Swaim's Panacea is a purely vegetable medicine, made from sarsaparilla and oil of wintergreen, that contains neither mercury nor any other deleterious drug.
William Swaim’s 1828 printed notice to the public, bound into his own treatise, pledged over his own signature that the Panacea contained no mercury or other harmful drug (Wellcome Collection, work bst63dyx). James Harvey Young’s academic history records that the Philadelphia Medical Society’s investigating committee inferred mercury exposure from patients’ symptoms, and that three separate chemists then proved by direct analysis that Swaim’s denial was false: at least some batches of the Panacea contained corrosive sublimate, one of the harshest common mercury compounds (Young 1961). The claim is refuted on direct chemical evidence, not merely on an absence of supporting trials.
Appears in
Sources
- A Treatise on Swaim's Panacea (bound-in notice: To the Public, signed Wm. Swaim, September 1828) — Swaim, William. To the Public. Notice bound into A Treatise on Swaim's Panacea... Philadelphia: [Maxwell], 1828. Signed Wm. Swaim, dated Philadelphia, September 1828. Wellcome Collection (catalogue work bst63dyx; IIIF presentation b21157546, image b21157546_0006). Public Domain Mark.
- The Toadstool Millionaires: A Social History of Patent Medicines in America before Federal Regulation, chapter 5 (Hercules and Hydra, the first significant critique of patent medicines) — Young, James Harvey. The Toadstool Millionaires: A Social History of Patent Medicines in America before Federal Regulation. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1961, chapter 5 (titled, per the publisher's own chapter list, Hercules and Hydra: The First Significant Critique of Patent Medicines). Reproduced with permission of the author and publisher at Quackwatch, https://quackwatch.org/hx/tm/5-2/ (posted 29 April 2002 per the page's own publication note).