Peruna tonic base (cologne spirits, water, and undisclosed 'mild drugs')
The substance sold as Peruna was, on contemporaneous analysis, mostly grain alcohol and water. Samuel Hopkins Adams’s 1905 reporting, later reprinted in The Great American Fraud (1907), calls Peruna “a stimulant pure and simple” made of “cologne spirits” diluted with water at roughly three parts water to one part spirits, plus “one-half of 1 per cent. of mild drugs” and coloring matter, and states flatly that “no drug or combination of drugs” in it could cure disease (Adams 1907). Period product labels stated the alcohol content directly: a Peruna label transcribed by bottle historian Richard Fike lists the same catalogue of catarrh cures as the case’s other sources and then discloses, in plain figures on the label itself, an alcohol content of 28 percent (Lockhart et al. 2025, quoting Fike 1987). That figure is independently corroborated: in 1905 the federal government banned Peruna’s sale on Indian reservations specifically because of its 28 percent alcohol content (Lockhart et al. 2025).
An Internal Revenue liquor-tax ruling forced the reformulation: Hartman added senna and blackthorn bark (both laxatives) so the product could still be classed as medicine rather than taxed as liquor, and cut the alcohol content to roughly 18 percent (Adams 1907; Sullivan 2007; a Peruna label from the product’s 1939-1946 ownership period, transcribed by Lockhart et al. 2025, still read “Alcohol 18 per cent”). The 1906 Pure Food and Drug Act separately required disclosure of the alcohol content on the label (Adams 1907). No plant, drug, or dose named on any label or in any promotional material in this bundle is treated here as itself active; the unnamed “mild drugs” and “active medicinal properties” language is the vague mechanism the case documents, not a claim this archive is confirming or denying ingredient-by-ingredient.