Excess fraud and profit made the patent medicine industry collapse under its own weight

Evidence

We can also see patent medicine as a victim of its own success. In some version, folk medicines had been around for centuries, and when their claims were more modest, and their advertising less importunate, they may have delivered some of what they promised at least by virtue of the placebo effect, which, as scientists have shown, can be quite significant. But the industry had caught the spirit of late nineteenth-century capitalism, and for patent medicine, this translated into too great a fraud, too much profit, too much damage to public health. And so the industry collapsed of its own weight. But the means that it had invented for converting attention into cash would live on in other forms, finding new uses in the hands of both government and other commercial ventures. — Tim Wu, The Attention Merchants, 118

Categorization

• XREF: The ‘means of converting attention into cash living on in other forms’ sets up the whole book’s thesis that attention-harvesting techniques outlive their original industries — parallels the Champagne-fairs institutions thesis and the reader’s graft/infrastructure essay metaphor. — connects to: Patent medicines were primarily alcohol, narcotics, and fraud rather than medicine — Tim Wu, The Attention Merchants, 112; Public disenchantment, not legislation, collapsed the patent medicine industry — Tim Wu, The Attention Merchants, 117; Industry self-regulation fails because profits trump standards and overseers lack authority — Albert Bandura, Moral Disengagement: How People Do Harm…, 986
• SEED: The placebo-effect angle — modest-claim folk medicine may have genuinely ‘worked’ via placebo before over-marketization destroyed it — is a nice essay contrast between honest minimal claims and overreach.

Broader Connections

• Public disenchantment, not legislation, collapsed the patent medicine industry #corroborates (0.95) — Tim Wu, The Attention Merchants, 117
• Industry self-regulation fails because profits trump standards and overseers lack authority #expands (0.72) — Albert Bandura, Moral Disengagement, 986