Shareholder Spotlight: William Swaim

Institutional-archive blog post from the Library Company of Philadelphia (the historical subscription library founded by Benjamin Franklin), fetched directly (byline not individually attributed beyond the institution; publication date 30 October 2018, confirmed from the page's own dated URL and posted-date). Direct fetch (via curl with the same user agent the deterministic verify-quotes tool uses) confirms the following facts stated on the page: William Swaim (1781-1846) is called one of the Library Company's most infamous historic shareholders; he began his career as a bookbinder and switched to patent medicine in the 1820s, seeing a financial opportunity; his concoction is described as made mostly of sarsaparilla, with a touch of mercury; the page states that by the time Swaim (explicitly noted on the page as not a doctor) became a Library Company shareholder in 1829, he had already been discredited by the Philadelphia Medical Society, and that he nonetheless continued to accumulate wealth from the product; and William Swaim is recorded as having purchased share number 439 on 12 May 1829. The post's own source list cites A. Walker Bingham's The Snake-Oil Syndrome (Hanover: The Christopher Publishing House, 1994) and William H. Helfand's Quack, Quack, Quack: The Sellers of Nostrums in Prints, Posters, Ephemera and Books (New York: The Grolier Club, 2002).