Public disenchantment, not legislation, collapsed the patent medicine industry

Evidence

The regulation took a distinctly American form that has proven influential to this day. Rather than banning patent medicines or their advertising, it imposed a “truth in labeling” requirement that made “misbranding” illegal and also required that any “dangerous” ingredients be listed. As understood by the government, this criminalized any false claims about potential therapeutic benefits. These new laws, along with advances in legitimate medicine, marked the beginning of the collapse of the patent medicine industry. The end did not come all at once. But even more than legislation, the precipitating factor was the public disenchantment with industry advertising. Even those who dared violate the new law with false claims met with a stony public, desensitized to tricks that had once been so seductive and had already been pushed to the logical extreme by Hopkins. Once the bubble popped, the astonishing alchemy that had made worthless decoctions into precious elixirs could never work again. Thus did Snake Oil go from being a cure-all to a byword for fraud. The ultimate effect was eventually to drive nearly all producers out of business. After peaking in 1907, this once mighty American industry began a death spiral, finally to become a fringe business by the 1930s. — Tim Wu, The Attention Merchants, 117

Categorization

• ADDENDUM: Connects to the trust/epistemic-degradation thread in the reader’s attention-history project: advertising’s overreach (‘alchemy could never work again’) is the same dynamic that eventually wears out any attention-grabbing tactic.
• CANDY: ‘Snake Oil’ going from a literal cure-all brand to a byword for fraud is a compact, tweetable etymology story.
• XREF: connects to: Patent medicines were primarily alcohol, narcotics, and fraud rather than medicine — Tim Wu, The Attention Merchants, 112; Excess fraud and profit made the patent medicine industry collapse under its own weight — Tim Wu, The Attention Merchants, 118; Patent medicines relied on mysterious secret ingredients to feed consumer hope — Tim Wu, The Attention Merchants, 97

Broader Connections

• Patent medicines relied on mysterious secret ingredients to feed consumer hope #qualifies (0.70) — Tim Wu, The Attention Merchants, 97