Maintenance Phase
Maintenance Phase
Snake Oil
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.
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Links:
- Snake Oil, Hustlers & Hambones by Mary Anderson
- A 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!
Michael: Hello, welcome to Maintenance Phase, a show about diet, and wellness, and occasionally, the things that are pretending to be those things.
Aubrey: [laughs]
Michael: That was not well written. I'm sorry.
Aubrey: As long as you feel bad about it, that's what really matters.
[laughter]
Michael: We're off to a good start.
[laughter]
Michael: I am Michael Hobbes. I'm a reporter for The Huffington Post.
Aubrey: Hi, I'm Aubrey Gordon. I'm an author, a columnist, and an essayist, and I'm a fat lady who loves research.
Michael: Yes.
Aubrey: You can also find us on Patreon. We're at patreon.com/maintenancephase. 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 to TeePublic. If you have designs of your own that you want to submit, you can do that, too.
Michael: Ooh, yes. It wouldn't be a millennial greeting if it didn't come with a bunch of URLs.
Aubrey: [laughs]
Michael: Today, we're talking about snake oil, I guess, which I know nothing other than the fact that at three-day intervals for weeks now, you have been texting me. I cannot wait to talk about snake oil.
Aubrey: [laughs]
Michael: I'm like, "Don't spoil me."
Aubrey: All I wanted to do was be like, "Here's a quote. Here's the thing."
Michael: [laughs]
Aubrey: This is just all fascinating tidbits that I've been yelling at my friends and family.
Michael: Yes.
Aubrey: I have memorized one of these quotes-
Michael: No way.
Aubrey: -because I love it so much.
Michael: Oh, my God.
Aubrey: So, you know nothing about snake oil, yeah?
Michael: I assume that it's the oil that you put on your pet snake to keep it hydrated.
Aubrey: [laughs] But you're familiar with the phrase 'snake oil salesman,' yeah?
Michael: 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. 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 selling fraudulent product, but specifically about health and wellness.
Aubrey: 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."
Michael: Oh, my God.
Aubrey: I will also say, "I found out that snake oil was a real actual thing." In order to learn about the history of snake oil, we're going to take this trip through the really bizarre history of quackery.
Michael: Ooh, good.
Aubrey: 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 the story without talking about some pretty serious racism.
Michael: Just once, I would like to look into one of these historical concepts or an existing institution and it's like, "No, racism nowhere to be found. It's weird." Scanning horizon, [crosstalk] no racism, again never happens. [laughs]
Aubrey: This was a thing that was almost all white people and there was no racism involved is not a thing, historically. Generally speaking, not a thing.
Michael: Yes.
Aubrey: Let's just get into it, right?
Michael: All right, let's dive in.
Aubrey: In order to talk about snake oil salesman, we have to talk about the history of medicine shows. Have you ever heard of medicine shows, Mike?
Michael: No. Medicine shows?
Aubrey: Oh, my God. Are you kidding me? This is going to be so much more fun than I thought it was going to.
Michael: Medicine shows.
Aubrey: 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.
Michael: Oh, wow.
Aubrey: Basically, a medicine show is a performance that will sell you a health product.
Michael: Okay.
Aubrey: Often in medicine shows, there will be some feigned injury, often these are all faked that they'll be like, "Let's bring somebody out of the audience, who has a health issue. Ma'am, what's your health issue? Oh, you have a limp? Drink this tonic. Oh, your limp is gone. Look at that."
Michael: Oh. So, it's an early infomercial?
Aubrey: Yeah, it's a live version of like, "There's got to be a better way."
Michael: Yeah. [laughs]
Aubrey: American medicine show has its roots in medieval Europe.
Michael: Oh.
Aubrey: At the height of the Roman Empire, there was a ton of work for entertainers for jugglers, and for tumblers, and for commedia dell'arte, but at the decline of the Roman Empire, that work dried up particularly, because the Catholic Church went on to ban theatre and circus.
Michael: [laughs] Continuing the Catholic Church's tradition of just like anything that is fun, just define it as a sin and ban it. No logic at all.
Aubrey: We hate fun.
[laughter]
Aubrey: 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 going to get caught, they would just pack up and move to the next town.
Michael: Oh, so, it's like three-card monte or something. These things that are illegal, but it takes a while for the cops to get there basically.
Aubrey: During that time in Europe, these are especially popular in England and in Italy, which is actually where we get the term charlatan.
Michael: Oh.
Aubrey: It is an Italian word, which, oh, God, I don't speak Italian, but it looks like ciarlatano, which specifically in its early use was used to refer to people who "sell salves or other drugs" in public places, pulls teeth and exhibits tricks of leisure domain.
Michael: I'm imagining the same person doing all three of those things. They do like a Cirque du Soleil performance, and then they pull a rabbit out of a hat, and then they take out one of your molars.
Aubrey: Yeah, so, teeth pulling was a specially popular-
Michael: Fuck.
Aubrey: - 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.
Michael: [laughs] Holy shit.
Aubrey: These became so popular in England. This is a fully thousand years later in 1511 that England became the first nation to start banning "quackery."
Michael: Oh.
Aubrey: That ban didn't work, because 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."
Michael: All right. I mean isn't there essentially no scientific method at this point?
Aubrey: Yeah, that's right.
Michael: 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 has an effective cure.
Aubrey: Yeah, that's right. We don't know about germs.
Michael: Right.
Aubrey: We think that most things are related to the humors, right?
Michael: Right.
Aubrey: Even "legitimate medicine" was a crapshoot at the time and it was super expensive.
Michael: Right. There's basically no state capacity to provide healthcare. There's no hospital that you go to. It's all just a bunch of private vendors, basically, right?
Aubrey: That's exactly right and you go if you can pay them.
Michael: Yeah.
Aubrey: When you go, even if one state provided, it would be like, "Enjoy your leeches."
Michael: Right.
Aubrey: Medicine shows throughout history have a few common elements.
Michael: One, Moon juice.
Aubrey: [laughs]
Michael: Two, sex dust.
Aubrey: One is, it was always a lengthy show. It was often an hour or two that got people into the mode of being entertained, not sold to. So, it wore people down. They'd be like, "Oh, I'm just watching a play and then surprised by our health tonic or whatever." Many medicine shows also included some elements of what we later came to define as freak shows. So, they would have little people, disabled people, disfigured people, fat people on display and then a doctor would meet up with you at the end, not actually a doctor, but a person who said, they were a doctor.
Michael: Someone in a lab coat, yeah.
Aubrey: 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."
Michael: Right.
Aubrey: When these transitions over to the US, medicine shows are also closely linked to Wild West shows so like Buffalo Bill Cody.
Michael: Uh-huh.
Aubrey: 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.
Michael: Holy shit.
Aubrey: 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, P.T. Barnum.
Michael: Oh, circus folks.
Aubrey: Before P.T. Barnum was in circus land, he was in wild west shows, medicine shows, and freak shows.
Michael: It sounds like they're all mixed up together.
Aubrey: They're all tied together at this point.
Michael: It's the combination Pizza Hut-Taco Bell.
Aubrey: [laughs] It's grim, right?
Michael: Yeah.
Aubrey: Here we go. But these shows were massively popular. Buffalo Bill's largest reported show was in Chicago and it drew 41,000 spectators.
Michael: Holy shit.
Aubrey: In addition to all of that, there was often a pretty spectacular display of what the medicine could do in medicine shows. This is over time, wherever you are. It was usually just a magic trick. Someone would pretend to cut their arm and then heal it or they'd put an able-bodied person in a wheelchair and then be like, "Look, they could walk." You're like, "Well, they could always walk, you just [crosstalk] in a wheelchair."
Michael: If they're doing this for 41,000 people, a lot of those people are not sitting particularly close.
Aubrey: Totally.
Michael: It's probably pretty easy to dupe large crowds like this-
Aubrey: Totally.
Michael: -with just like a couple ketchup packets.
Aubrey: [laughs] Yeah. I would say the interesting thing about medicine shows as I would have thought that the enlightenment would have killed them off.
Michael: Yeah.
Aubrey: They got more traction during the enlightenment.
Michael: Oh, interesting.
Aubrey: Not because of any new scientific findings that made more effective products, but because more people were more conversant in more sciency words. So, it legitimated medicine shows in folks minds.
Michael: It's 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. So, instead of debunking the junk science, the junk science just adopted all these medical scientific terms.
Aubrey: Yeah. Here's a quote from one of the medicine shows. One of the medicine showmen would say, "A doctor will cut out your umbiculus and remove your twidium."
Michael: [laughs]
Aubrey: 100% made up words that sound vaguely sciency and people will be like, "Well, he sounds like he knows what he's talking about."
Michael: That's great. I was just saying this morning, I spent too much time on the twidium.
Aubrey: [laughs]
Michael: So, I agree. I agree with this.
Aubrey: 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 about the product, but mostly they were the only entertainment that was available at the time, especially in small towns and rural communities.
Michael: Yeah, before TV, there's just not a lot to do in the evenings.
Aubrey: Totally. You go see a medicine show, there are tumblers, and there are actors, and there's all this stuff. Medicine shows becomes the preeminent form of entertainment.
Michael: Were they free to attend?
Aubrey: They were often free to attend. Yes. The trick was, you made your money on selling your stuff to people.
Michael: Yeah, it's like one of those timeshare conferences.
Aubrey: Yeah, absolutely. This is where we get into P.T. Barnum, who is the biggest popularizer of medicine shows in the US.
Michael: The Ray Kroc of circuses.
Aubrey: Yes, absolutely. [laughs] It's a pretty perfect comparison. I would say in a lot of ways, he's the archetypal medicine showman and was the Velvet Underground of medicine showman.
Michael: [laughs]
Aubrey: Not everybody saw him, but everyone who did started their own medicine show.
Michael: [laughs]
Aubrey: He ran all of this stuff. Freak shows, Wild West shows, all of that 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 screeds about the very tribal members, who were making him rich.
Michael: Oh shit.
Aubrey: It made him impossibly rich. He was so rich.
Michael: See, I would describe him using an obscure Italian word 'ciarlatano.'
Aubrey: [laughs]
Michael: I don't know if you know about that. I've known about it for almost six minutes now.
Aubrey: I will say, his early medicine show, he pulled it together with a partner, who was from Germany. They sold bear grease, which they said would regrow hair.
Michael: Okay. bear grease sounds something like snake oil, where it sounds pretty expensive to gather. I don't know what the bear grease was actually made out of, but it sounds like a lot of trouble. What was the actual bear grease?
Aubrey: It was just Vaseline.
Michael: Okay. One thing that's interesting to me, the contrast between P.T. Barnum level scamming and what's going on now with Moon Juice and wellness influencers, etc., is that he knew that he was full of shit. Whereas, I feel what makes it harder now is a lot of the wellness influencers actually believe it. They think that taking this pill is going to make you better at having dusty sex or whatever.
Aubrey: 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." There were also legit thought they were onto something. I think it is similar to today.
Michael: Oh.
Aubrey: It was also really popular in part because medicine shows were mostly dominated by men. In the 1800s, live entertainment was seen as this feminine pursuit.
Michael: [laughs] Okay.
Aubrey: The arts was something for women, but also women, who were professional actors were associated with sex work, because the idea is that you can just be bought by anyone who can pay the price. It's really weird [crosstalk] off stigma.
Michael: Whatever. God, it's like the Catholic Church is like, "Here's a fun thing. Let's fuck it up. Let's ruin it for everybody."
Aubrey: "Do you want to go to a play or do you want to go to hell?"
Michael: [laughs]
Aubrey: Those are your choices [crosstalk].
Michael: It's so weird. [laughs]
Aubrey: Part of the reason that medicine shows were so popular, this is in the 1700s, late 1700s was in part because medicine at the time wasn't regulated at all. In the US, there were not really structures for medical education, for certification, for any of that kind of stuff. There were just a bunch of people, who are 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 the first medical school to require a college degree for entrance, prior to that many doctors weren't literate.
Michael: "Hey, Doc, what does it say in the label?" "Ah, I don't know."
Aubrey: But listen, Mike, we're going to talk about this in a minute. There weren't labels.
Michael: Oh, what? [laughs]
Aubrey: 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.
Michael: What? It is just a liquid in a mason jar, and you're buying it at one of these fairs, and that's it?
Aubrey: Yeah, and it's like, "Here it is."
Michael: Shit.
Aubrey: Treatment like medical treatment could come from any number of sources. People are like, "I don't know I could go to the doctor, but they're expensive and not good or I could mix up this herbal tonic in my kitchen." Anybody who offered a solution, it was all equally good. There is a book that I relied on heavily for this research by Ann Anderson called Snake Oil, Hustlers and Hambones. Ann Anderson, the author calls treatments at the time "a mix of superstition apocrypha, case histories, and anything that seemed like a good idea at the time."
Michael: It is infomercials.
Aubrey: Yeah, totally. But everything's an infomercial, right?
Michael: Yeah.
Aubrey: Anyone, anywhere can tell you, "This will work well for you" and you'll just believe it, because there's not a source to check it against, right?
Michael: Yeah, right. Although it's not the population is particularly literate and particularly well versed in science, medicine, history, literature--. The education system at this time was not particularly well developed, either.
Aubrey: 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.
Michael: Oh, wow.
Aubrey: They would be like, "I'm a doctor and the blacksmith or I'm a doctor and the farmer," because there just isn't enough business.
Michael: Doctors were the original gig workers.
Aubrey: Yeah. [laughs]
Michael: You know what I was expecting?
Aubrey: This is the quote that I memorized. I love it so much.
Michael: Tell me. Close your eyes and tell it to me.
Aubrey: [laughs] This is from Snake Oil, Hustlers and Hambones. "The Midwest harbored quacks as manoeuvre does flies. Indiana was called "a sinkhole in the medical practice" and Ohio, "a paradise for the incompetent."'
Michael: [laughs]
Aubrey: It was a freewheeling medical environment in which the medicine showman with his tall silk hat and folksy manner could operate unrestrained.
Michael: Dude, keep going. Let's roast all 50 states. What else you got?
Aubrey: Yeah. [laughs]
Michael: Illinois.
Aubrey: I love the idea of just senselessly dunking on a stage.
Michael: [laughs] I know.
Aubrey: I told my brother, I was like, "I want a t-shirt that says, "Ohio, a paradise for the incompetent."' He was like, "It should be their license plate."
[laughter]
Michael: It's better than those states that are terrible for incompetent people.
Aubrey: We are incompetent inclusive.
Michael: Come incompetents, join us.
Aubrey: Again, at this time, doctors are not especially good at what they do. There's this Dr. Benjamin Rush. He treated everything by bleeding his patients.
Michael: Oh, yeah. [crosstalk]
Aubrey: This is [crosstalk] humors based whatever, right?
Michael: Yeah.
Aubrey: In the process of bleeding them, he killed a lot of his patients and this became especially bad news during a yellow fever outbreak.
Michael: Oh.
Aubrey: Yellow fever spread by mosquitoes.
Michael: Yeah.
Aubrey: This dude is bleeding patients into open containers. [crosstalk] These are patients who had yellow fever, mosquitoes are swarming drinking that blood. It's essentially a super spreader of that.
Michael: People need blood to live. Don't take it away from people.
Aubrey: That yellow fever outbreak ended up killing 10% of the population of Philadelphia.
Michael: Oh, what?
Aubrey: This was not an insignificant super spreader event.
Michael: Man, you've got competition, Ohio.
Aubrey: [laughs] Philadelphia, a paradise for the incompetent. In addition to medicine being garbage, nobody knew anything about health and sanitation at the time.
Michael: Right.
Aubrey: This is a pretty lengthy quote from Snake Oil, Hustlers and Hambones. It's my next to memorize from this book.
Michael: Close your eyes. I'll only listen if you close your eyes. Otherwise, I'm leaving.
Aubrey: [laughs] 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 poisoned. 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."
Michael: It is amazing that people managed to have sex in these conditions.
Aubrey: [laughs]
Michael: This was a time when the birth rate in America was nine children for every woman, which means people are having sex at least nine times in there like vermin infested poop caked [crosstalk] no showers afterwards, it is amazing to me constantly that the human race has made it this far.
Aubrey: It's really gross.
Michael: Ah, imagine their breath if they kiss somebody with that breath. Oh.
Aubrey: It's really upsetting.
Michael: Yeah, dude.
Aubrey: You can see how in this time when just everything related to health and wellness is pretty broken. You can understand how somebody 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."
Michael: You're also just drowning and people just saying stuff. I feel the relationship to truth and falsehood back then was very different as well.
Aubrey: Absolutely. Medicine shows would also employ all kinds of extremely garbage tactics to sell their stuff. For example, one medicine showman, who was pretty famous at the time, Thomas Kelly would set up a stage and line the edge of the stage with jars of pickled tapeworms.
Michael: Okay.
Aubrey: Then what sort of get up on stage and describe a bunch of vague symptoms. We hear this in supplement companies, they're advertised on TV do this where they're like, "Do you feel tired sometimes? Are you not always confident?"
Michael: Yeah.
Aubrey: He would say all those things are the result of having a tapeworm.
Michael: Ooh.
Aubrey: That tapeworm will start to kill you, unless you buy his Shamrock Tapeworm Remover for $7, which is $190 in today's money. Frankly, joke's on everyone because given the sanitation at the time, a lot of people really did have tapeworms.
Michael: Yeah. What was he actually selling? Do we know?
Aubrey: This one we don't particularly know. I will say a lot of the tonics would have a little bit of turpentine in them, which is what would give them, it would make it smell like medicine.
Michael: That's like the dandruff shampoo companies that added something to their shampoos to make it tingle a little bit.
Aubrey: Really.
Michael: Because otherwise people didn't think that it was working. The thing that cures dandruff has nothing to do with the tingling, but it has to be a little bit unpleasant, otherwise, people think that it must be fake.
Aubrey: Oh, yeah. One of the things that medicine showman would sell was something called an electric belt or an electricity belt, which was basically just a belt that on the inside had glue and capsicum, which is what makes pepper spicy. So, you would put it on and it would feel spicy and tingly on your skin and you'd be like, "That means it's working."
Michael: Must be working. Yeah.
Aubrey: But all it was doing was putting hot peppers on your skin.
Michael: Right.
Aubrey: Thomas Kelly started off the tapeworm remover stuff, but many other medicine showmen refined that approach. They would sell people these pills that were in gelatin capsules, like any gel cap you would take now, but inside the pill was tightly wound-up string.
Michael: [laughs]
Aubrey: Do you see where this is going, Mike?
Michael: Also, people would poop out a little string?
Aubrey: Yup.
Michael: Shut up.
Aubrey: 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 tapeworm."
Michael: Oh, where is the Better Business Bureau? Sleeping at the wheel [crosstalk].
Aubrey: [laughs] It's no Better Business Bureau, buddy. This became such a popular approach that there's a whole business, a factory based in Kansas City that just makes artificial tapeworms. There was another medicine showman, who said that could cure deafness.
Michael: Oh, no.
Aubrey: He worked almost exclusively in rural communities and it was basically just like people had such a buildup of earwax.
Michael: Oh, yeah.
Aubrey: He would be on stage and be like, "This person is deaf or they are hard of hearing. Check out my product. Now, they can hear. Wow."
Michael: Yeah, but at least he's actually providing a fucking service.
Aubrey: Yeah, totally.
Michael: That's [crosstalk] where it's like, "Sure, man. You used to have your wax in your ears and now, you don't."
Aubrey: 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.
Michael: Oh, okay.
Aubrey: Patent medicine was very big in the 1800s and early 1900s, essentially, anyone could file a patent or trademark for anything and sell it as a cure for anything else.
Michael: Oh, it's like fucking vitamin supplements now.
Aubrey: Yeah, there's no regulation on selling or advertising medicine.
Michael: Great.
Aubrey: Patent medicines were incredibly, heavily advertised and provided the blueprint for a bunch of advertising tactics that we see now. In 1847, 2,000 newspapers ran 11 million patent medicine ads.
Michael: Whoa.
Aubrey: By the Civil War, patent medicine ads were half of all of the newspaper advertising revenue in the country.
Michael: No way. It's like perfume ads in Vogue.
Aubrey: [laughs]
Michael: There's a little flap, so that you can pull off.
Aubrey: Patent medicine was pitched at medicine shows, but also on street corners out of these suitcases on tripods. What that allowed medicine showman to do is show how limited the quantity was. They'd be like, "It's going fast. You got to get it now."
Michael: It's like a fucking Jeffree Star makeup palette.
Aubrey: [laughs]
Michael: 100% still doing this now. Limited edition.
Aubrey: I will just say I'm very surprised to hear you tapped into Jeffree Star makeup palettes.
Michael: How dare you?
Aubrey: [laughs]
Michael: Of course, I'm tapped into that.
Aubrey: They also use this tactic of nagging consumers. It's very mystery, the pickup artists,-
Michael: [laughs]
Aubrey: -where they would talk to someone and they'd be like, "Oh, you probably can't afford this." Then the person would be like, "I can afford it. Here's my money."
Michael: It's like, "Yeah, this sports car is only for people that have a sense of danger, but you wouldn't be interested in that."
Aubrey: That's exactly right. Patent medicines, we talked about what was in patent medicines. Some of them were herbal, but most of them are substances that are pretty heavily regulated today.
Michael: Okay.
Aubrey: There was something called Mrs. Winslow's Soothing Syrup, that was a cough syrup advertised to kids.
Michael: Oh, no. I forgot about kids.
Aubrey: That was liquid heroin.
Michael: No way.
Aubrey: 100%, my dude.
Michael: Dude, lit.
Aubrey: [laughs]
Michael: It [crosstalk] like, "Fuck. It's trainspotting." Those kids are lying down, just like tripping balls.
Aubrey: But with babies.
Michael: Give me another juice box, man. Oh, yeah.
Aubrey: It's so fucked. Here were some other ones. Seth Arnold's Cough Killer was morphine.
Michael: Nice.
Aubrey: Fahrney's Teething Syrup-
Michael: Teething syrup.
Aubrey: -eating was morphine and chloroform.
Michael: Oh.
Aubrey: Jayne's Expectorant was opium.
Michael: How were people getting this fucking heroin? Where do you buy heroin in the 1840s? Is it just around?
Aubrey: Listen, if there's no medical regulation, there's definitely no DEA.
Michael: Yeah. [laughs]
Aubrey: None of this has been scheduled.
Michael: Yeah.
Aubrey: There's not even requirements that you label medication at this point. I would imagine if you wanted some heroin, you could probably just go get some heroin.
Michael: At the heroin store.
Aubrey: 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-
Michael: What?
Aubrey: -started in 1879, Bayer Aspirin, patent medicine, 1899. [crosstalk] Milk of Magnesia 1880, Ex-Lax 1905, and Richardson's Croup and Pneumonia Cure Salve created in the 1890s, it's now known as Vicks VapoRub.
Michael: They made Vicks VapoRub in the 1890s?
Aubrey: It kind of feels like it, doesn't it?
Michael: Yeah, a little bit.
Aubrey: [laughs] 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, there's this opening for thinking and talking about different kinds of medicine. More white folks in the US seemed to be at the time more open to cures and treatments that were developed by people, who weren't white, particularly, indigenous remedies at the time. So, tribal members in what is now the US had developed these remedies that were often more effective than white folks' remedies.
Michael: Right. This goes back to our conceptions now of Chinese medicine and this 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.
Aubrey: Yeah, absolutely. There's this tie between popular conceptions of indigenous medicine start [crosstalk] be on the come up as the genocide of indigenous peoples starts to be more and more completed. As indigenous people become less of a perceived threat to white folks, they're like, "Oh, look at these native people, who are at one with nature and they've figured all these things out." A bunch of white folks start referring to themselves as Indian medicine experts.
Michael: Oh shit.
Aubrey: It's so dark, my dude.
Michael: Is it too late to cancel those people like a 150 years later?
Aubrey: [laughs] I feel life expectancy cancelled those people.
Michael: Yeah, that's true.
Aubrey: There was a guy named John Derringer, who called himself Indian John. There was a company called the Kickapoo Indian Medicine Company and the owners of the Kickapoo Indian Medicine Company were unsurprisingly two white dudes. They chose the name Kickapoo Indian Medicine Company because they thought it sounded funny.
Michael: Oh, God, really?
Aubrey: Uh-huh.
Michael: There's something so interesting about how you're able to fetishize a culture and also attempt to destroy it at the same time.
Aubrey: This is the beginnings of a lot of how nonindigenous people talk about indigenous folks in the US now, which is like, "They're gone now and we can revere them.
Michael: Right.
Aubrey: 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 moneyback guarantee."
Michael: That seems a marketing ploy, though, because if they're moving on to a different town, how would you even take them up on that?
Aubrey: Well, here's the funny thing. Are you ready?
Michael: Well, do it.
Aubrey: The Oregon Indian Medicine Company created this, there tonic, it was called Ka-Ton-Ka and they said it was established by the Umatilla tribe in the woods of Oregon, all of that stuff. It was made by a drug firm in Pennsylvania and shipped West. It was so deeply not anything indigenous. They launched their business in the spring and traveled all over Oregon to sell it, but didn't count on Northwest rain. So, their wagons got stuck in the mud for the rest of the year.
Michael: Seriously? No one told you about rain in the Northwest?
Aubrey: They just didn't even account for it.
Michael: Nobody there [crosstalk] seems sleepless in Seattle, nine out of 10 days.
Aubrey: Anyway, it's just fascinating to me that all of these templates for advertising. He stoked fear so that you can sell something, you 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 the one that works.
Michael: Yeah, it is dispiriting that we just keep doing the same thing over and over again like nothing changes. We just happen to have forgotten about the last wave of these crazes.
Aubrey: Absolutely. This is actually where we come to actual snake oil.
Michael: Yes.
Aubrey: This is also where it gets a little bit you're wrong about.
Michael: Ooh.
Aubrey: Uh-huh.
Michael: My favorite.
Aubrey: Unlike other patent medicines, snake oil was a real thing and it actually worked.
Michael: Shut up.
Aubrey: I will knock, Mike.
Michael: This is the twist in this episode. Snake oil was real?
Aubrey: It was real and it worked. It was real and it worked.
Michael: [laughs]
Aubrey: I love it. When I found that out, this is one of the first things that I discovered in research for this episode. That's when I started texting him was like, "This is going to be so good." [laughs]
Michael: This is absurd.
Aubrey: It's totally absurd. 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 and it's one that was primarily powered by immigrant railroad workers, most of whom were from China.
Michael: Yes.
Aubrey: These Chinese immigrant workers are coming in, doing this hard manual labor of building a railroad. They have a lot of aches and pains and to soothe that they used snake oil, which is a traditional Chinese remedy. It was a concentrate that was made by boiling a Chinese water snake.
Michael: What?
Aubrey: Uh-huh. Then you would skim off the fat that had collected off of the top and that's your snake oil.
Michael: So, it's actual snake oil?
Aubrey: It's oil from a snake.
Michael: No fucking way. I thought it was just going to be the bear grease thing, where it's like, you just pick up some dirt from the ground or something and you're like, "Oh, it's snake dust or whatever."
Aubrey: White people saw that this worked, I think overwhelmingly 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.
Michael: It's an early painkiller. It's like Tylenol?
Aubrey: It's Icy Hot.
Michael: You rub it on yourself. You don't drink it. Okay.
Aubrey: Uh-huh. The challenge is these guys want to make American snake oil. America doesn't have the Chinese water snake.
Michael: Yeah, we don’t have a lot of Chinese water snakes around.
Aubrey: They just start boiling different kinds of snakes and they are like, "this is it."
[laughter]
Aubrey: This is a quote from a piece in True West Magazine. There is a guy that is the reason that we have the term 'snake oil salesmen.'
Michael: Oh.
Aubrey: "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.
Michael: Oh God.
Aubrey: He deceptively used mineral oil to make his "snake oil potent." Making a show out of his treatment, Stanley pulled a rattler out of a sack, slit it open, and dropped the snake into a pot of boiling water. People would watch him, like, wrestle a rattlesnake, cut its belly, and then boil it." That's a pretty amazing show if you don't have TV.
Michael: Yeah. [laughs]
Aubrey: 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 warms your skin. It's capsicum, like, we were talking about earlier.
Michael: Yeah.
Aubrey: Turpentine, so, it smelled like medicine and about 1% fatty oil, which they think came from cows.
Michael: Oh.
Aubrey: They're like, there's not even snake in the snake oil. A, the snake he's claiming it is doesn't work and B, that snake isn't even in it.
Michael: So snake oil salesmen means counterfeit snake oil.
Aubrey: Yeah.
Michael: It's not that snake oil is counterfeit medicine.
Aubrey: Yeah, absolutely.
Michael: Wow.
Aubrey: It'd be like, if you made fake aspirin and people were like, "That guy's a real aspirin salesman."
Michael: Yeah.
Aubrey: [crosstalk] Well, aspirin is good.
Michael: Yeah.
Aubrey: The issue is it's fake.
Michael: Oh.
Aubrey: 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.
Michael: Oh, no. Don't reinforce the omega-3 people, Aubrey. Stop there.
Aubrey: [laughs]
Michael: They're already talking about that stuff too much.
Aubrey: Basically, salmon is our classic best example of where to get omega-3s. Salmon has a maximum of 18% of this particular fatty acid, this particular omega-3. Snake oil on average had 20%.
Michael: Okay.
Aubrey: This is extremely potent.
Michael: When you take an omega-3 supplement from the store, you're literally taking snake oil.
Aubrey: [laughs] Kind of, yeah. You're taking the active ingredient.
Michael: Wow. The only purpose of podcast is to give people ammunition to go, "Well, actually, when they're going to parties" and this is the ultimate. The next time someone says like, "Elon Musk is selling snake oil." He's like, "Well, actually, snake oil fucking works. But Elon Musk is still trash."
Aubrey: We just made you 100% more insufferable. You're welcome.
Michael: Yeah. This is our goal.
[laughter]
Aubrey: This is our product. This is what we sell. Of course, most of the snake oil salesmen at the time weren't selling this product, right?
Michael: Yes.
Aubrey: Most of them were selling the rattlesnake variety, some of them were selling the Clark Stanley version, which is just, I guess, some cow fat in a bottle.
Michael: It's also an interesting metaphor for what happens to the exotic indigenous medicinal treatments that end up coming to the West, because it's like, "Ooh, snake oil is a real thing, you boil the snake, and then you rub it on yourself." But then they take it to the US, 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 airlift it to this new context, and have it work exactly the same way.
Aubrey: Yeah, we're referencing Moon juice a lot here, because this feels very Moon juicy.
Michael: Yeah.
Aubrey: "Oh, this thing works. So, I'm just going to distill these ingredients down without regard to where they come from, without regard to what makes them work."
Michael: Right. Just boil a snake. It doesn't matter what kind pf 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.
Aubrey: Nailed it.
Michael: Yeah.
Aubrey: The last thing I wanted to talk about was snake oil in particular is how it became our shorthand for this hucksterism, right?
Michael: Yes.
Aubrey: To talk about that, we have to talk about the decline and fall of patent medicines and of medicine shows, right?
Michael: Oh, thank God.
Aubrey: Things really start to change in terms of the medical landscape of the US around the turn of the century. There is way more regulation of formally educated and certified doctors. We now have the Johns Hopkins School of Medicine, we now have these 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 common knowledge amongst doctors and those doctors are increasingly skeptical of patent medicines. In 1892, the Senate passes the first federal legislation to regulate medicine in any way.
Michael: Oh, thank God.
Aubrey: But it fails in the house.
Michael: Oh.
Aubrey: They don't pass it because patent medicine sellers have formed the proprietary association and they're lobbying really hard.
Michael: This is why we can't get rid of fucking scam phone calls.
Aubrey: Yep.
Michael: Urgh. And use car dealerships, and the penny, and daylight savings.
Aubrey: Penny [laughs]
Michael: There's always some little tiny interest group that fucking ruins it for everybody.
Aubrey: Yeah, and they're the people who literally profit off of it.
Michael: Yes, always. Urgh.
Aubrey: In 1905, this is 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.
Michael: Oh, hell yeah.
Aubrey: Right?
Michael: Remember when people wrote magazine articles and then stuff changed?
Aubrey: 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 "prohibited the sale of misbranded or adulterated food and drugs in interstate commerce." It didn't prohibit adding narcotics to children's medicine, but it did say that if there was anything addictive in your medicine, you had to list it on the label. Basically, it was like, "If there's heroin in this, you have to say there's heroin in it."
Michael: Giving kids heroin is fine, but just tell them first.
Aubrey: Yeah, that's right. [laughs]
Michael: Get me your PJs, little man.
Aubrey: Interestingly, it isn't until 1917 that Clark Stanley, who's the rattlesnake king, the actual snake oil salesman is prosecuted under the Pure Food and Drug Act for selling garbage fake shit.
Michael: Next stop, Elon musk. Do it.
Aubrey: [laughs] That is the beginning of the end. This becomes a very watched trial, becomes covered heavily in the media, all of this stuff. By the time, the 1930s roll around drugstores are now more common, they're more accessible to folks, and they're in more places, and that allows for this centralized local source for drugs, which also allowed for more regulation and also more word of mouth, right?
Michael: Right. Repeat customers. You finally have an incentive to actually sell people things that work.
Aubrey: Yeah, and the fake urgency of a medicine show doesn't quite work in the same way, right?
Michael: Right.
Aubrey: If you're like, "Buy it now. It's your only chance." That doesn't work when you're like, "No, there's a Walgreens."
Michael: Yeah.
Aubrey: They also have aspirin.
Michael: And the 17-year-old working behind the counter can't give an hour-long presentation, where they're killing a rattlesnake in front of you for every customer, unfortunately.
Aubrey: At this time, movie theaters also start to pop up, so, people can find better entertainment than watching a live tooth extraction [crosstalk] on a medicine show.
Michael: Right. 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.
Aubrey: 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.
Michael: Oh, our old friend, the FDA.
Aubrey: This is how we got the FDA.
Michael: That is like a superhero origin story.
Aubrey: [laughs]
Michael: This is bitten by a radioactive spider of regulatory agencies.
Aubrey: It wasn't until 1938 that Congress got involved with the next layer of regulation. That was called the Food, Drug and Cosmetic Act of 1938. It required manufacturers to "list all active ingredients, make only supportable claims, refrain from creating medicines for life-threatening illnesses, and reveal all relevant facts."
Michael: Basic stuff.
Aubrey: Basic stuff that we rely on today.
Michael: I'm sure the patent medicine people were so butthurt about it.
Aubrey: Absolutely.
Michael: "Oh, I have to sell medicine. If I say, I'm selling medicine. Oh."
Aubrey: Medicine shows continue on a smaller scale into the 40s and 50s and the last major medicine show shuts down in the early 1960s.
Michael: Wow. Our parents might have been going to medicine shows.
Aubrey: It feels oddly possible depending on the part of the country that you're in.
Michael: Yeah.
Aubrey: It's really fascinating to me that this persisted for so long. That surprised the hell out of me.
Michael: People are desperate for medical treatments. The medical system now is a lot better than it was in the 1840s, but it still has holes.
Aubrey: Absolutely.
Michael: I feel whenever you have holes in these systems, they're going to get filled by something. Usually, that's something is ciarlatano.
Aubrey: [laughs]
Michael: I'm making finger gestures right now. Extremely authentic.
Aubrey: There you go. That's snake oil.
Michael: I can't believe it works.
Aubrey: It worked. We should stop saying it didn't. Probably, when we talk about snake oil salesmen, 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 [crosstalk] and told you it was medicine.
Michael: Then Chinese people like, "We're going to use this actually effective medication," and we're like, "We'll call it a fucking scam."
Aubrey: [laughs]
Michael: That's going to become the synonym for the con artist.
Aubrey: Yeah. [laughs]
Michael: The thing that work that Chinese people did.
Aubrey: Yeah, your thing that worked is garbage and our thing that's garbage really works.
Michael: [laughs]
Aubrey: It's fully Jedi mind trick.
Michael: What are your closing thoughts on what this means for now? What should we learn from this?
Aubrey: The thing that I'm stricken by is how this simultaneously feels a distant memory of a long gone past, but also that all of these tactics are still in play now.
Michael: Extremely in play. Yeah.
Aubrey: This is the playbook for selling garbage health shit that doesn't work.
Michael: Right.
Aubrey: So, that was the thing that was really fascinating to me. I thought this was just going to be like a fun wacky story about how things used to be. 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.
Michael: 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 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?" Like, "Are there cracks that they're falling into and loopholes that they're exploiting?"
Aubrey: Well, and as we learned in the Fen-Phen Episode, those cracks emerge and then sometimes, we don't close the loopholes. 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.
Michael: Exactly. Yeah.
Aubrey: During the Fen-Phen Episode, we found out that FDA considers Big Pharma to be its customers and they ought to provide it with customer service. That is not what the FDA was founded to do, but it has moved in that direction over time. It would be great to be like, "We passed a law and that fixed it." Sometimes, that happens, but for the most part, it takes a level of vigilance, and constant evaluation, and constant rethinking of, "Was this the approach? Did it do what we meant it to do?"
Michael: Then 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.
Aubrey: Yeah.
Michael: 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. Somebody is going to pop up and say, "I can make this make sense, I can fix you." So, we just need to be extremely careful with this 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.
Aubrey: And that in the absence of that constantly updated regulation and regulatory structures, we 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. [laughs]
Michael: I don't want to have to do all this work myself. I don't want to learn about Yellow 5 and Blue 42 or whatever they are, and find out whether they're poisons or not. 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.
Aubrey: You want to know that you're not giving your kids heroin?
Michael: Yeah.
Aubrey: Keep dreaming bud [laughs].
