SPEAKER_02: With no fees or minimums, banking with Capital One is the easiest decision in the history of decisions. Even easier than deciding to listen to another episode of your favorite podcast. And with no overdraft fees, is it even a decision? That's banking reimagined. What's in your wallet? Terms apply. See CapitalOne.com slash bank. Capital One N-A member FDIC. Hey, welcome to The Short Stuff. I'm Josh and there's Chuck and Jerry's here, too.
And we're all thinking of Dave right now. So his ears are probably burning like flames on the side of his face. Or in my throat.
SPEAKER_01: Yeah, Chuck's got a little sore throat, but not really. What'd you say? You've got some dust in your throat?
SPEAKER_02: You know how when you just have a little coughing fit because it feels like there's a tickle in your throat you can't get rid of?
SPEAKER_01: Sure. I always call it-
SPEAKER_02: You sound like you're about to cough right now. I always call it dust in my throat.
SPEAKER_02: Sure. Yeah, that's a good description. Also- We're going to try to muddle through everybody. I was going to say a great Tom Waits album, but the joke's dumb, so I'm not going to say it.
SPEAKER_02: Dust in my throat is great. That was a great joke, man. This one's fun. You dug this one up. We have talked over the years a lot about snake oil and what's called patent medicines.
SPEAKER_01: And this is the origin story of snake oil.
SPEAKER_02: Yeah, and it kind of ties into our episode we just released on meat and food before the FDA came along. Huh? Yeah. So to quote the Oxford English Dictionary-
SPEAKER_02: Oh. Snake oil is, quote, a quack remedy or panacea. Ooh. And essentially what they're saying there in highfalutin terms is that snake oil is- it's- well, it's a quack remedy. It doesn't actually work. It's something that's sold as a medicine or a cure that doesn't do anything like it says. And it just has a bad association. We think of snake oil as something you're duped by, and the person you're duped by is a snake oil salesman. But this is one of those really interesting stories, Chuck, where there's an actual origin to this. And as bad as we think of snake oil today, like it actually had a legitimate use back in the day and still does, depending on where you live. Yeah, and that's if you're literally talking oil from a snake.
SPEAKER_01:
We're talking about in China, they would use Chinese water snakes, venomous Chinese water snakes, to get their literal extract- you know, extract oil from the snake.
And that oil is very high in omega-3 fatty acids, which we all know are very good for your health. So the original snake oil in, you know, ancient China actually had a use. It wasn't like this bunk medicine. You know, it's good for your brain health, your heart health. I think it can reduce inflammation. Kind of like fish oil, everyone knows that omega-3 fatty acids are great, and that was what the original snake oil was.
It was so high, or it is so high in omega-3 fatty acids, that it reduces inflammation if you just rub it on your skin.
SPEAKER_02:
It's just really potent stuff, which is pretty much the opposite of what we think of with snake oil today. Like, not only does it not really work, it's fake snake oils. Original snake oil was not fake, it was very potent. And in the 19th century, there were a lot of Chinese immigrants who came over either by their own volition or as indentured workers to work on the railroad,
the transcontinental railroad in particular, and they brought this snake oil with them. And it became like kind of a popular curative for people when they wanted to relieve sore muscles or inflammation. And it caught the attention of one guy named Clark Stanley, who became a – he was a cowboy, he was a legit cowboy – but he became a patent medicine seller. And you toss that word around, patent medicines, but there's an actual explanation to how we got to where patent medicines had this bad reputation, and it's in the name too.
SPEAKER_01: Yeah, because you could say, I have this medicine, I want to patent it so only I can sell it. And part of having a patent can mean that you don't have to tell what's in it. So, you're, you know, it's proprietary, so you can have your little secret recipe. And so, patent medicines were, you know, they became these medicines that was essentially snake oil.
It's like, you know, who knows what could be in this stuff, and these hucksters are selling it for, you know, a quarter a bottle, 10 cents a bottle, 50 cents a bottle, as we'll see, which is like 18 bucks today.
And no one knows what's in it. So, that is where snake oil – well, actually, we're not quite there yet.
That's what patent medicine was. Right.
And maybe we should take a break then with that cliffhanger about how snake oil as hucksterism came about.
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If you want to know, then you're in luck. Just listen up to Josh and Chuck, stuff you should know.
SPEAKER_02: So Chuck, you left us off on the cliffhanger where we were talking patent medicines were basically fraudulent and fake. And snake oil was about to enter the realm of from legitimate medicine to fake patent medicine. And it did so via that cowboy turned patent medicine seller, Clark Stanley. Yeah. So he was around and he said, hey, these Chinese people are using this snake oil or they're, you know, have stories of using this snake oil because they didn't have those Chinese water snakes in the American West, of course.
SPEAKER_01:
But he heard these stories. He was into this patent medicine thing and he said, well, one thing we have a lot about here is rattlesnakes.
So I'm going to, well, we'll get to the little twist here in a second, but I'm going to make a patent medicine, this snake oil liniment out of rattlesnakes.
I'm going to say I'm the rattlesnake king. I'm going to put out a little pamphlet to really gussy up my story called The Life and Adventures of the American Cowboy Colon, Life in the Far West in 1897. And it's going to have horses and cowboy poetry and like lasso throwing advice. And I'm going to include this with this snake oil. I'm going to charge 50 cents a bottle, which, like I said, was 18 bucks today. And it's going to cure almost anything you can think of. Yeah. He said that it was the strongest and best liniment known for the cure of all pain and lameness for rheumatism, neuralgia, sciatica, lameback, lumbago, contracted muscles, toothaches, sprains, swellings, etc.
SPEAKER_02:
Cures frostbites, chillblains, bruises, sore throat, bites of animals, insects and reptiles. That was on the label. Yeah. It was like the early medical marijuana places in California.
SPEAKER_01:
You're like, can't sleep? Try marijuana. Too much sleep? Try marijuana.
SPEAKER_02:
So if you notice, though, this is like lameback contracted muscles. Like he's tying into the reputation that snake oil already has. It's an anti-inflammatory that you rub on your skin. Yes. But he never gave credit to the Chinese people who introduced him to snake oil or who introduced him to the United States. He said that he learned to make snake oil from rattlesnakes from years of study with a Hopi medicine man. And also because he was bit countless times by rattlesnakes. So I guess that gave him some entree into it. The problem is rattlesnake oil has about a third of the omega-3 fatty acids that oil from Chinese water snakes do, which makes it about a third as potent. Yeah. And then here's the real twist that we promised.
SPEAKER_01:
He didn't even use rattlesnake oil. So even if he was using it, it would have been, you know, far less potent. But he wasn't even using that stuff. And we know, and this is how it ties into the episode from yesterday, because of the Pure Food and Drug Act of 1906, in that episode yesterday, we talked about one of the things they did was a big crackdown on patent medicine.
SPEAKER_01:
So he was exposed, and they tested his snake oil in 1917, and it had beef fat, red pepper, mineral oil, a little bit of camphor, and a little bit of turpentine.
Yeah, that's it. That was what was in Stanley's snake oil liniment.
SPEAKER_02: No snake oil.
SPEAKER_01: He got caught red-handed, and he knew he was caught red-handed.
SPEAKER_02: This new FDA – I don't even think it was the FDA yet. They busted him. And so for decades of selling fake medicine, he was fined $20, which is less than $500 today, and that was that.
SPEAKER_02: But the thing is, is he single-handedly gave snake oil a bad name. Like, it was him. He was the conduit through which snake oil turned legitimate to this umbrella term, this catch-all term, for any kind of fake, fraudulent medicine, or any time somebody's trying to sell you something that's not real, or just kind of hustling you. That's snake oil sold by a snake oil salesman. And our friends at CodeSwitch seem to have found the first use of snake oil as kind of a catch-all term to deride all patent medicines in that way. Yeah, it was about 10 years afterward. It was 10 years after Clark Stanley was busted.
SPEAKER_01: In 1927, a poem by Stephen Vincent Benet called John Brown's Body, which is, I think, fairly famous, right? I've heard of that, haven't I?
That's where we get that John Brown's body lies a-mouldering in the grave.
SPEAKER_02: Oh, okay.
SPEAKER_02:
But that's like two lines of this almost book-length epic poem. Yeah, one of the lines as well was Sellers of Snake Oil Balm and Lucky Rings.
SPEAKER_01: And then also in 1956, it was in the very famous play The Iceman Cometh from Eugene O'Neill, right? Yeah, so one character says that someone else, another character is, quote, standing on a street corner in hell right now, making suckers of the damned, telling them there's nothing like snake oil for a bad burn.
SPEAKER_02:
Amazing. That's classic Eugene O'Neill.
SPEAKER_02: So that's it. That's where snake oil came from, or that's where snake oil's bad reputation came from. And you can thank Clark Stanley for it, or blame him if you're a snake oil manufacturer.
Yeah. And I love this because I'm sure we'll talk about snake oil again, and then we can reference Clark Stanley.
SPEAKER_01:
Yeah, for sure, Chuck. And since I said for sure, everybody, I don't think either of us have anything more about snake oil. Short stuff is out.
SPEAKER_00: Stuff You Should Know is a production of iHeartRadio. For more podcasts to my heart radio, visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.
