The Poison Bottles America Trusted
About this episode
This episode explores the dangerous and unregulated world of patent medicines in America before the establishment of the FDA.
Before the Food and Drug Administration, before warning labels, before anyone had to prove a medicine was safe or even admit what was inside it, America ran on the bottle. This episode opens the cabinet on the patent medicine era, the long stretch of years when a quarter and a clipped newspaper advertisement could buy a family a cure-all that promised relief from nerves, weakness, pain, sleeplessness, women's complaints, and almost anything else a body could suffer, and then it asks the only question that matters, which is what those beautiful bottles actually held. We start in a winter farmhouse with a crying baby and a spoonful of morphine, then trace the machinery of the whole trade, the secret formulas that were never really patented, the newspapers bought and silenced by advertising money, the torchlit medicine shows rolling out of town before dawn, the fake Indian remedies of the Kickapoo Medicine Company, and Clark Stanley's famous snake oil that a federal laboratory found contained no snake at all. From there we look hard at the soothing syrups that dosed infants with morphine until doctors gave them the name baby killers, at the women's tonics that hid hard liquor and…
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