before 1925. The phrase actually comes from the late 17th century when they were marketing medical elixirs. So basically if you came up with some kind of medicine that was helpful for something and you wanted to sell it to everybody, you would go take it to, you know, your local royal. Whoever you would ever king or princes running around. Right. Exactly. Do Duchess. Whoever. Viceroy. Is that a, that's a royal right?

Sure. Is that a butterfly? Both. It's both. Learning things every day. So you would take it to your local Viceroy. And you know, give it to him and be like, this is great for that knee pain or whatever that you're having, put this on your hemorrhoid. And then they would use it and if they liked it and they thought it really did work, sometimes they would issue you a letter patent, which basically said, you can use my name

in all of your advertising. You can go around and say, the king of Sweden loves, you know, Joe's foot powder. Joe's foot powder, get it today. Great for foot problems and hemorrhoids, apparently. And women problems. And women problems. It actually originally was called

no-strom remedium from the Latin for our remedy. So it was kind of, no, no, patent medicines was much better. So, you know, actually patenting the medicines would have meant that they had to disclose the ingredients. And obviously, as you're going to find out, nobody wanted to tell anybody what was in this stuff. It's not good. No, it wasn't good. But the idea was that if you could get the endorsement of some kind of royal person,

somebody famous and then tell everybody that they liked it, then you could convince everybody to use whatever your medicine was. So Sid, if this was made up and they didn't have a lot of evidence to fall back on, how are they getting these into the hands of the people? Well, it's really interesting because the history of patent medicines is you kind of dig into it, you're really kind of studying the history of advertising, especially in the US. I think this is something you would be interested in, Justin. I love advertising, very susceptible to it.

Absolutely, if you ever want to sell anything, even if you just want to prove that you can sell it to one person, try out Justin. And if you can attach adjectives to that product, like cheesy, flaky, crunchy, perhaps new, or... I'm basically like the farmer farmers in Charlotte's web. Just any word up there and I'm gonna take your word for it. Some pumpkin.

Some pumpkin spice latte. Does it gonna buy that pumpkin? Yep. Or that pumpkin spice latte. Whatever, it doesn't matter. But when it came to patent medicines, it really initially did kind of mirror the advent of like empiric science and like the scientific method seeking to find if there were, you

know, ways to prove that something worked. So, you know, you would try something out like, I have this compound, I think it works for headaches. And so you'd give it to a lot of people and you'd realize that it did work for headaches. And so there was some science initially. But at the time, we had so many diseases and so many problems. We didn't have enough of these medicines

that actually worked for all of those different problems, right? Okay. So you know this thing works for headaches. Okay, now you have, you know, cholera. Well, what else are you going to try? You might as well try that thing that worked for headaches. Why not? What else do you have? We know it does something in there. Right, we know it does something. So let's keep trying it. And compared to the other like medical doctrines of the time, it kind of made sense. I mean, because we're talking about either like, you know, occultism or what they used to call the doctrine of signatures, I think

this is pretty funny. Hit me. So this was the concept of medical practice that nature would provide you with clues as to what could help you with different ailments. So, for instance, this is the example I found. Let's say you have a skull fracture. I do. You do? I meant to tell you earlier actually, before we started, I'm, Well, looks like I'm gonna have to go this one alone.

Hey, I'm back. Okay. Oh, all right. Medical miracle. Yeah. You know what you must have done. Hey, I'm back. Okay. All right. Medical miracle. You know what you must have done. I've done what you must have eaten some of this powdered walnut shell.

That's exactly it. I had some powdered walnut shell lying around. I thought it was blow, thought it was cocaine, which I usually used to pick me back up after a downturn. As a disclaimer, Justin does it really use cocaine. And I just inhaled it. Is that what I did?

Did I inhale it? The powdered walnut shell or did I mix it in the sponge? You probably mixed it in something. Some sort of tincture. Maybe a tincture, maybe a compound to put on your head. Maybe a salve. Yeah, a poultice. A poultice perhaps.

Anyway, so you can see where they would get the idea. Like a walnut shell, I guess kind of looks like a skull. So if your skull is broken, take some walnut shell. I think that's a fantastic theory. I would love to apply that too. If your eyes are broken, it's grapes. It's just like a whole Halloween theme there. Right, if your eyes are broken.

If your eyes are broken, it's grapes. They look like eyes. My teeth hurt. here's some corn yeah I guess teeth kind of look like corn sure more or less they look like corn my intestines are broken eat some pesquetti do you think intestines look like spaghetti they're the closest like eye okay maybe if it's not, maybe not spaghetti. Maybe like egg noodles. Or two, what are those two, pin-a? They look like like long pin-a pasta.

Pin-a, found naturally in our environment. Okay, I'll write. I hope I pick some pin-a. All right, smart guy. All right, smart-a-lock. So, like I was saying, compared to this theory of medicine, it kind of made sense that, well, we actually have this thing, we know works for something, let's just try it for everything. And this was the idea behind a lot of patent medicines was, hey, I've got something that

does work for this one thing, and I am going to now market the heck out of it until everybody will buy it. So, how did they market it? How did they get the word out? So one interesting way is, you know, Almanac's Justin. I do, I have them littered about. I hoard them. Our house is just full of Almanacs everywhere, Almanacs.

So one way that they would market their product is actually, that's where Almanacs came from. They would create these Almanacs because people love facts like that. They just love reading, you know, books of interesting facts. And nerds do. I do. Okay, point taken. And they would use them as vehicles to just provide lots of advertisement for their products. So like every other page was an advertisement for, you know, whatever their stuff was. Dr. Jimmy's good time, juice. Dr. Jimmy's good time, juice.

Next to like the forecast for, you know, November of whatever, 18, 18, 82 or whatever. So that was where a lot of these all my ex-fers came from. The other way that they would like to market them are medicine shows. Oh, okay. So medicine shows, I'm assuming you want me to tell you more.

Go on. What the hell? Interested in my face looks. You can't see this at home, but trust me. Find a Google image chart for a really interested person. And just imagine me doing that. That would definitely be Justin. So medicine shows were like, they were kind of like traveling circuses.

Except that the whole idea was just to promote either one or maybe a couple different guys would get together and promote several different patent medicines. You would have all kinds of like different acts and performances that would draw crowds. So just like a circus, you know, like come down and see these people, you know, see the bearded lady or whatever. But then at the end, the big, the big moment at the end was really just this huge sales pitch for whatever your thing was. And that was actually, that was the whole idea of like a shill in the audience. Oh, they'd have one person who kind of, oh, my arms better.

Think stock. Exactly. And then would come out and like testify to how great it was. So they were paid ahead of time and then they would stand up and say, hey, I used what Dr. Jimmy's feel good powder, whatever. Dr. Jimmy's good, Tom Juice. Yeah. That. And I'm, look how strong I am now. And they actually, strong men were one of the biggest, that was one of the biggest acts

that they would use because then they could market their product and say, hey, remember those big musly guys you saw earlier today? Guess what they eat. Now, just so you know, this is still happening to you today, but it's happening with products like hydroxycut, or extends, like this exact pattern and this exact scam is being run on you with a person sucking their stomach in

and putting on some fake tan and saying that this fitness product works for them. That's exactly right. I think you should, you filled me in once Justin on one of the tricks that they use for the before and after pictures. Oh yeah, yeah, yeah. There's lots.

I mean, there's obviously Photoshop, but a lot of times they get super fit people who have been in some sort of accident or let themselves go. Or just had a baby or something where they had to put on some weight. And then they can snap back because underneath there, the blubber is a fit person that they can pretty easily shed because it's all muscle underneath there. I think that's a great trick. I never thought of that. Yeah. It's pretty clever. So when they were, you know, marketing these different patent medicines, they had to have a gimmick. That was the big thing. So you've got this thing and you can name it something, whatever. And you can

have, you know, testimonies and you can use your royal endorsement. But you've got to have some kind of gimmick as to why this is such a great thing. And there were kind of different categories that's fell into. One of the biggest was exotic ingredients. Give me an example of an exotic ingredient. So you could probably find a lot of this again today using marketing. But Dr. Kilmer's swamp root. Now listen, I love his work in Kiske's Bang Bang. He's fantastic in Tombstone. I'm not sure if foul Kilmer gave me swamp root.

I would ingest it. And I didn't even know he was a medical doctor. And you know, it's great about that. It may as well have been foul Kilmer, because there probably was never a Dr. Kilmer. Rarely in any of these products that were marketed as Dr. Whoever's stuff, was there a doctor? A lot of the time, it was a bunch of guys in a warehouse

printing out advertising circulars who made up a name. And the swamp reaps sounded very exotic. So the story behind it was that Dr. Kilmer would go around and collect these, you know, very rare Roots that were found deep within exotic swamps all over the world and then turn them into this tonic and you could take it And it would help your kidney health But it would well no probably not probably there wasn't an even swampry, right? That was probably made up as well Yeah, oh yeah, yeah, yeah a lot of the time the whatever they're saying is and there wasn't an even swampery, right? That was probably made up as well. Yeah. Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah. A lot of the time, whatever they're saying is in there, isn't in there.

Yeah. No, that's important to know. There are ingredients in these, but very rarely the ingredients that they're claiming, because again, they don't have to disclose the ingredients at this point. It's all just dust and water and fruit juice. Sure. Why not? And actually, I'll get to that. There's a lot of things, some of the stuff which we've covered before, which were actually in these. There was also the bowel bob fruit, which was a common thing to market because it sounds exotic.

It sounds like something you can't get. I think you can actually get it in Maine. I don't know how exotic that is. It's an egg. But it sounded sounded weird and so that was very popular. If you didn't have an exotic ingredient, maybe you wanted to go the Native American route. I do. At the time.

I'm ready. Take me down this path. At the time. Lead the way, Sagittarwayo. Hey, relevant topic. Thank you, topical. I like it. At the time, the Native Americans were still seeing Hey, relevant. Topical. I like it.

At the time, the Native Americans were still seeing as exotic as well, but it was really the concept of the noble savage was very common at the time. And so they thought that they- Like ironized godi, the guy who cried when you threw trash. Is that an example of a noble savage? That a much later example, but yeah. The idea that the Native Americans were in touch with the world in a way that we weren't.

So that they weren't civilized in the same manner as the Europeans, but that they understood nature and the way the earth worked in a way that the Europeans didn't was the kind of concept. So marketing something as being related to Native Americans was very popular. And that's actually where Kikapu, Indy, and Saagwak comes from. And we still do this to the... I mean, it's so interesting to see these, like, these sort of cultural loops repeat because, like, we still do this today.

Like, how often do you see, like, in a commercial or whatever, someone in like a small rural community or like, you know, these Tibetan monks have been using this secret for for so long. I like these are the same, it's the same scam. Exactly. Look at where this natural spring water comes from. Right, exactly. So the Kikapu Indian medicine company was specifically to market, you know, this product and then

they had others, but the idea was that there really was a kick-a-poo Indian tribe, by the way. They had no relation to this company. It was out in Nebraska or something, I think, but they had nothing to do with the people who marketed this. And it was, in fact, the basis for kick-a-poo joy juice from Lilabner's comic strip. There were also Dr. Mor Morris's Indian root pills. They had a whole story for this one.

Tell me, take me on a journey. So Dr. Morris was a trained medical doctor in the United States, who then left for more exotic climbs, traveled all throughout Asia, Africa, Europe, all over the world, looking for cures, looking for medicine, finally ended up back in his home country, lived with the American Indians for three years,

learned their ways, got in touch with nature as they were, and discovered their secret roots, not like where they came from. Their secret plant roots. Like actual roots, like in the ground. And then he took these roots and he ground them up and he made them into pills and they were great for, again, for everything.

Everything. Everything. There was no Dr. Morse. Okay. There's no evidence that anybody like that ever existed. I saw that kind of, I got it in the head. Yeah. It's a theme.

There were also, you know also one whole class of patent medicines we already did a whole show about, and that was the like radium, the whole idea of radiation therapy and all those cures. But there was also electromagnetism. So we discovered the idea of electromagnetism, and then of course we thought, well, I mean, we know what this is now,

let's make medicine out of it. So there were all kind of devices that were created that you could like put on like hats You could wear and suits that would attract electricity to your body. Perfect. Or perhaps you just want to coat yourself in a cream that will make you more conductive to electricity. Yeah, absolutely. I've been looking for ways to be more conductive. You could it could be like generalized electromagnetism. So like the violet violet ray machines, which would attract it to the whole body and we're good for

General health. Well, yeah good for nothing, but the idea is they were good for general health There are also electric fezes. Do you want to wear an electric fuzz? Electric fuzz is the name of my my college jam band we were terrible and a roundly disliked in the musical community. Did I cure your baldness? It did cure my baldness.

That's the weird thing about that band. It did. Well, it did much better than the electric phases of Olden Bay. Yeah. Yeah. There were also some doctors who claimed that they could use radio waves to diagnose patients. Again, well, that's sort of true, right? I mean, as in over long distances, you could send radio waves.

Oh, God. Distances away. Oh, no. And they would penetrate a person's body and then you would get waves back that would tell you what was wrong with them. Absolutely not. We're not talking about radiology here. And I think one that's great is in 1913,

there was John Brinkley, who called himself the electromagnetic doctor, and he brought this electric medicine from Germany, which was really just colored water. And he would inject it into men who were having problems in the bedroom, and it was supposed to make them more virile. He actually later went on to- That had to work though. That one had to work.

I mean, that sounds legit. Well, maybe as a placebo, but this was nothing compared to later when he started transplanting goat testicles into human men's scrotums to should also treat their impotence. Good job, Brinkley. Yeah, still not a good idea. Not a good idea. I mean, I lash.

Just pull the eyelash off. Don't I lash? No, it's gone now. Okay, good. So, do you want to know what was really in this stuff? Yes, please. I'm dying. I just drank two bottles of it while you were talking.

Well, then I'm betting you're feeling pretty good because most of these things contained opium, alcohol, so a lot of the cold medicines contain cocaine. So basically stuff that would make you feel something. I mean, the idea was that you can't sell a patent medicine, you know, like the colored water thing is not gonna work for very long.

You need something that will have some kind of noticeable effect on the body. And the easiest way to do that is to give somebody alcohol or a stimulant or an narcotic. Mm-hmm. Cause yeah, you'll feel that. Yeah, and we already know a lot of the children's cough syrup or opiates, a lot of cold medicines were cocaine

or maybe just grain alcohol. I guess, cause- That'll clear it out. Because you think about it, your cold's going to go away probably. Eventually. Eventually. There were a lot of medicines marketed for female complaints. Lydia Pinkham's was the most popular one that some people may be familiar with, which

was just alcohol. But when they're talking about female complaints, I looked into what this means because I thought they probably just meant the same thing we talked kind of talked about with hysteria, like, Moody, Upadieness. Yeah, or not doing what you say. That's not really what we're talking about. What are we talking about? We're talking about early pregnancy.

What? A lot of these medicines were actually, they were marketed for female complaints, but that was a secret code for if you're pregnant and don't want to be. So like very early rudimentary plan B. Exactly. So well, not not plan B. I mean These are medicines that would induce abortion. Oh my god. So penny royal, Tanzi, Juniperus, Sabina So a lot of these compounds which had been kind of found to do this maybe anecdotally. So they began putting these in pills and selling them for quote unquote female complaints. A lot of, and then during the prohibition area, this was like a way a lot of the licores were sold as medications. So, you know, there were like herbs in them that they said would

do stuff, but really you're just taking them for all of the Boos, you know, yeah, the only thing they treated is like rough day syndrome Absolutely, but they're great for that they're perfect for that there was actually the prohibition officers would crack down on this stuff Periodically, so there was something called Peruna that was a tonic that was 18% grain alcohol So there was something called parruna that was a tonic that was 18% grain alcohol They changed it to Jamaican ginger which was Like another variation of the formula that was they were trying to like skirt the authorities with They did that by adding an organophosphate which you're not familiar with but it's actually a really deadly neurotoxin Oh Oh good, a fantastic job all time, you people.

You did it again. So it created this like delayed neuropathy, this nerve damage that these patients would get, and then they just named it something. So they said, ah, you've been drinking Jamaican ginger, you got Jake Leg. I don't know why they didn't just stop drinking Jamaican ginger, but.

I have a condition. Yeah, my headaches are gone, but Hachi, Machi, this jagged leg can't seem to shake it. Or I can't seem to stop shaking it. Yeah, you can't stop shaking it. No, you just can't feel it anymore. Just can't feel it. The most famous of all this though, and I'm surprised you haven't asked me about it yet, Justin.

Sid, what about snake oil? There you go. It's like you read my mind. Or your sheet. Snake oil is the most famous obviously of the patent medicines. So Clark Stanley, also known as the rattlesnake king. Oh, how can I get that nickname?

What do I need to do? Well, I think all you really need to do are publicly take rattlesnakes and like break them down and process them into an oil at the world's Colombian exposition in Chicago. So if you could manage to do that, then you can sell something called snake oil. Who is the worst criminal, the guy who knowingly lie or AG tombs, the serial killer stuck to the Chicago world's fair, the Colombian exposition, who was worse. They were both there. Think about it. What if he had

killed him and saved hundreds of people? Would that have expunished his crimes? I have no idea what you're talking about. I just told you. I mean, what more contrast do you need? There was a serial killer at the world's Colombian exposition in Chicago. Right. And so you think he should have killed Clark Stanley, the rattlesnake. What if he had killed Clark Stanley, the rattlesnake King and safe people from being exposed to the bad stuff in it?

Do you really think that anybody can kill Clark Stanley, the rattlesnake King? His name is the rattlesnake King. Oh, hell, you're right. There's no way. You can't bring him down. You just make him stronger and angrier. Now to be fair, he was later brought down by the order. OK. Well, okay. They could bring him down fine. They have badges

They analyzed his cheating snake oil and found that it did in fact contain no snake mineral oil red pepper camp for fatty oil and turpentine. That was about it. Bad for you. Yeah, not good for you Bad for you. Some of these medicines would include like laxatives or diuretics, again, just to produce some kind of effects. You could feel like they were doing something. And eventually, they actually started to put things in there that could do damage. Like, when opioids were banned from them, they turned it to like this anti-inflammatory that caused like liver and kidney failure. So, Justin, were you wondering what they cured? What did they cure? Everything. Perfect. Yeah. William Radams,

microbe killer actually set on the bottle. Cures all diseases. Great job. And Dr. Sibley's solar tincture took it one step further. What did it say? Restore life in the event of sudden death. No. Absolutely. It seems like an easy one to dispray. And in addition, all the things that we always talk about at curing, the Binary Old Disease, TB Cancer, Color and Aralgia, Scarlet Fever, blah, blah, blah, blah.

How did these go out of fashion, Sid? The main way, actually, in 1905, a guy named Samuel Hopkins Adams published in Colors Weekly, an article called The Great American Fraud, and it was exposing all of these patent medicines and people kind of knew that and Muck Rager journalist had been writing about it for a while. It's just this was the kind of the big breakthrough article that everybody read and paid attention to and it led to in 1906 the Pure Food and Drug Act which required that you you label all the ingredients in all of these products. They didn't ban any ingredients. They didn't say you couldn't put this stuff

in it. They just said you have to tell people what's in it and it kind of limited the like really wild claims that they could make. So that was the beginning of the end, I would assume. Absolutely. After that, in 1936, they started banning alcohol and opiates and stimulants from these things. And a lot of the, like I said, the really fraudulent claims were actually banned at this time. There was one Morris Fishbane, who's the editor of the Journal

of the American Medical Association, JAMA, who spent much of his career on masking these frauds. And so that was kind of the end of medications, but that wasn't the end of the concept of patent medicine. It just moved to cosmetics. Oh, perfect. And you still see this today. Shampoo's marketed as having like yang yang, yang yang, yang yang, you know what I'm talking about?

Yingling? Yingling for your hair. Bananas, mangoes, honey, all of this stuff. There's no evidence that any of it does anything, but there you go. Well, honey, we'll get into that some other time. But there's no evidence that it's going to make your hair look like the girl in the commercial. Right. And then as you mentioned, Justin, even today today it continues in nutritional supplements, weight

loss aids, and sleep medications. Which always be very careful to say in their ads like, we don't know, maybe it doesn't really cure anything. Like I mean it says in the ads, like it's not proven to actually help. So I don't know, you got 30 bucks? Give it a shot. Well, exactly. And that's why you'll notice that they say a lot, you know, this is not intended to diagnose

or treat any disease. They have to put that because of all of these things we've talked about. Yeah, because they're fake. And I think my favorite, Justin, and you may have already mentioned it, is inzite. I have not mentioned inzite. Are you familiar with inzite? Is that like a penal system? It is a pill for, again, for impotence.

It's actually made of just some herbs and minerals and vitamins and that kind of stuff, but they originally made up a scientific name for it. Ah, because people are dumb. It was so fragile asotas and excuse my Latin, if I don't know how to pronounce that. And they claimed that that was Latin for better sex. No, not, it's not.

It is not Latin for better sex. It's the grammar is wrong, apparently. And what it really translates to, if anything, is refuge for the dissipated. Yep. I've got something to up. Which I guess is accurate. Yeah, see, something I thought that was fascinating when you were telling me this is that when you're researching this topic is that some of these things that our patent medicines

or started as patent medicines are still like on the market, like you can still get them. Oh, absolutely. Lutin's cough drops is one that's, you know, a lot of people still use. Those are originally a patent medicine. Goodie powder. A lot of my patients use that. And maybe that's a regional thing, but I have a lot of patients who use that. And that was a patent medicine.

Phillips milk of magnesium. Bear aspirin, bromocells are, I mean, a lot of these medicines are still around. It doesn't necessarily mean they're fake, right? It just doesn't. Yeah. No, it doesn't mean they're fake. No, I mean, bear aspirin obviously has a use. It has lots of uses. But when it was first marketed, it was a patent medicine

and it was marketed for many more things than it actually does. Vicks vapor rub. Didn't you say, oh, Vicks vapor rub is fake? That's fake, right? No, it's not fake. It just, it just doesn't, I mean, it makes you feel better, doesn't it? I guess.

I mean, you know, when you're sick and somebody rubs it on your chest, I'll do it. Okay, I appreciate that. I'll rub that on your chest next time you're sick. It makes you feel cared for. My mom used to put it on a hankerchief, and I would inhale it. Maybe feel good. There were also some that are no longer sold as medicine

that were originally. Like what? Well, seven up. Coca-Cola, Dr. Pepper, Pepsi, Tonic Water, Angusira bitters. That would make, okay, Angusira bitters, I don't know. They just, that would get you a little drunk because those are alcohol, but I guess a lot of these are caffeine.

Once people were onto the caffeine game, you couldn't mark, cause that would give you a pick me up, especially if you weren't doing caffeine every day. Absolutely. Yeah, that would make you feel a bit better, I guess. Yeah, a lot of these things were marketers medicine and then when they realized like,

well, we can't market this as medicine anymore, cause it's not, we'll just sell it, because it tastes good. Why not? Treat yourself. So, that's patent medicines. It's a pretty weird subject. It's why in Ranging, we've hit on a lot of these things.

A lot of our other episodes have kind of edged into this, but it is a whole category and it's really interesting to read about. So, I thought we should sum it all up what it is. Thank you to everyone who has been listening and tweeting and sharing our program. We sure appreciate it. If you wouldn't mind heading over to iTunes, you can head over there and give us a review on our iTunes webpage. I'm currently without my Macintosh computer, so I can't say thank you to everybody who did that this week, but I really, we really, really appreciate it,

and it really helps us out. So thank you so much for sharing the show. Please tweet about it at Sobones. And don't start it with at Sobones, because then only people who follow us already can see it. You gotta put it in the middle there somewhere. Anyway. you can tweet at us too at Justin McElroy. She's at Sydney McElroy S-Y-D-N-E-E I also want to encourage you to head over to maximumfund.org. There's a ton of other great programs

That you can listen to and enjoy like Wayman Powell, Jordan Jesse Goe, Bullseye, one bad mother my brother and my brother and me Oh, that's thank thank you, sir, to God. And partial. There's forums there so you can go chat about our show and all the other great programs. We'd also like to thank stuff you missed in history class for the great shout out.

Yeah, thank you so much for them. And thank you to the taxpayers for letting us use their song, Medicines, as our intro and outro tune. We sure appreciate it. And thank you to you for listening to another episode of Sobbing. We'll be back with you next Friday. Until then, I'm Justin McRoy. I'm Sydney McRoy. And as always, don't Alright! Maximumfund.org

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