ke action was Hooper's Female Pills.
Between 1919 and 1923, government agents seized a great many shipments
of this ancient remedy in versions put out by three Philadelphia
concerns.[119] Some of the packages bore red seals, others green seals,
and still others black, but the labeling of all claimed them to be "a
safe and sovereign remedy in female complaints." This theme was
expanded in considerable detail and there was an 18th-century ring to
the promise that the pills would work a sure cure "in all
hypochondriac, hysterick or vapourish disorders." No pill made
essentially of aloes and ferrous sulphate, said the government experts,
could do these things. Nor did the manufacturers, in court, seek to say
otherwise. Whether the seals were green or red, whether the packages
were seized in Washington or Worcester, the result was the same. No
party appeared in court to claim the pills, and they were condemned and
destroyed.

[119] Multiple seizures were made of products shipped by the
Horace B. Taylor Co., Fore & Co., and the American Synthetic Co.
The quotations are from Notice of Judgment 8868; see also 8881,
8914, 8936, 8956, 8974, 9134, 9147, 9203, 9510, 9586, 9785,
10203, 10204, 10629, 11519, 11669.

In one of the last actions under the 1906 law, a case concluded in
1940, after the first federal statute had been superseded by a more
rigorous one enacted in 1938, two of the old English patent medicines
encountered trouble.[120] They were British Oil and Dalby's
Carminative, as prepared by the South Carolina branch of a large
pharmaceutical manufacturing concern.

[120] Federal Security Agency, Food and Drug Administration,
Notice of Judgment 31134, United States vs. McKesson and Robbins,
Inc., Murray Division, 1942.

According to the label, the British Oil was made in conformity with the
Philadelphia College of Pharmacy formula given in an outdated edition
of the _United States dispensatory_. But instead of containing a proper
amount of linseed oil, if indeed it contained any, the medicine was
made with cottonseed oil, an ingredient not mentioned in the
Dispensatory. Therefore, the government charged, the Oil was
adulterated, under that provision of the law requiring a medicine to
maintain the strength and purity of any standard it professed to
follow. More than that, the labeling contravened the law since it
represented the remedy as an effective treatment for variou