Dinitrophenol and obesity: an early twentieth-century regulatory dilemma

Peer-reviewed historical review (FDA pharmacologist author) establishing that DNP found widespread favor as a weight-loss drug in the early 1930s due principally to the work of Maurice Tainter, a clinical pharmacologist from Stanford University; that its narrow therapeutic index caused irreversible harm in thousands of users before physicians abandoned it; and that it took passage of the Federal Food, Drug, and Cosmetic Act of 1938 to give federal regulators authority to stop patent medicine men from selling it.