Coca-Cola, 7 Up and Luden’s cough drops all descend from the patent medicine era. The term comes from royal letters patent in late 17th century England, an endorsement rather than a disclosed formula; secrecy was the business model, since most nostrums were water, alcohol and common herbs. Benjamin Okell’s promoters invented a Dr. Bateman to sell Dr. Bateman’s Pectoral Drops. In the 1860s William H. Gannett sold Oxien, supposedly made from the African baobab, and founded the newspaper Comfort to carry its ads. Traveling medicine shows used banjo players, strongmen and planted shills, and the Kickapoo Indian Medicine Company put Modoc War scout Donald McKay onstage to sell Sagwa.

Inside the bottles were opium in infant soothers, cocaine in catarrh remedies and heavy alcohol, like 18 percent Peruna, a way around local prohibition. Jamaica ginger tainted with an organophosphate paralyzed thousands with jake leg. Eben Byers drank nearly 1,400 bottles of Radithor, radium in water sold by William J.A. Bailey, and his jaw crumbled. Samuel Hopkins Adams’s 1905 Collier’s series The Great American Fraud led to the 1906 Pure Food and Drug Act and its labeling rules.

• The doctrine of signatures, which prescribed walnuts for the brain and liverwort for the liver
• Why opium and alcohol masked symptoms so well that buyers believed the testimonials
• Acetanilide’s cyanosis, and the late 1940s discovery that the body turns it into acetaminophen
• Coca-Cola’s coca leaf extract and 7 Up’s original lithium citrate
• The modern supplement disclaimer and Enzyte’s invented Latin name