Bah Humbug Oil

The FDA or Food and Drugs Adminstration was established in 1906, the same year that President Theodore Roosevelt signed the Pure Food and Drug Act. Also known as the Wiley Act, after pioneering food chemist Harvey Washington Wiley, it allowed the government to inspect and ban adulterated foods and patent medicines.

They had plenty of work to do, as you can see just by glancing through the American Medical Association's 1912 opus Nostrums and Quackery. This book is a cornucopia of strange potions and conniving salespeople, lavishly illustrated with ads and written with a mixture of sarcasm and outrage. Just my cup of unadulterated tea, in other words.

Take, for example, the offering of one Mrs. J.F. Marshall Smith - whom I had hoped to present to you through census records, but cannot find (yet - there is always a 'yet'). The combination of a devastatingly common surname, the fact that none of the Smiths in Minnesota in 1900-1920 used this combination of initials and extra name, and no hometown mentioned - resulted in...absolutely nothing. A couple of possible Mrs. Smiths, but nothing certain.

At any rate, imagine for a moment that you are that mysterious Mrs. Smith living somewhere in Minnesota in the early 1900s. And imagine that you have decided to make a little extra pin money by manufacturing a patent medicine. First you need a recipe of sorts, of course. And bottles. And perhaps a marketing plan. But above all you need a really good name for your amazing miracle cure which "relieved diphtheria of the most malignant type."

Well, that is the position that Mrs. J.F. Marshall Smith found herself in. And the name she came up with for her medicine was - Humbug Oil. Not in a spirit of irony, either. It is not clear what sort of spirit she had in mind. Perhaps she was inspired by Ebenezer Scrooge. The Oil consisted of turpentine, linseed oil and what the government chemists called "a watery-alcoholic solution of ammonia water, ammonium salts and a voltile alkaloid, probably coniin." [Nostrums and Quackery, Chicago, 1912, p. 506]. The last ingredient mentioned, better known as coniine, is a derivative of hemlock - not at all the sort of thing you'd want to be taking as medicine.

Humbug, indeed.

The FDA fined Mrs. Smith $5 in 1911 for shipping her Humbug Oil from Minnesota to Utah. As one of the anonymous authors of Nostrums and Quackery writes: "If no other claim than that denoted by its name had been made, Mrs. Smith could doubtless continued to sell her nostrum unmolested."

[The word 'humbug' can be traced to the mid-18th century in Britain and was originally student slang for a hoax. By the 19th century it became synonymous with nonsense or with an outright fraud. It was especially associated with Dickens' Ebenezer Scrooge (who used the word in the first sense) and with the showman P.T. Barnum, whose sensational exhibits were referred to as humbugs in the second sense of the word. Humbugs are also a British mint-molasses hard candy, striped brown and white or black and white. And you can still find mint humbugs today - though there are no medicinal advantages (or disadvantages) to them.]

Unfortunately there was no Humbug Oil ad pictured in Nostrums and Quackery, so the image is of another nostrum called Wolcott's Instant Pain Annihilator (which one might have needed after a dose of Humbug Oil), from the Library of Congress.

Samuel Hopkins Adams mentions Mrs. Smith and her Humbug Oil in The Great American Fraud (AMA: Chicago, 1912), p. 130.