Patent medicines relied on mysterious secret ingredients to feed consumer hope

Evidence

A few more signal tricks rounded out the medicine advertising approach. Perhaps chief among these was the “secret ingredient.” Every patent medicine needed something to set it apart from all the others making similar claims, some kind of mysterious element that was not and perhaps could not be fully explained. It fired the imagination, feeding hope where reason offered thin gruel. Carbolic smoke; swamp root; baobab fruit; and in the case of Clark Stanley’s liniment, the secret was, of course, the magic of snake oil itself. — Tim Wu, The Attention Merchants, 97

Categorization

• CANDY: Fun, tweetable: ‘snake oil’ literally was a secret-ingredient marketing gimmick.
• XREF: connects to: Peddlers manufactured medicine publicly as spectacle to sell dubious remedies — Tim Wu, The Attention Merchants, 86; Patent medicines escalated to promising immortality and cures for all disease — Tim Wu, The Attention Merchants, 91; Patent medicine marketing techniques still dominate modern consumer advertising — Tim Wu, The Attention Merchants, 98 (+6 more)

Broader Connections

• Patent medicines were primarily alcohol, narcotics, and fraud rather than medicine #corroborates (0.85) — Tim Wu, The Attention Merchants, 112
• Required secrecy about treatment content marks fraudulent therapeutic offers #corroborates (0.82) — Holm Gero Hümmler, Ulrike Schiesser, Fact and Prejudice, 693
• A large share of herbal supplements are secretly adulterated with undisclosed pharmaceuticals #complicates (0.78) — Harriet A. Washington, A Terrible Thing to Waste, 1147
• The Eleusinian Mysteries’ secret was pharmacological, powered by a psychedelic drink #expands (0.70) — Jamal Awil, The Whispering Archive, 173