Patent Medicines (House Report No. 52, 30th Congress, 2nd Session)
government report · 1849
LINK
SUMMARY
Full text fetched directly from the Internet Archive/NLM digitization (101221080.nlm.nih.gov, OCR full text). A House Select Committee report recommending against patenting compound medicines, condemning the patent-medicine trade generally as a vast system of medical empiricism. Names Brandreth specifically: "The annual fee for publishing Brandreth's pills has amounted to one hundred thousand dollars." The same paragraph states: "Morrison paid more than twice as much for the advertisement of his never dying Hygeine," then predicts (in the report's own, differently spelled words) that Brandreth's fame would fade as Morison's had -- a prediction this bundle's disconfirmation section shows was wrong. Used in this bundle for the $100,000/year advertising-fee figure, the comparison to Morrison's larger advertising expense, and the committee's mistaken prediction of fading obscurity. Also used for the committee's general critique that no single remedy can cure diseases diametrically opposite to one another, the mechanism-only basis of the case's disconfirmation argument.
NOTES
This 1849 U.S. House of Representatives Select Committee report on patent medicines (Report No. 52, 30th Congress, 2nd Session, February 6, 1849), fetched directly in full text from the NLM/Internet Archive digitization, is a contemporaneous federal government assessment of the patent-medicine trade generally and of Brandreth’s pills specifically. It names Brandreth’s $100,000 annual advertising expenditure, contrasts it with the larger sum it attributes to James Morison’s advertising, and predicts (wrongly, as this bundle’s disconfirmation section shows) that Brandreth’s fame would fade as Morison’s had. The report’s broader argument, that no single remedy can be a genuine “specific” for diseases of opposite character, supplies part of the case’s disconfirmation of the blood-impurity/universal-purgative theory.