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Samuel Hopkins Adams
(26 Jan 1871 - 15 Nov 1958)
American journalist and author whose investigative journalism and a series of eleven articles for Collier's Weekly in 1905, exposing false claims of patent medicines, led to the 1906 Pure Food and Drug Act. He was also a prolific writer of magazine stories and novels.
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Science Quotes by Samuel Hopkins Adams (8 quotes)
According to the estimate of a prominent advertising firm, above 90 per cent, of the earning capacity of the prominent nostrums is represented by their advertising. And all this advertising is based on the well-proven theory of the public's pitiable ignorance and gullibility in the vitally important matter of health.
— Samuel Hopkins Adams
'The Fundamental Fakes', Collier's Weekly (17 Feb 1906). Reprinted in The Great American Fraud (1907), 55.
Any physician who advertises a positive cure for any disease, who issues nostrum testimonials, who sells his services to a secret remedy, or who diagnoses and treats by mail patients he has never seen, is a quack.
— Samuel Hopkins Adams
'The Sure-Cure School,' Collier’s Weekly (14 Jul 1906). Reprinted in The Great American Fraud (1907), 84.
Ignorance and credulous hope make the market for most proprietary remedies.
— Samuel Hopkins Adams
'The Subtle Poisons,' Collier’s Weekly (2 Dec 1905). Reprinted in The Great American Fraud (1907), 32.
Medicine would be the ideal profession if it did not involve giving pain.
— Samuel Hopkins Adams
The Health Master (1913), 61.
Printer’s ink, when it spells out a doctor’s promise to cure, is one of the subtlest and most dangerous of poisons.
— Samuel Hopkins Adams
In 'The Sure-Cure School,' Collier’s Weekly (14 Jul 1906). Reprinted in The Great American Fraud (1907), 84.
Shut your eyes to the medical columns of the newspapers, and you will save yourself many forebodings and symptoms.
— Samuel Hopkins Adams
'The Sure-Cure School,' Collier’s Weekly (14 Jul 1906). Reprinted in The Great American Fraud (1907), 84.
With a few honorable exceptions the press of the United States is at the beck and call of the patent medicines. Not only do the newspapers modify news possibly affecting these interests, but they sometimes become their agents.
— Samuel Hopkins Adams
'The Nostrum Evil,' Collier’s Weekly (7 Oct 1905). Reprinted in The Great American Fraud (1907), 5.
With the exception of lawyers, there is no profession which, considers itself above the law so widely as the medical profession.
— Samuel Hopkins Adams
The Health Master (1913), 10.