The Great American Fraud: Articles on the Nostrum Evil and Quacks, in Two Series, Reprinted from Collier's Weekly
book · 1907
LINK
SUMMARY
Samuel Hopkins Adams's muckraking survey of patent medicines, originally serialized in Collier's Weekly beginning in 1905 and republished in book form by the American Medical Association in 1907. Chapter II, 'Peruna and the Bracers' (reprinted from Collier's Weekly, Oct. 28, 1905), is the primary contemporaneous professional assessment of Peruna used in this case: Adams interviewed Dr. S. B. Hartman in person, reports Hartman's own admission that no drug cures disease, analyzes Peruna's composition as chiefly 'cologne spirits' diluted with water, quotes the company's catarrh-cures-everything marketing (pneumonia, dyspepsia, appendicitis, Bright's disease, heart disease) and its promotion as a yellow-fever preventative, and reports the general political economy of the patent-medicine press. An earlier chapter (Chapter I, the Introduction) separately documents Peruna's advertising during a New Orleans yellow-fever scare. Fetched at the Internet Archive (identifier greatamericanfra00adamiala, a University of California Libraries/Americana scan) for bibliographic facts (title, chapter titles, original Collier's Weekly reprint dates, publisher) read from the book's own title page and chapter headers; every verbatim quotation used in this bundle was separately, directly confirmed against the proofread Wikisource transcription of the same edition (en.wikisource.org/wiki/The_Great_American_Fraud/Chapter_1 and .../Chapter_2), since the archive.org page actually used for that direct check is a JavaScript-rendered viewer whose raw HTML does not carry the OCR text, and the raw-OCR download mirror has its own scanning errors and line-wrap artifacts (both documented in the case's grounding log).
NOTES
Samuel Hopkins Adams’s The Great American Fraud is the qualifying historical evidentiary-failure source for this case: a signed, dated, contemporaneous professional (investigative-journalistic) analysis, first published in a national magazine and then republished by the American Medical Association itself, that directly assesses Peruna’s marketed catarrh-cure and disease-prevention claims as false. The book’s title page states it was reprinted from Collier’s Weekly and published in Chicago by the American Medical Association in 1907; Chapter II, “Peruna and the Bracers,” is headed as reprinted from Collier’s Weekly on Oct. 28, 1905. In it, Adams reports interviewing Hartman directly in Columbus, quotes Hartman’s admission that “no drug or combination of drugs, with the possible exception of quinin for malaria, will cure disease,” analyzes the product’s composition and calls it “a stimulant pure and simple,” and quotes the company’s own catarrh-of-everything marketing and its yellow-fever-preventative advertising, calling the underlying cure claims “too ridiculous to need refutation” given the product’s actual, mostly-alcohol contents. It is cited throughout this case’s practitioner, intervention, and claim entities for direct quotations, chronology, and the disconfirmation record.