A patent medicine (sometimes called a proprietary medicine) is a non-prescription medicine or medicinal preparation that is typically protected and advertised by a trademark and trade name, and – often falsely – claimed to be effective against minor disorders and symptoms, as opposed to a prescription drug that could be obtained only through a pharmacist, usually with a doctor's prescription, and whose composition was openly disclosed. Many over-the-counter medicines were once obtainable only by prescription and thus are not patent medicines. The ingredients of patent medicines are incompletely disclosed. Antiseptics, analgesics, some sedatives, laxatives, antacids, cold and cough medicines, and various skin preparations are included in the group. The safety and effectiveness of patent medicines and their sale is controlled and regulated by the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) in the United States and corresponding authorities in other countries. The term is sometimes still used to describe quack remedies of unproven effectiveness and questionable safety sold especially by peddlers in past centuries, who often also called them elixirs, tonics, or liniments. Current examples of quack remedies are sometimes called nostrums or panaceas, but easier-to-understand terms like scam, cure-all, or pseudoscience are more common. Patent medicines were one of the first major product categories that the advertising industry promoted; patent medicine promoters pioneered many advertising and sales techniques that were later used for other products. Patent medicine advertising often marketed products as being medical panaceas (or at least a treatment for many diseases) and emphasized exotic ingredients and endorsements from purported experts or celebrities, which may or may not have been true. Patent medicine sales were increasingly constricted in the United States in the early 20th century as the FDA and Federal Trade Commission added ever-increasing regulations to prevent fraud, unintentional poisoning and deceptive advertising. Sellers of liniments, claimed to contain snake oil and falsely promoted as a cure-all, made the snake oil salesman a lasting symbol for a charlatan.
Origins and advertising
The phrase "patent medicine" comes from the late 17th century marketing of medical elixirs, when those who found favour with royalty were issued letters patent authorising the use of the royal endorsement in advertising. Few if any of the nostrums were actually patented; chemical patents did not come into use in the United States until 1925. Furthermore, patenting one of these remedies would have meant publicly disclosing its ingredients, which most promoters sought to avoid. Advertisement kept these patent medications in the public eye and gave the belief that no disease was beyond the cure of patent medication. "The medicine man's key task quickly became not production but sales, the job of persuading ailing citizens to buy his particular brand from among the hundreds offered. Whether unscrupulous or self-deluded, nostrum makers set about this task with cleverness and zeal." Instead, the compounders of such nostrums used a primitive version of branding to distinguish their products from the crowd of their competitors. Many extant brands from the era live on today in brands such as Luden's cough drops, Lydia E. Pinkham's vegetable compound for women, Fletcher's Castoria and even Angostura bitters, which was once marketed as a stomachic. Though sold at high prices, many of these products were made from cheap ingredients. Their composition was well known within the pharmacy trade, and druggists manufactured and sold (for a slightly lower price) medicines of almost identical composition. To protect profits, the branded medicine advertisements emphasized brand names and urged the public to "accept no substitutes". At least in the earliest days, the history of patent medicines is coextensive with scientific medicine. Empirical medicine, and the beginning of the application of the scientific method to medicine, began to yield a few orthodoxly acceptable herbal and mineral drugs for the physician's arsenal. These few remedies, on the other hand, were inadequate to cover the bewildering variety of diseases and symptoms. Beyond these patches of evidence-based application, people used other methods, such as occultism; the "doctrine of signatures" – essentially, the application of sympathetic magic to pharmacology – held that nature had hidden clues to medically effective drugs in their resemblances to the human body and its parts. This led medical men to hope that, say, walnut shells might be good for skull fractures. Homeopathy, the notion that illness is binary and can be treated by ingredients that cause the same symptoms in healthy people, was another outgrowth of this early era of medicine. Given the state of the pharmacopoeia, and patients' demands for something to take, physicians began making "blunderbuss" concoctions of various drugs, proven and unproven. These concoctions were the ancestors of the several nostrums.
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