Quackery Unmasked
period treatise · 1858
LINK
SUMMARY
Full OCR text fetched directly from the Internet Archive digitization (quackeryunmaske00king_djvu.txt; note the scan's line-end hyphenation breaks several words mid-quote, e.g. 'tra-gedian', 'individu-als', 'con-tinual', so quotations here are chosen from spans the scan renders cleanly, and longer passages are reported in indirect style rather than forced into a single verbatim run). Dan King, M.D., a practicing physician per the title page and preface, directly assesses Brandreth's pills as contemporaneous quackery. Chapter XXII (p. 251) notes his large annual advertising expenditure, consistent with the $100,000 figure independently given in the 1849 congressional report. Chapter XXII (p. 253) documents the pills' harm from habitual heavy dosing, stating "by the injudicious use of these pills" hundreds were left "with all its incidental miseries" of perpetual constipation. Chapter XXVII (pp. 295-296) gives King's fullest assessment: Brandreth announced that he had discovered a single cause of all disease, impurity of the blood, and a single sure remedy; King dismisses the whole enterprise as a farce whose proprietor "still hoards the immense proceeds of the mighty farce," and states that among those who used the pills, beyond the many left with perpetual constipation, some were hastened to their deaths, though King declines to detail specific cases. Used in this bundle as the contemporaneous professional/medical assessment establishing evidentiary failure (per this archive's historical-evidence-proportionality standard): a practicing physician's direct, published critique of the blood-impurity theory and the pill's harms, written during Brandreth's lifetime.
NOTES
Dan King, M.D.’s Quackery Unmasked (Boston, 1858) is a contemporaneous physician-authored critique of 19th-century American patent medicine, fetched directly in full text from its Internet Archive digitization (a scan whose line-end hyphenation breaks several relevant words, so long passages are reported here in indirect style rather than forced into a single verbatim run). Two chapters address Brandreth by name: Chapter XXII (“The Press,” pp. 248-253) documents the scale of his advertising spending (an estimated $100,000 a year, consistent with the same figure independently given in the 1849 congressional report on patent medicines) and the harm of habitual purgative use, from which hundreds were left with perpetual constipation “by the injudicious use of these pills.” Chapter XXVII (“Nostrum Recommendations,” pp. 295-296) gives King’s direct assessment of the blood-impurity/one-cure theory itself, dismissing the whole enterprise as one whose proprietor “still hoards the immense proceeds of the mighty farce” and noting, without naming individual cases, that some users were hastened to their deaths by the pills. This is the bundle’s contemporaneous, medically qualified evidentiary-failure source under this archive’s historical-evidence-proportionality standard.