The Newspaper Body for Sale

 

The Newspaper Body for Sale

California newspapers sold private medical certainty by the bottle while reporting public health through experiments, inspections, statistics, coercion, and doubt.

Four Bodies on Page Nine

On November 12, 1901, page nine of the Los Angeles Herald presented at least four versions of the human body in need of protection. The first belonged to the customer at the milk counter. Los Angeles health officials had restored one dairywoman’s suspended permit after she promised to keep her premises clean, but two other dairies had been ordered to explain why their permits should not be revoked. Their proprietors, the paper reported, had repeatedly ignored the milk inspector’s demands. A customer had also carried a suspicious roll of butter to the authorities. When cut open, it appeared to contain tallow and lard.^[1]

The second body belonged to the consumptive patient. Elsewhere on the page, the county supervisors cautiously approved the purchase of two outdoor tents for people with pulmonary tuberculosis. The hospital superintendent had recommended open-air treatment partly because invalids continued to arrive in Southern California and the county hospital was already congested. The tents were an experiment. If they proved successful, the county might erect more.^[2]

The page’s commercial medicine knew no such hesitation. Beneath the heading “To Explore Alaska,” a short item abruptly left the Arctic for the stomach. Hostetter’s Bitters, it announced, had for fifty years cured “all stomach and bowel complaints,” along with indigestion, constipation, headache, liver and kidney trouble, malaria, fever, and ague.^[3] Another notice promoted a method of driving medicine into the body with high-tension electrical currents. The discovery, it said, had made consumption, rheumatism, and related diseases “positively curable.”^[4]

The contrast lay not only in what the page said, but in its verbs. The public-health officials might revoke a permit. The supervisors would make an experiment. The hospital would add tents if the first two succeeded. The advertisements had already cured all. They had made disease curable. One sheet of newsprint held two medical languages: a public system proceeding through inspection, limited capacity, and provisional knowledge, and a commercial system offering certainty to anyone frightened enough to buy it.

The Press Diagnoses Its Own Business

Medical advertising did not wander innocently into the newspaper. The press understood its value and, on occasion, explained the arrangement with remarkable candor.

In 1855, the Georgetown News praised “thorough and systematic advertising” as a nearly dependable route to fortune. Patent-medicine proprietors stood among its leading examples. Their advertising bills might look fabulous to the uninitiated, the paper acknowledged, but the great sellers increased those expenditures because they believed every dollar spent publicizing their goods returned five or ten.^[5] The article was not an exposé. It was instruction. The fortunes proved that advertising worked.

Seven years later, the Weekly Trinity Journal put the point more sharply. Townsend, Brandreth, and Holloway, it observed, had made millions from syrups, pills, and ointments. Their special genius was neither chemistry nor medicine. They had discovered what the paper called the most powerful engine for extracting money from people’s pockets: the printing press. Townsend supposedly reinvested his first hundred thousand dollars in advertising and received millions in return. Then the newspaper asked the question at the heart of the cure economy: Was it the virtue of Townsend’s Sarsaparilla that sold the product, or the celebrity newspapers had given it throughout the world?^[6]

The question did not trouble the Journal for long. It used the patent-medicine fortune to urge miners, merchants, and professionals to advertise. A newspaper, it explained, was now the place people consulted to learn where every want could be supplied. Advertisements did more than answer desires; they reminded readers how much they wanted. Medical copy operated inside that same machinery, with one important advantage. It could first teach readers to recognize a fear—a weak stomach, a disordered nerve, an intimate symptom, a child who would not stop crying—and then place the answer beside it.

An advertisement is evidence of what a newspaper allowed a seller to promise, not proof that the promise was true. But the promises mattered. Repetition gave them familiarity; news-like typography gave them authority; the newspaper gave them entry into the home. For some readers, the advertising column became a medical directory, a confidential office, and a place to discover that a private misery had a purchasable name.

The Confidential Office Made of Paper

Dr. J. C. Young’s advertisements began by turning secrecy into terror. In an 1854 issue of the Columbia Gazette, Young warned that solitary sexual practices opened an avenue to destruction. The loss of semen weakened the body, the advertisement claimed, while paralysis, insanity, sterility, impotence, and nervous debility waited farther down the road. A reader who suspected the slightest trouble should seek help immediately. Young offered treatment in San Francisco with “the utmost confidence and secrecy,” promised to “warrant a perfect and permanent cure, or make no charge,” and invited distant sufferers to enclose ten dollars with a letter. Private apartments had been arranged.^[7]

Across six promotions on the same page, the diagnosis expanded until it could absorb almost any disappointment. Backache, indigestion, palpitations, melancholy, embarrassment, lost confidence, social withdrawal, and failure in business could all become symptoms of the same concealed disorder. The advertisement offered more than medicine. It offered an explanation for a man’s inability to perform the public identity expected of him—and a private route back to it.

Two years later, one advertised cure returned to print as an accusation. The Shasta Courier, reprinting a San Francisco account, told of a man named Welch who had responded to the “flaming advertisements” of Young and another practitioner, Dr. Josselyn. According to the report, Welch paid fifty dollars in advance for a guaranteed cure, deteriorated under treatment, and eventually found relief from a different physician. When he sought repayment from Josselyn, the confrontation became violent and Josselyn shot him in the neck.^[8] The article supplied an allegation, not a judicial finding. Even so, it is a rare surviving view from the other end of the transaction: a customer who said the promise had failed and demanded his money back.

If Young’s advertisements transformed masculine shame into a secret medical emergency, Lydia E. Pinkham’s campaigns turned women’s suffering into a serialized correspondence. In late 1898, Pinkham testimonials appeared in the Sonoma News almost week after week. They named menstruation, prolapse, nervous prostration, faintness, heart palpitations, depression, hemorrhage, exhaustion, and fear of surgery. Their language could be intimate, but their conclusions were remarkably consistent. Recovery was demonstrated by a return to work.

Lucy Goodwin’s printed testimonial described four years of uterine trouble. She said she had once been unable to stand for more than a few minutes or sit up for half a day. After taking Pinkham’s products, she reported, “I can do all kinds of housework and feel stronger than I ever did in my life.”^[9] Mary Hochiette’s advertisement began with menstrual irregularity and severe bleeding that confined her to bed. Its headline supplied the resolution: “I Do My Own Work.” In the testimonial itself, Hochiette thanked the medicine for making her “now able to do my own work.”^[10]

These were commercial representations, but the form reveals what the seller believed women would recognize. Pain mattered. Fear mattered. So did the ability to resume unpaid domestic labor. Later Pinkham copy extended the same promise to women who worked for wages, presenting illness as a heavy drag on the woman who had to support herself or help others at home.^[11] The healthy man in Young’s copy could return to confidence and business. The healthy woman in Pinkham’s could return to housework or earning.

By 1913, a Pinkham promotion described the company as the keeper of an enormous archive of private female experience. It invited sick women to write to a correspondence department where, the advertisement claimed, each letter would be opened, read, and answered by a woman and held in strict confidence. The company said hundreds of thousands of such letters remained in its files.^[12] Whether or not every assurance could be trusted, the invitation met a need. It offered women a vocabulary for discussing conditions they might not comfortably name to a male physician, if a physician was accessible at all.

The newspaper had become the door to a clinic that existed partly on paper. A reader supplied her private history. The company returned advice and a product. Selected letters came back into the newspaper as public sales proof. Suffering became testimony; testimony became advertising; advertising brought the next suffering reader into the correspondence. The system recognized experiences that respectable public discourse often hid, but recognition arrived attached to a bottle and a definition of health measured in restored usefulness.

The correspondence made a clinic from a newspaper column. In another issue, the advertising system would occupy almost an entire page.

When the Advertisement Became the Page

Before following the cure economy into the nursery, turn to another Los Angeles Herald. On December 15, 1901, Swamp-Root did not merely occupy space on page three. It became the page. Twenty-five consecutive promotional pieces supplied physicians who prescribed the kidney remedy, druggists who recommended it, customers said to have recovered, sales that increased, and one dealer’s claim that more than twenty thousand bottles had passed through his stores in a year.^[13]

Read separately, each piece resembled a testimonial or professional opinion. Read together, they produced the impression of a community reaching the same conclusion from every direction. Repetition became corroboration. Sales became evidence. Retailers became witnesses. The advertisement manufactured its own consensus.

Later in the same issue, an item headed “What Goes Up” warned that patent medicines dependent on alcohol supplied only a temporary lift followed by depression. It sounded like an attack on the cure trade until it announced the solution: Stuart’s Dyspepsia Tablets, a supposedly harmless preparation containing the digestive substances that weak stomachs lacked.^[14] The criticism was part of the sales mechanism. One medicine distinguished itself by borrowing the language of reform against its competitors.

A newspaper page could make a product appear ubiquitous, professionally endorsed, and already proved. It could also preserve warnings that the cure itself had become the danger.

What Was Inside the Quiet

In 1869, the Shasta Courier carried a local item under the heading “Heavy on Babies.” It relayed a San Francisco physician’s warning that Mrs. Winslow’s Soothing Syrup could expose an infant to an unsafe quantity of opium when administered according to its printed directions. The quoted physician called the preparation a “child-killer.”^[15] A similar report circulated the following year, elaborating the same medical allegation. The repetition shows that the warning traveled; it does not turn the underlying analysis into a second investigation.

The danger became easier to describe as newspapers learned to name the substance behind the soothing. “Opium and Its Disguises,” published in 1893, described patented cough balsams as potentially forming “a cloak under which the unrestricted sale of opium is carried on.”^[16] Yet the article did not condemn opium itself. It called the drug invaluable for relieving extreme pain and producing sleep. Its objection was to concealment and indiscriminate availability—to powerful medicine sold without the knowledge needed to judge when its use was justified.

By 1910, an article based on a federal bulletin named cocaine, morphine, codeine, opium, cannabis, and heroin among ingredients reportedly found in infant and proprietary remedies. Some products, it noted, were advertised with assurances that they contained nothing injurious and could safely be given even to the youngest child. The article said numerous instances were on record of infants who died or became dependent on the drugs in such preparations.^[17] Commercial reassurance and official warning were now describing the same bottles in opposite languages.

The cure economy could even turn dependency into another market. A 1901 Herald advertisement presented an anonymous bank employee who said a family physician’s morphine injections had cost him his health, family, position, and ambition. A proprietary remedy from the St. James Society, the testimonial claimed, restored all of them—including a job paying ten thousand dollars a year. The advertisement offered other sufferers a free trial bottle and asserted that thousands of doctors prescribed the treatment.^[18] The biography and cure belonged to the advertisement’s sales story. What the promotion demonstrates is the flexibility of the form: a bottled remedy could promise to cure the dependency that another medicine had allegedly produced.

For the parent with a sleepless infant, quiet could look like proof that the syrup worked. The newspaper record asks what the quiet contained. Once the answer included narcotics, dependency, and reported death, private suffering became a subject for public measurement. The city began counting bodies that advertisements had addressed one frightened reader at a time.

The Body Becomes a Ledger

Return to the December 15, 1901, Sunday Herald. On page three, Swamp-Root had multiplied into endorsements, sales figures, and alleged cures. On printed page nine, the body appeared in another form: the annual report of the Los Angeles health department.

Here there were no grateful letters and no portraits of restored customers. There were lists of deaths. The department sorted the people who had died during the municipal year by age, sex, birthplace, ward, institution, cause, and the racial classifications used by the officials who compiled the report. It counted infants, suicides, deaths from violence, alcoholism, opium use, typhoid, diphtheria, heart disease, and Bright’s disease. The individual patient had become a population.^[19]

Consumption dominated the ledger. The report recorded 348 deaths from pulmonary tuberculosis. Of those, 255 were people who had lived in Los Angeles for fewer than ten years. The Herald presented the figures as support for the city’s reputation as a health resort: many consumptives had come from somewhere else, already carrying the disease that would kill them. Yet the same numbers exposed the human underside of the climate cure. Los Angeles did not merely advertise health. It received people sick enough to seek a new climate, then counted those who arrived too late to recover.

The ledger represented an enormous change in what medicine could see. Disease could be compared across wards. Inspectors could order houses connected to sewers, demand that nuisances be abated, register contagious illness, and count deaths in hospitals. Suffering entered public administration. But the process also removed the voice that commercial testimony claimed to preserve. The Pinkham reader explained how illness felt and what recovery meant to her. The municipal patient survived as a cause, a category, and a number.

Two printed pages later, the same edition reported another kind of medical transformation. At a Pasadena meeting led by Dr. Eliza J. Beach, women physicians and nurses discussed advances in surgery, chemistry, hospitals, laboratories, medical education, anesthesia, ventilation, and trained nursing. Beach described women’s admission into medical schools and practice. Mrs. Solon Briggs contrasted older tinctures and teas with newer pharmaceutical chemistry. Mrs. Charles D. Lockwood traced nursing’s development into a trained profession and described the nurse as the physician’s indispensable partner.^[20]

Within one Sunday newspaper, medicine appeared as a page manufactured from commercial endorsements, a citywide ledger of sickness and death, and a profession building schools, laboratories, hospitals, and new places for women. None displaced the others. The modern newspaper carried them together.

Counting made suffering visible, but visibility was never neutral. Once officials could identify where illness occurred and classify the people who carried it, they could also decide which streets, homes, and bodies required watching.

Inspection, Protection, and the Commercial City

Three days after publishing the mortality ledger, the Herald returned to Health Officer Powers. His annual report described a city learning to manage disease through systems rather than testimonials. Los Angeles inspected milk and meat, monitored its water, ordered nuisances abated, and considered new hospitals, a public slaughterhouse, better garbage collection, and a crematory for condemned food and refuse. Powers associated a decline in typhoid with restricting the use of sewage to irrigate vegetables eaten raw. He credited the prompt use of antitoxin with limiting deaths from diphtheria. This was public health doing tangible work: tracing causes, changing practices, and building institutions.^[21]

The same report showed how readily protection could become surveillance. During a bubonic-plague scare, Powers said, inspection of Los Angeles’s Chinatown had been “rigidly enforced.” A majority of the sick and dead Chinese residents encountered by officials had been examined for plague. During one month, he reported, necropsies were performed on every dead Chinese resident, followed by bacteriological examinations and tests on animals. Disease had become something the city could investigate, but investigation was not distributed evenly. One population was approached not simply as a collection of patients but as a suspected reservoir.

Two years later, a San Francisco dispatch made the political geography explicit. California’s state board of health declared Chinatown a menace to the “health, commerce and trade” of the city and state. It recommended removing the district from the city center to an isolated location where strict building rules and, if necessary, quarantine could be enforced “without prejudice to local interests.”^[22] The wording joined three forms of protection that officials did not necessarily regard as separate: protection from disease, protection of commerce, and protection of the city’s reputation. The proposed solution was not merely to eliminate unsanitary conditions. It was to relocate the people associated with them. The article itself acknowledged serious doubt that officials possessed the power to compel such a removal.

Yet plague cannot be reduced to a pretext. A report published the following month described state and national health officials coordinating against an actual danger. A California representative credited vigorous cleaning and cooperation among city, state, and federal authorities with reducing the prospect of another outbreak. The conference endorsed continued health work while concluding that broader restrictions on travel and traffic were unnecessary.^[23] Sanitation could protect life. Quarantine could also halt commerce. Officials were trying to control both infection and the economic consequences of being known as an infected place.

That double purpose made public health powerful and morally complicated. The mortality ledger could reveal suffering that private advertising reduced to a sales opportunity. Inspection could improve milk, water, sewage disposal, and hospital care. But the same administrative vision could convert a neighborhood into a menace and its residents into objects of compulsory examination. The city saw more than the advertisement did; it also acquired more power over what it saw.

Public health had learned to classify neighborhoods as well as bodies. Reformers confronting proprietary medicine faced another problem: how to classify the bottle—and how to stop the seller from turning the classification into another promise.

When the Medicine Burned and the Law Became a Label

Miss Gordon answered the patent-medicine industry with a match. At a 1905 convention of the Woman’s Christian Temperance Union, she reportedly poured out two ounces of Peruna and two ounces of Jamaica ginger and set them alight. Both “burned with a clear flame,” the convention report said, demonstrating that alcohol was their principal ingredient.^[24] It was not a laboratory assay, but it made the reformers’ argument visible. A medicine sold for the nerves, stomach, or general constitution could burn like liquor.

The federal government had recently arrived at a similar classification through taxation. In September 1905, the commissioner of internal revenue ruled that manufacturers of patent medicines composed largely of distilled spirits would need licenses as rectifiers and liquor dealers. Druggists and others selling them would owe the usual retail liquor license.^[25] The decision did not ban the remedies or determine whether they worked. It changed the category in which the government saw them. A bottle presented to the customer as medicine could be treated by the revenue office as alcohol.

Regulation supplied advertisers with a new problem, but also with a new vocabulary. In 1908, a Ventura promotion for Hyomei declared that the inhaled remedy cured “all forms of catarrhal diseases.” It offered the local drug company’s money-back promise, assured readers that the formula was available to physicians, and then added: “It is guaranteed under the Pure Food and Drug Act by Serial No. 1418.”^[26] A retailer’s guarantee and the language of federal law appeared as parts of one accumulating case for trust. The advertisement did not explicitly say that Washington guaranteed the cure. The placement let private and federal-sounding reassurance reinforce one another.

Two years later, an answer to a reader’s question about vinegar explained how the system worked. The Department of Agriculture issued a serial number when a manufacturer filed a general guaranty. The filing and number were not required by law, the article noted, but manufacturers often considered them “quite desirable” to have.^[27] The guarantor was the business named on the label, not the federal government.

By 1913, the Bureau of Chemistry was trying to separate those meanings for the public. Among ten instructions for obtaining safe food, its final warning addressed the familiar label directly:

“Do not set too much store by the ‘guaranteed under the pure food and drugs act’ label. The government does not guarantee these wares.”^[28]

The warning concerned regulated goods generally, not Hyomei alone. Its necessity nevertheless reveals what the statutory formula could imply. The law did not merely constrain the sales pitch. It could become part of the sales pitch.

Regulation could change what a label said. It could not manufacture certainty where medicine itself remained uncertain. In 1918, expert confidence and institutional caution would collide within ten days.

Ten Days Between Certainty and Doubt

By November 1918, regulation had changed what manufacturers could put on a label, but influenza exposed a harder problem: what could medicine honestly promise while knowledge was still changing?

On November 5, the Daily Free Press carried the confident advice of Dr. Woods Hutchinson, a popular medical writer then working in Los Angeles. He urged gauze masks, outdoor treatment, and injections prepared from killed Pfeiffer bacilli. Hutchinson described the mask as the only reliable armor against infection and credited open air with dramatically reducing mortality. When he turned to the injection, his language became as certain as any advertisement: “It is not an experiment,” he said. It was “the only thing to do” for infected patients.^[29]

This was not what a modern reader would recognize as an influenza vaccine, nor was Hutchinson speaking for the federal public-health service. The preparation was made from what he called the bacillus of Pfeiffer. Hutchinson nevertheless spoke as an expert addressing an emergency. Doctors and nurses were frightened, hospitals were crowded, and people wanted something more definite than watchfulness. Certainty itself had practical value.

Ten days later, the same newspaper printed a strikingly different medical voice. No specific serum or other means of curing influenza had been established, the article warned, and no vaccine had been shown to prevent it. Hurried attempts at treatment and prevention were “simply experiments in a new field.” Their value might not be known until the epidemic had passed and the results could be examined. Physicians—and especially health officers speaking to the public—should avoid “making more promises than the facts warrant.”^[30]

The two reports do not arrange themselves neatly into wisdom and folly. Hutchinson was trying to act while people died. The later warning defended a discipline of doubt while evidence remained incomplete. Together they reveal something commercial medicine rarely had to display: knowledge changing under pressure. Public medicine could contradict itself because it could revise itself. The advertisement’s competitive advantage was that its cure never needed to become less certain.

In December, the United States Public Health Service addressed people recovering from influenza with a warning about the disease that had haunted the essay’s opening page. Influenza, it said, could leave survivors more vulnerable to tuberculosis. Convalescents should have their lungs examined, build their strength through food and fresh air, and seek competent medical care. The bulletin’s bluntest instruction concerned the cure trade:

“Don’t waste money on patent medicines advertised to cure tuberculosis.”^[31]

It offered no miraculous substitute. Its answer was examination, time, adequate food, fresh air, and “decent living.” Those prescriptions were less portable than a bottle and harder to sell in a column. They also returned illness to the material world: to nourishment, clinical attention, and the conditions under which a damaged body attempted to recover.

Commercial certainty condensed suffering into a purchase. Institutional uncertainty demanded something more difficult from both physician and patient: the willingness to act without pretending that every question had already been answered.

The Woman Named in the Inquest

Six years later, a brief item in the Ventura Free Press carried the headline “Woman’s Death Laid to Patent Medicines.” A coroner’s jury attributed Ruby C. Smith’s death to excessive patent-medicine consumption during the preceding week and rejected suicide as the explanation. Her maid, Clementine Acquistapace, said Smith had drained several bottles containing 24 percent alcohol.^[32]

The report did not name the medicine. It supplied no dose, toxicological analysis, or independent medical conclusion beyond the inquest. Its brevity left almost everything about Smith’s final week outside the frame: what troubled her, what relief the bottles promised, where she obtained them, and whether anyone understood how much she was taking. Yet the article did something the advertisements rarely did. It named a cost without converting the sufferer into proof of a cure.

Return, then, to page nine of the Herald in 1901. On that page officials inspected milk, supervisors experimented with outdoor tents, Hostetter’s promised cures for a catalog of complaints, and electricity made consumption “positively curable.” Across the following decades, the newspaper also printed narcotic warnings, mortality ledgers, racialized inspections, bottles that burned, regulatory labels, revised medical advice, and an inquest.

The paper did not contain one coherent medical truth. It contained a marketplace of assurances beside an unfinished public struggle to count illness, test remedies, regulate danger, and admit uncertainty. Reading the page honestly means holding those voices together.

The bottle had crossed the page. It began as a promise addressed to anyone who was frightened and alone. It ended in a brief inquest report that did not name the medicine. It did, however, name the woman.

Source Notes

1. Los Angeles Herald, November 12, 1901, p. 9, “Board May Revoke Several Milk Permits,” sn85042462:1901-11-12:ed-1:a0164.
2. Los Angeles Herald, November 12, 1901, p. 9, “Tents for Consumptives at County Hospital,” sn85042462:1901-11-12:ed-1:a0165.
3. Los Angeles Herald, November 12, 1901, p. 9, “To Explore Alaska,” including Hostetter’s promotional copy, sn85042462:1901-11-12:ed-1:a0168.
4. Los Angeles Herald, November 12, 1901, p. 9, electrical-treatment promotion extracted at the end of sn85042462:1901-11-12:ed-1:a0169.
5. Georgetown News, November 29, 1855, p. 1, “Advertising,” sn93052972:1855-11-29:ed-1:a0006.
6. Weekly Trinity Journal, January 11, 1862, p. 1, advertising commentary, sn85025202:1862-01-11:ed-1:a0001.
7. Columbia Gazette, August 19, 1854, p. 3, Dr. J. C. Young promotions, especially sn84038765:1854-08-19:ed-1:a0010 and sn84038765:1854-08-19:ed-1:a0013.
8. Shasta Courier, February 16, 1856, p. 4, “Quacks and Their Victims,” sn82015099:1856-02-16:ed-1:a0020.
9. Sonoma News, September 30, 1898, p. 4, Mrs. Lucy Goodwin testimonial, sn98061910:1898-09-30:ed-1:a0038.
10. Sonoma News, November 11, 1898, p. 4, Mrs. Mary Hochiette testimonial, sn98061910:1898-11-11:ed-1:a0042.
11. Los Angeles Herald, December 10, 1901, p. 4, “Our Working Girls,” sn85042462:1901-12-10:ed-1:a0077.
12. Campbell Interurban Press, March 21, 1913, p. 3, “Free Advice to Sick Women,” sn87073059:1913-03-21:ed-1:a0042.
13. Los Angeles Herald, December 15, 1901, p. 3, Swamp-Root promotional sequence sn85042462:1901-12-15:ed-1:a0047 through sn85042462:1901-12-15:ed-1:a0071, especially a0047 and a0063.
14. Los Angeles Herald, December 15, 1901, p. 12, “What Goes Up,” sn85042462:1901-12-15:ed-1:a0228.
15. Shasta Courier, November 27, 1869, second page, “Heavy on Babies,” within sn82015099:1869-11-27:ed-1:a0003; and Weekly Trinity Journal, April 2, 1870, p. 4, “Save the Babies,” within sn85025202:1870-04-02:ed-1:a0012.
16. Bridgeport Chronicle-Union, August 5, 1893, p. 1, “Opium and Its Disguises,” sn87067079:1893-08-05:ed-1:a0004.
17. Pacific Rural Press and California Fruit Bulletin, May 14, 1910, pp. 397–398, “A Menace to Public Welfare,” sn94051009:1910-05-14:ed-1:a0026.
18. Los Angeles Herald, November 17, 1901, p. 6, St. James Society morphine-remedy advertisement, sn85042462:1901-11-17:ed-1:a0098.
19. Los Angeles Herald, December 15, 1901, printed p. 9, “Death Rate Grows Less,” sn85042462:1901-12-15:ed-1:a0317.
20. Los Angeles Herald, December 15, 1901, printed p. 11, “Great Advance in Medicine,” sn85042462:1901-12-15:ed-1:a0336.
21. Los Angeles Herald, December 18, 1901, p. 11, “Powers Has Many Plans,” sn85042462:1901-12-18:ed-1:a0155.
22. Los Angeles Herald, May 15, 1903, p. 3, “Chinatown a Menace,” sn85042462:1903-05-15:ed-1:a0039.
23. Los Angeles Herald, June 4, 1903, p. 2, “Plague Eradicated,” sn85042462:1903-06-04:ed-1:a0027.
24. Daily Free Press, November 6, 1905, p. 4, “Notes of W. C. T. U Convention,” sn95062222:1905-11-06:ed-1:a0007.
25. Daily Free Press, September 15, 1905, p. 1, “Patent Medicine License,” sn95062222:1905-09-15:ed-1:a0007.
26. Daily Free Press, March 12, 1908, p. 3, “Best of Proof,” Hyomei promotion, sn95062222:1908-03-12:ed-1:a0010.
27. Pacific Rural Press and California Fruit Bulletin, January 22, 1910, printed p. 65, “Vinegar and the Pure Food Law,” sn94051009:1910-01-22:ed-1:a0008.
28. Campbell Interurban Press, July 11, 1913, p. 1, “Ten Ways to Be Sure of Good Things to Eat,” sn87073059:1913-07-11:ed-1:a0009.
29. Daily Free Press, November 5, 1918, p. 4, “Open Air and Vaccine Are the Best Remedies Says Dr. Hutchinson,” sn95062222:1918-11-05:ed-1:a0022.
30. Daily Free Press, November 15, 1918, p. 1, “Serums and Vaccines in Influenza,” sn95062222:1918-11-15:ed-1:a0006.
31. Daily Free Press, December 14, 1918, p. 2, “Advice to Flu Convalescents,” sn95062222:1918-12-14:ed-1:a0020.
32. Ventura Free Press, August 26, 1924, p. 1, “Woman’s Death Laid to Patent Medicines,” sn95062161:1924-08-26:ed-1:a0014.

Cited Source Snippets

Line breaks and evident OCR defects have been normalized for readability. Ellipses mark omitted words. Each number corresponds to the source note above.

• [1] Milk permits: “Both have been repeatedly notified by the milk inspector to clean up their premises and both have failed to obey orders.”
• [2] Open-air tents: “If the experiment of the two tents proves successful, more will be instituted.”
• [3] Hostetter’s Bitters: “For fifty years it has cured all stomach and bowel complaints.”
• [4] Electrical treatment: “This discovery made consumption, rheumatism and kindred diseases positively curable.”
• [5] Advertising economics: “Every dollar … expended in giving publicity to their goods and wares returns to them increased five or ten fold.”
• [6] The printing press: “the most powerful engine to extract money from the pockets of men”
• [7] Dr. J. C. Young: “Dr. Young will warrant a perfect and permanent cure, or make no charge.” The campaign also warned of symptoms “unfitting them for either business or society.”
• [8] Welch’s accusation: “He was induced through the flaming advertisements of Drs. Young and Josselyn to apply to them for relief.”
• [9] Lucy Goodwin: “I can do all kinds of housework and feel stronger than I ever did in my life.”
• [10] Mary Hochiette: “I am now able to do my own work, thanks to your wonderful medicine.”
• [11] Working women: “life is often a heavy drag in consequence of illness”
• [12] Pinkham correspondence: “Your letter will be opened, read and answered by a woman and held in strict confidence.”
• [13] Swamp-Root page: “Those who buy Swamp-Root come again for it, and that speaks for itself.” Another unit claimed, “We have sold … more than twenty thousand bottles of Swamp-Root.”
• [14] Stuart’s advertorial: “many liquid patent medicines derive their effect entirely from the alcohol they contain”; then, “probably the best preparation of this character is Stuart’s Dyspepsia Tablets.”
• [15] Mrs. Winslow warnings: “an infant of six months is in danger of being dosed with opium … hardly safe for an adult.” A later version reported that “each ounce of the stuff contained nearly one grain of morphine.”
• [16] Opium’s double character: “a cloak under which the unrestricted sale of opium is carried on”; yet, “It is beyond question a valuable drug.”
• [17] Infant remedies: “remedies intended for infants and containing morphine, codeine, opium, cannabis indica, heroin”
• [18] St. James testimonial: “the FREE TRIAL almost cured me of the desire for drugs”
• [19] Mortality ledger: “Of the 348 deaths from consumption 255 had lived here less than ten years.”
• [20] Women in medicine: “the admission of women to the study and practice of medicine as well as surgery”
• [21] Plague inspection: “A majority of the sick and dead Chinese were inspected for bubonic plague.”
• [22] Chinatown removal: “a serious menace to the health, commerce and trade of the city and state”
• [23] Coordinated plague response: “with the vigorous cleaning of Chinatown the fear of another outbreak of the disease was rapidly disappearing”
• [24] WCTU demonstration: “She set fire to two ounces of each and they burned with a clear flame.”
• [25] Liquor licensing: “a decision seriously affecting patent medicines composed largely of distilled liquors”
• [26] Hyomei: “It is guaranteed under the Pure Food and Drug Act by Serial No. 1418.”
• [27] Guaranty mechanism: “This guaranty and serial number are not required by law, but are oftentimes considered quite desirable for a manufacturer to have.”
• [28] Federal disclaimer: “Do not set too much store by the ‘guaranteed under the pure food and drugs act’ label. The government does not guarantee these wares.”
• [29] Hutchinson: “Give the vaccine to the infected persons. It is not an experiment.”
• [30] Medical-journal warning: “we as yet have no specific serum or other specific means for the cure of influenza”
• [31] Public Health Service: “Don’t waste money on patent medicines advertised to cure tuberculosis.”
• [32] Ruby C. Smith inquest: “due to excessive use of patent medicine during a period of a week, and not to suicide”