The Poison Bottles America Trusted

Before the Food and Drug Administration, before warning labels, before anyone had to prove a medicine was safe or even admit what was inside it, America ran on the bottle.

This episode opens the cabinet on the patent medicine era, the long stretch of years when a quarter and a clipped newspaper advertisement could buy a family a cure-all that promised relief from nerves, weakness, pain, sleeplessness, women's complaints, and almost anything else a body could suffer, and then it asks the only question that matters, which is what those beautiful bottles actually held. We start in a...