snake oil

Clark Stanley's Snake Oil

The phrase snake oil is as a derogatory term used to describe quackery, the promotion of fraudulent or unproven medical practices. The expression is also applied metaphorically to any product with questionable and/or unverifiable quality or benefit. By extension, the term "snake oil salesman" may be applied to someone who sells fraudulent goods, or who is a fraud himself.

The phrase originates with a topical preparation made from the Chinese Water Snake (Enhydris chinensis) used by Chinese labourers to treat joint pain. The preparation was promoted in North America by travelling salesmen who often used accomplices in the audience to proclaim the benefits of the preparation.

History

Chinese labourers on railroad gangs involved in building the First Transcontinental Railroad first gave snake oil to Europeans with joint pain.^[1] When rubbed on the skin at the painful site, snake oil was claimed to bring relief. This claim was ridiculed by rival medicine salesmen, and in time, snake oil became a generic name for many compounds marketed as panaceas or miraculous remedies whose ingredients were usually secret, unidentified, or mis-characterized and mostly inert or ineffective.

Patent medicines originated in England, where a patent was granted to Richard Stoughton's Elixir in 1712.^[2] Since there was no federal regulation in the USA concerning safety and effectiveness of drugs until the 1906 Food and Drugs Act^[3] and various medicine salesmen or manufacturers seldom had enough skills in analytical chemistry to analyze the contents of snake oil, it became the archetype of hoax.

The snake oil peddler became a stock character in Western movies: a travelling "doctor" with dubious credentials, selling fake medicines with boisterous marketing hype, often supported by pseudo-scientific evidence. To increase sales, an accomplice in the crowd (a shill) would often attest to the value of the product in an effort to provoke buying enthusiasm. The "doctor" would leave town before his customers realized they had been cheated.^[1] This practice is also called grifting and its practitioners are called grifters.

In popular culture

• Poppy: W. C. Fields's film about a Western frontier American snake oil salesman complete with a surreptitious crowd accomplice. His demonstration from the back of a buckboard (transparently fraudulent to the movie audience) of a miraculous cure for hoarseness ignited a comic purchasing frenzy.
• Disney's Pete's Dragon : The greedy "Doc" Terminus, played by Jim Dale, gave a testament to the persuasive power of the snake oil salesman. Dealing with a crowd of people he had conned on a prior visit, Terminus turns them from angry vengeance seekers to believers once more, paying top dollar for Terminus's products despite their previous ineffectiveness.
• The Adventures of Tom Sawyer : Mark Twain presents Aunt Polly as a true believer in various sorts of snake oil, though not always in the form of an alleged medicine. She also adopted cold showers as a cure-all at one point in Tom's childhood. For a time, she insisted that Tom Sawyer take a painkiller every day, simply because she thought it would be good for him; Tom finally gave some to Peter the housecat, who reacted to the dose with extreme and comic agitation. After seeing the cat vanish in a frenzy out the window, Aunt Polly no longer forced Tom to take the painkiller.
• Little Big Man: The main character, Jack Crabb, works as the apprentice of a travelling snake oil salesman for a while.
• Say Say Say's music video: In a more modern appearance of grifting in pop culture, the collaboration of Paul McCartney and Michael Jackson in 1983 produced a music video for Say Say Say, which depicts McCartney as the salesman selling a dubious strength elixir from the back of a truck and Jackson as his accomplice amongst the audience.
• Beachcomber: Many of J. B. Morton's books and radio programs included short spoof advertisements for Snibbo, a fictional treatment allegedly tackling various unlikely human conditions.
• Flåklypa Grand Prix: In this animated movie, Snake Oil is used as a name for a shady oil company.
• Emmet Otter's Jug Band Christmas: In this Muppet Christmas special, Emmet and Ma periodically reminisced about his deceased Pa, the unsuccessful snake oil salesman, because "Pa couldn't find anyone who would want to oil a snake."
• Every Time I Die: The New Junk Aesthetic CD uses a line in the song "Host Disorder" containing the term. "Open your heart to the snake oil peddlers."
• Gypsys, Tramps & Thieves: The lyrics describe that, Papa would do whatever he could / Preach a little gospel, sell a couple bottles of Doctor Good. "Doctor Good" is most often interpreted to be a kind of snake-oil elixir.
• Steve Earle's "Snake Oil": Singer-songwriter Steve Earle recorded a song critical of the Ronald Reagan administration entitled "Snake Oil" for the album Copperhead Road, released in 1988: "Well ain't your President good to you/ Knocked 'em dead in Libya, Grenada too/ Now he's taking his show a little further down the line/ Well, 'tween me and him people, you're gonna get along just fine."
• Red Dead Redemption: A mission involves John Marston working with a snake oil salesman as a shill.
• The Irish Rovers - Lily the Pink: A light-hearted look at the efficacious medicinal compound.

See also

• Crocodile oil
• Elixir
• Golden hammer
• Silver bullet
• Universal panacea

References