Word: snake-oil
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...loggerheads, into partnership. Meeting at a national congress on medical quackery in Washington, D.C., A.M.A. President Leonard W. Larson (TIME cover, July 7) and Health Secretary Abraham A. Ribicoff agreed that the public is vulnerable largely because it believes that quackery went out with the river boats and snake-oil peddlers, that it can't happen now. Instead, said Ribicoff, extravagant claims of earlier times have given way to "the illustrated brochure, the medicine-show extravaganza to the television commercial." Among the quacks now under FDA attack, Ribicoff pointed out by way of a modern horrible example, are peddlers...
...later laws largely curbed the worst abuses of the snake-oil salesmen, but the "desire to take medicine" that Osier noted still dies hard. The biggest medicine-show extravaganza of all, says Author Carson, was staged in 1950 with Dixieland bands and Hollywood stars to promote a $1.25-a-bottle tonic that pulled in millions for a spellbinding Louisiana legislator named Dudley J. LeBlanc. The potion was called Hadacol, and it contained 12% alcohol. The Hadacol empire wound up in a tangle of bankruptcy proceedings...
...Mencken-who called Bryan "a tin-pot pope" and lamented that Darrow might as well be "bawling [his eloquence] up a rainspout in the interior of Afghanistan"-the monkey trial made screamlines all over the U.S. and Europe. Bryan and Darrow put on a spectacular sideshow, bellowing like snake-oil salesmen, crassly subverting judge, jury and the rules of evidence as they addressed their elocution to the larger court of public opinion. "We have the purpose," Darrow thundered, "of preventing bigots and ignoramuses from controlling the education of the United States." And Bryan roared: "If evolution wins, Christianity goes!" Both...
...different generation and a different world. He still has an in eradicable touch of Texas backlands about him. When he is trying to persuade or cajole somebody, as he often is, he grabs an arm or shoulder in a bruising grip, and a hint of the carnival snake-oil seller shows in his voice. His fellow Senators joke about the lavish vanity of his tailoring and his baronial Senate office?but they respect him, too. Last June the non-partisan Congressional Quarterly polled Senators and Representatives on who they thought would be the Democratic Party's "strongest possible" presidential candidate...
What is the function that a clergyman performs in the world? Answer: he gets his living by assuring idiots that he can save them from an imaginary hell. It is a business almost indistinguishable from that of a seller of snake-oil for rheumatism. As for a lawyer, he is simply, under our cash-register civilization, one who teaches scoundrels how to commit their swindles without too much risk. As for a physician, he is one who spends his whole life trying to prolong the lives of persons whose deaths, in nine cases out of ten, would be a public...