The Rise and Fall of Snake Oil

In the late autumn of 1901 a woman named Laura Masall set off alone into the rocky grasslands of central Oklahoma to hunt for rattlesnakes. Contemporary newspapers painted Masall as one of the most successful snake hunters in the United States of America. She had begun her professional life as a circus performer, but some unspecified accident had left her with a ‘disfigured’ face severe enough to push her out of show business and into the snake trade. From her home in the foothills of the Wichita Mountains – an area called ‘Venom Spring’ by locals because it was reputed to be ‘infested with snakes of all sorts’ – she sold live snakes to snake charmers and zoological gardens, taxidermy snakes to curators of museums, and snake venom to experimental chemists and physicians. One of the most ‘remunerative’ parts of her business, though, was in the preparation and sale of snake oil.

Today, most people know the term ‘snake oil’ as a figure of speech: an image to capture a fake medicine or quack nostrum. The character of the ‘snake oil salesman’ has likewise become synonymous with falsehood, sleaze, and slick (but ultimately empty) promises. But what actually was snake oil and how did it acquire this slithery reputation?

Snake oil had traditionally been used in Britain and America for hundreds of years as a folk remedy for rheumatism, muscle strain, and various other bodily aches and pains. Snakes do not naturally secrete oily substances, but fat taken from butchered snakes could be rendered down into a liquid by slow heating and then filtering out any remaining pieces of meat or gristle. ‘The oil produced’, as the Dawson News described it in 1896, ‘is from two to three ounces a snake, almost white in colour, and has the consistency of tortoise oil, which it closely resembles.’ In 1902 The Lancet speculated that the oil – which reminded the medical writer of the ‘baleful viper broth’ boiled up by Shakespeare’s witches in Macbeth – had probably first been incorporated into ancient magic and medicine ‘in accordance with the savage theory that fat, blood, sputum and so forth contain the life-principle or “soul” of men and animals, and are therefore a cure for many diseases’. For mainstream 19th-century medicine snake oil was, at best, either a ‘savage’ curiosity or an unpleasant survival from some older, pre-scientific era of the healing art. In 1876 the American Journal of Pharmacy looked back scornfully on the old, outmoded style of apothecary, whose ‘bottled snakes, jars of rancid dog lard, snake oil, human fat and numerous other repulsive and unnecessary remedies’ were now mercifully being ‘displaced [by] modern science’.