James Harvey Young

Three southern food and drug cases.

ence, composed principally of historians either resident in the South, or concerned with the Souths past, or both, and guided by an awareness of how I have spent most of my research hours during the four decades that I have lived and taught in the South, I have chosen tonight to speak of three southern food and drug cases. The first strikes me as melodrama, the second as tragedy, the third as epilogue. In each instance, I confess, a case with very similar regulatory elements might have originated elsewhere in the nation. Yet these cases did arise within the South and are clothed in habiliments of southernness, which I shall point to. While I do not claim from three examples overarching interpretations, I hope I may illumine some ill-lit corners of southern history.

Patent Medicines: An Early Example of Competitive Marketing

Patent medicines in the United States played a pioneering role in marketing. The nostrum manufacturer, during the early decades of the nineteenth century, exploited a brand name and developed a distinctive symbol as a trademark. His wares were sold in a package of distinctive shape or design. He sought to achieve as national a market as transportation conditions permitted. His advertising appeared in newspapers of all regions, appealing to citizens to buy from local retailers an article made hundreds of miles away. In a highly competitive market, the remedy promoter was forced to explore in his advertising a wide variety of psychological lures.

American Self-Dosage Medicines: An Historical Perspective

The advertisements for over-thecounter medicines are not what they used to be. Instead of making blatant claims they tell us in modest tones that a given medicine may give temporary relief from minor aches and pains; or perhaps its chief virtue may be that it is mild and that doctors recommend it; or perhaps that it contains more iron and vitamins than a competitor. The appeal of television advertisements, for example, lies not

Health Fraud: A Hardy Perennial

Quackery forms a gaudy thread in the fabric of health care through the course of American history. In the colonial years, the American market for commercial self-dosage was dominated by “patent medicines”—some of them actually patented—shipped overseas from the mother country. Packed in containers of distinctive shape, sealed in wrappers printed with boastful therapeutic claims, advertised in the slender newborn press, these British nostrums far overshadowed occasional American imitators.

The Horses Of Instruction

James Harvey Young is professor of history at Emory University, where he has taught since finishing his doctorate at the University of Illinois in 1941. His undergraduate degree is from Knox College. Professor Youngs publications include The Toadstool Millionaires and The Medical Messiahs, which together treat the history of health quackery in America and efforts to combat it. Professor Youngs article, as well as the following article by Dr. Rundell, was read at the 1970 meeting of the Organization of American Historians. ademic turbulence. The way I came to know these things illustrates a crucial point our students have been stressing about the mutuality of learning: they learn from teachers, to be sure, but teachers also learn from students. Not until