Cuforhedake

Patent medicines and snake oil have so fascinated the American public, that snake oil has become the generic term for false cure.

Getting to the point, the society has developed a medical point of view or expectation in which, having a health condition, a single pill cures any ill with minimal fuss or effort.

Illness is often not so simple, although many wish and demand it were and the pharmaceutical industry caters to that hope.

Always has.

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Curiously, this tale begins with a carelessly stacked stone wall of no obvious purpose found overgrown near a stream at the farm.

For repairs elsewhere, it was convenient to salvage stone that had been removed from the fields over 250 years and piled with no obvious pattern, next to the stream. That natural barrier would have been as far as stone, carried one at a time could be removed from field plantings.

In the process of sorting among the stones available, artifacts turned up. Why antique pharmacy bottles would be placed among the rocks is obscure but the fact that the stone left between them many crevasses, provided a safe haven for delicate glass items.

Most were square or rectangular in cross section with name and maker an integral embossed feature poured into the vial glass when molded.

One particularly well-preserved vessel was etched with the name Cuforhedake, perhaps an Indian word, for all anyone knew.

The details of this patent medicine revealed that the nature of drug business, while generating some actual miracle drugs and blockbusters, had not changed in years.

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Cures and the botanicals that promoted them, have always been the province and profession of the tribal shaman.

As chemistry and pharmacology sprang from empiric roots among tribes, the availability of medicines absent medical expertise, has grown along with the fundamental research for the basis of diseases and the cures based on rational experiments.

From the 1930s when the FDA was organized to protect consumers, public confidence in private and public research and its applications in the clinic, has grown.

There has been a point, perhaps initiated during Covid, when the public lost trust and confidence that their best interests were the primary consideration of the established medical and pharmaceutical enterprise.

The growth of internet took political power out of the hands of the establishment, but that power became divorced from accountability inherent in professional clinical medicine.

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So, how does a dirty century-old bubbled-glass bottle of Curforhedake put things back into proportion?

In the 1880s, Philadelphia pharmacy student Robert N. Harper came up with a marketing scheme. With no medical evidence, he combined ingredients like acetanilid, antipyrine, caffeine, sodium and potassium bromide, and alcohol, and sold the mixture as a cure for headache to the public outside the realm of certified medical practice.

His original formulation was rebranded Cuforhedake bran fude was challenged by the 1906 Foods and Drug Act. Originally sold as Cephalgine, his marketing scam was to rename the product by a phonetic analogue of “Cure for Headache Brain Food”, hoping the subliminal suggestion would escape legal scrutiny of selling a product under false pretenses.

The outcome of the trial was a guilty verdict that cost Harper $700 after he had generated several hundred thousand dollars from naive headache sufferers.

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The precedent of putting a forth a scam and accepting a litigated settlement that cost far less then the benefit of the scam seems eternal.

So long as there is dire need of a cure for a disease, there are those whose hope would drive them to try anything.

The implications for the arc of the Covid vaccine story, and for the current popularity of unvetted ivermectin consumption are obvious as both develop in real time.

We’ll have to see what happens.

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