Figure 14. — Opodeldoc 

 Bottle as illuslrated in the 

 1879 Catalog of Hagerty 

 Bros., New York City, New 

 York. 



the olden days, the medicines were still alive. The 

 first edition of the National Formulary, published in 

 1888, had cited the old English names as synonyms 

 for official preparations in four cases, Dalby's, Bate- 

 man's, Godfrey's and Turlington's. 



Thus as the present century opened, the old English 

 patent medicines were still being sold. City druggists 

 were dispensing them over their counters, and the ped- 

 dler's wagon carried them to remote rural regions."* 

 But the medical scene was changing rapidly. Im- 

 provements in medical science, stemming in part from 

 the establishment of the germ theory of disease, were 

 providing a better yardstick against which to measure 

 the therapeutic efficiency of proprietary remedies. 

 Medical ethics were likewise advancing, and the oc- 

 casional critic among the ranks of physicians was being 

 joined by scores of his fellow practitioners in lam- 

 basting the brazen effrontery of the hundreds of 

 American cure-alls which advertised from newspaper 

 and roadside sign. Journalists joined doctors in con- 

 demning nostrums. Samuel Hopkins Adams in par- 

 ticular, writing "The Great American Fraud" series 

 for Colliers Weekly, frightened and aroused the Ameri- 

 can public with his exposure of cheap whiskey posing 

 as consumption cures and soothing syrups filled with 

 opimn. Then came a revolution in public policy. 

 After a long and frustrating legislative prelude, Con- 



gress in June of 1906 passed, and President Theodore 

 Roosevelt signed, the first Pure Food and Drugs Act. 

 The law contained clauses aimed at curtailing the 

 worst features of the patent medicine evil. 



The Patent Medicines In The 20th Century 



Although the old English patent medicines had not 

 been the target at which disturbed physicians and 

 "muck-raking" journalists had taken aim, these an- 

 cient remedies were governed by provisions of the 

 new law. In November 1906 the Bureau of Chem- 

 istry of the Department of Agriculture, in charge of 

 administering the new federal statute, received a letter 

 from a wholesale druggist in Evansville. Indiana. One 

 of his stocks in trade, the druggist wrote, was a remedy 

 called Godfrey's Cordial. He realized that the Pure 

 Food and Drugs Act had something to do with the 

 labeling of medicines containing opium, as Godfrey's 

 did, and he wanted to know from the Bureau just 

 what was required of him."^ Many manufacturing 

 druggists and producers of medicine were equally 

 anxious to learn how the law would affect them. The 

 editors of a trade paper, the American Druggist and Phar- 

 maceutical Record, issued warnings and ga\-e advice. It 

 was still the custom, they noted, to wrap bottles of 

 ancient patent medicines, like Godfrey's Cordial and 

 Tvirlington's Balsam, in facsimiles of the original cir- 

 culars, on which were printed extravagant claims and 

 fabulous certificates of cures that dated back some two 

 hundred years. The new law was not going to per- 

 mit the continuation of such 18th-century practices. 

 Statements on the label "false or misleading in any 

 particular" were banned.'" 



A few manufacturers, as the years went by, fell afoul 

 of this and other provisions of the law. In 1918 a 

 Reading, Pennsylvania, firm entered a plea of guilty 

 and received a fifty dollar fine for putting on the 

 market an adulterated and misbranded version of Dr. 

 Bateman's Pectoral Drops."' The law required that 

 all medicines sold under a name recognized in the 

 United States pharmacopoeia or the .\ational formulary. 



"* Robert B. Nixon, Jr., Corner druggist, New York, 1941, 

 p. 68. 



"5 Letter from Charles Lcich & Co. to Harvey Washington 

 Wiley, Bureau of Chemistry, Department of .-Xpiiculturc, No- 

 vember 2, 1906. Manuscript original in Record Group 97, 

 National Archives, Washington, D. C. 



'" American Druggist and Phatmacntticat Record, 1906, vol. 49, 

 pp. 343-344. 



"" Department of .^gricullure. Bureau of CJiemistry, Notices 

 of Judgment under the Food and Drugs .\ct. Notice of Judg- 

 ment 6222, United States vs. Pabst Pure Extract Co., 1919. 



PAPER 10: OLD ENGLISH P.-\TENT MEDICINES IN AMERICA 



179 



