Snake oil

This article is about medicinal compounds. For snake oil in cryptography, see Snake oil (cryptography). For the album by Tim Berne, see Snakeoil (album).

Clark Stanley's Snake Oil

Snake oil is an expression that originally referred to fraudulent health products or unproven medicine but has come to refer to any product with questionable or unverifiable quality or benefit. By extension, a snake oil salesman is someone who knowingly sells fraudulent goods or who is themselves a fraud, quack, charlatan, or the like.

A snake oil recipe from the 18th century, printed in Spain

The use of snake oil long predates the 19th century, and it was never confined to the Americas. In Europe, viper oil had been commonly recommended for many afflictions, including the ones for which rattlesnake oil was subsequently favored (e.g., rheumatism and skin diseases).

Wormer's Famous Rattlesnake Oil

William S. Haubrich, in his book Medical Meanings (1997, American College of Physicians), mentions the hypothesis that the term came from the eastern United States. The Seneca people, indigenous to the New York and Pennsylvania region, would rub cuts and scrapes with the petroleum collected from oil seeps. European settlers observed this habit, and in mid-nineteenth century they began bottling and selling the substance as a cure-all. They named the product for the local tribe as "Seneca oil". Supposedly through mispronunciation, this became "Sen-ake-a oil" and eventually "snake oil". Haubrich remarked, "This story is almost too good to be true – which means it probably isn't." It appears to be a case of folk etymology, since no known historical evidence supports this explanation.

History

Chinese laborers on railroad gangs involved in building the First Transcontinental Railroad first gave snake oil to Europeans with joint pain. When rubbed on the skin at the painful site, snake oil was claimed to bring relief. This claim was ridiculed by rival medicine salesmen, and in time, snake oil became a generic name for many compounds marketed as panaceas or miraculous remedies whose ingredients were usually secret, unidentified, or mischaracterized and mostly inert or ineffective.

Patent medicines originated in England, where a patent was granted to Richard Stoughton's Elixir in 1712. Since there was no federal regulation in the United States concerning safety and effectiveness of drugs until the 1906 Food and Drugs Act and various medicine salesmen or manufacturers seldom had enough skills in analytical chemistry to analyze the contents of snake oil, it became the archetype of hoax.

The snake oil peddler became a stock character in Western movies: a traveling "doctor" with dubious credentials, selling fake medicines with boisterous marketing hype, often supported by pseudo-scientific evidence. To increase sales, an accomplice in the crowd (a shill) would often attest to the value of the product in an effort to provoke buying enthusiasm. The "doctor" would leave town before his customers realized they had been cheated. This practice is also called grifting and its practitioners are called grifters.

From cure-all to quackery

A report of the 1917 decision of the United States District Court for Rhode Island, fining Clark Stanley $20 for "misbranding" its "Clark Stanley Snake Oil Liniment".

The composition of snake oil medicines varies markedly among products.

Stanley's snake oil — produced by Clark Stanley, the "Rattlesnake King" — was tested by the United States government in 1917. It was found to contain:

• mineral oil
• 1% fatty oil (presumed to be beef fat)
• red pepper
• turpentine
• camphor

This is similar in composition to modern-day capsaicin-based liniments or chest rubs. None of the oil content was found to have been extracted from any actual snakes.

The government sued the manufacturer for misbranding and misrepresenting its product, winning the judgment of $20 against Clark Stanley. Soon after the decision, "snake oil" became synonymous with false cures and "snake-oil salesmen" became a tag for charlatans.

Historical intrepreter Ross Nelson as "Professor Thaddeus Schmidlap", resident snake-oil salesman at the Enchanted Springs Ranch and Old West theme park, Boerne, Texas.

See also

• Crocodile oil
• Elixir
• Golden hammer
• Medicine show
• Panacea
• Patent medicine
• Placebo
• Silver bullet
• Laudanum
• Laetrile
• Quackery