re-alls which advertised from newspaper and roadside sign.
Journalists joined doctors in condemning nostrums. Samuel Hopkins Adams
in particular, writing "The Great American Fraud" series for _Collier's
Weekly_, frightened and aroused the American public with his exposure
of cheap whiskey posing as consumption cures and soothing syrups filled
with opium. Then came a revolution in public policy. After a long and
frustrating legislative prelude, Congress in June of 1906 passed, and
President Theodore Roosevelt signed, the first Pure Food and Drugs Act.
The law contained clauses aimed at curtailing the worst features of the
patent medicine evil.

[114] Robert B. Nixon, Jr., _Corner druggist_, New York, 1941,
p. 68.

The Patent Medicines In The 20th Century

Although the old English patent medicines had not been the target at
which disturbed physicians and "muck-raking" journalists had taken aim,
these ancient remedies were governed by provisions of the new law. In
November 1906 the Bureau of Chemistry of the Department of Agriculture,
in charge of administering the new federal statute, received a letter
from a wholesale druggist in Evansville, Indiana. One of his stocks in
trade, the druggist wrote, was a remedy called Godfrey's Cordial. He
realized that the Pure Food and Drugs Act had something to do with the
labeling of medicines containing opium, as Godfrey's did, and he wanted
to know from the Bureau just what was required of him.[115] Many
manufacturing druggists and producers of medicine were equally anxious
to learn how the law would affect them. The editors of a trade paper,
the _American Druggist and Pharmaceutical Record_, issued warnings and
gave advice. It was still the custom, they noted, to wrap bottles of
ancient patent medicines, like Godfrey's Cordial and Turlington's
Balsam, in facsimiles of the original circulars, on which were printed
extravagant claims and fabulous certificates of cures that dated back
some two hundred years. The new law was not going to permit the
continuation of such 18th-century practices. Statements on the label
"false or misleading in any particular" were banned.[116]

[115] Letter from Charles Leich & Co. to Harvey Washington Wiley,
Bureau of Chemistry, Department of Agriculture, November 2, 1906.
Manuscript original in Record Group 97, National Archives,
Washington, D.C.

[116] _American Druggist and Pharmaceutical Record_, 1906,