Resumen de The College of Dentistry at New York University Brings this Section to Life with “Elixers of the Past”
Quackery in medicine is as old as medicine. In times of crisis desperate patients believe in extraordinary claims. In the annals of pain killer quack medicine, elixirs, nostrums and liniments hold a preeminent position. The College of Dentistry at NYU received a collection of 237 bottles of nostrums and liniments dating from approximately 1850 through 1940. In this paper we inaugurate a series of articles featuring “Elixirs of the Past”. We start this series with four samples, Mrs. Winslow’s Soothing Syrup, Dr. Grove’s Anodyne for Infants, Jadway’s Elixir for Infants and Kopp’s, four of many teething syrups that contained narcotics and were linked to infant death at the end of the 19th century. In 1906 Congress introduced The Pure Food and Drug Actto stop unsubstantiated claims. Companies were fined in court cases and finally compelled to remove narcotics and stop making unsubstantiated claims. Unmasking past claims hopefully stops quacks of today. Nevertheless, far more unfounded and extraordinary claims are being made today, using social media, perhaps more brazenly than one hundred years ago.
