Radam's Microbe Killer: Advertising Cures for Tuberculosis
secondary literature · 2015
LINK
SUMMARY
Article on the National Library of Medicine's historical-collections blog, by Virginia Tech researchers (Grace Hemmingson, Scottie Lynch, Nancy Fowlkes Mason) and Professor E. Thomas Ewing, drawing on NLM and Medical Heritage Library holdings. Byline, title, and date read from the page (fetched 2026-06-11). Source for: Radam's book making 'the "simple" statement that all diseases have a single origin: "There is, in truth, but one disease"'; that the Microbe Killer 'cost virtually nothing to produce yet yielded significant profits'; that Radam had no medical training, being 'a botanist and gardener by trade'; the bottle and advertising graphic of 'a man with a club about to hit the grim reaper while pieces of a broken scythe lay around the skeleton's feet'; the before/after photographs in the book; the federal seizures (twelve cases seized in April 1910 as 'false, exaggerated, and misleading', and more than 800 cartons and boxes destroyed after a jury hearing following the 1912 amendment to the Food and Drugs Act); and an advertisement still running in 1919. NOTE: the NLM piece dates the large destruction to July 1914, while Barnett (ntskeptics-radam-2004) dates the Minneapolis/St. Paul destruction to December 1913; the case frames the federal destruction under the Sherley Amendment without asserting a single contested date and cites both.
NOTES
This National Library of Medicine article is the institutional secondary source for the case’s account of the Microbe Killer’s doctrine, marketing, and regulatory end. Written by Virginia Tech historians for the NLM History of Medicine Division’s Circulating Now blog, it draws on the Library’s own holdings of Radam’s book and period newspapers. It supplies the single-disease thesis in Radam’s own words as quoted by the NLM, the description of the club-and-skeleton trademark that appeared on both the bottles and the newspaper advertisements, the before/after portraits in the book, and the federal seizures that closed the business. Its dating of the major court-ordered destruction (July 1914) differs from Barnett’s (December 1913); both are cited and the case avoids pinning a single exact date for the destruction.