Introduced into drugstores across the country in 1898 by the Bayer pharmaceutical firm came a new medication for bad coughs. Heroin! Pushing hard drugs in the American market was common place. With no government regulation, easy accessibility, and medical ignorance, drug abuse was a major social problem.
Available through the mail or at the local drugstore you could find Cocaine tablets for throat and nerves, baby syrups spiked with morphine, opium for newborns, cocaine drops for toothaches (tauted to take the pain away and make children happy.) and many more.
Alcohol was the base of most liquid medications. Experts have estimated that nineteenth-century Americans imbibed more spirits from patent medicine than from bottled liquor. It wasn’t until 1909, when the Narcotics Drug Act was enacted, that the government began to regulate the quality of of medications.
Drug ads were as numerous as the products they promoted. The pages, of Life, Harper’s, the Sears Catalog, and the New York Times were filled with a virtual onslaught of drug touting notices. Congressman William Everett of Massachusetts told the story of one church congregation that found the advertising barrage to be especially trying. Needing new hymnals and no money to buy them, the church contacted a patent-medicine manufacturer who agreed to defray a large percentage of the hymnal cost in return for advertising space in the new books. On December 24th the new books arrived. Christmas Day the congregation filled the church sanctuary only to find in their hymnals:
Hark! The herald angels sing
Beechan’s pills are just the thing.
Peace on earth and mercy mild
Two for man and one for child.
Sources: Otto L. Bettmann, The Good Old Days: They were Terrible ( New York: Random House, 1974), p.152.
Edward Boykin, ed., The Wit and Wisdom of Congress ( New York: Funk & Wagnalls, 1961), p. 376.
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