“A gesture as effective as sending out a boy with a peashooter to bring down a rhinoceros.”

Sometimes I feel like I’m the boy and the rhino is the compendium of quack therapies ranging from coffee enemas, raw juice diets and therapeutic touch to Laetrile, homeopathic X-rays and Joe Mercola’s penchant for infusing carbon dioxide up his rectum. Alas, the peashooter analogy is not my own. I swiped it from “100,000,000 Guinea Pigs,” a book published in 1933 by consumer advocates Arthur Kallet and F.J. Schlink. It claimed that the American public were guinea pigs, at the mercy of retailers who were flooding the market with overly hyped products that were either untested or known to contain harmful ingredients.

The peashooter in Kallet and Schlink’s example was aimed at “Allen’s Ulcerine Salve,” the “rhinoceros” that was claimed to be an effective treatment for gunshot wounds, lacerations and animal bites. Not only was there no evidence of efficacy, but the product contained a toxic lead salt. The 1906 Food and Drug law had prohibited nostrums from false labelling of ingredients, but if there were no ingredients listed on the label, authorities could do nothing but confiscate a few dozen bottles.

Allen’s Ulcerine Salve was by no means the only rhinoceros targeted by Kallet and Schlink. Lead arsenate was widely sprayed at the time on fruits and vegetables as an insecticide and government action was only taken when Britain refused to import American apples because of arsenic residues. Dried fruits were preserved with sulphur dioxide at doses that were not allowed in Europe, flour was bleached with potassium bromate already banned in France, and toxic ammoniated mercury was widely advertised to whiten skin and remove freckles. Fear of bacterial diseases was widespread and various “antiseptics” of unproven........

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