Cowboy Clark Stanley was down on his luck when he heard a tale that the Chinese (back in China) made a medicine or treatment from snakes. Immediately a get-rich-scheme formed in his mind.

At the 1893 Columbian Expedition in Chicago, Stanley came onstage with a live rattlesnake. He slit open the snake and dropped it into a pot of boiling water. Skimming off the fat from the surface, he told his eager audience that this was the “gen-u-ine” cure for what ailed them. People believed and his Snake Oil Liniment was sold for 24 years. 

So called “snake oil medicine” wasn’t only the “medicine of the west.” Similar schemes abounded in the 19th century. Wikipedia defines this as “any worthless concoction sold as medicine.” 

A bit published in the Georgia Gazette on 29 Jun 1774 proclaimed a “Miracle Medical Cure!”  Some 46 men signed their names as testimony that the stuff worked:

“We the under named subscriber of St. George’s and St. Matthew’s parishes, think it our duty to publish the following CURES perfected by Dr. John Patrick Dillon, for the good of the poor afflicted with the same, they they may know where they may expect remedy, as we have had, and affirm the same subscribing jointly that we have been CURED by him of: cancers of all kinds, fistulas, hysteric afflictions, rheumatisms, consumptions, fluxes, dysenteries, convulsions, epilepsies, apoplexies, hypochondrias, caries*, malignant ulcers, pleurisies and gravels**.” 

( Caries is tooth decay/cavities. Gravels is kidney stones.)

QUESTION: Are “snake oil” cures still being passed off today as worthwhile medicines?