April 2018
Beginner
200 pages
3h 39m
English
Clark Stanley worked as a cowboy and later as a very successful entrepreneur, selling medicine in the United States that he made based on secrets he learned from an Arizona Hopi Indian medicine man. His elixir was made from rattlesnake oil, and was marketed in the 1890s through public events in which Stanley killed live rattlesnakes and squeezed out their oil in front of admiring crowds. After his medicine gained a wide popularity, he was able to set up production facilities in Massachusetts and Rhode Island with the help of a pharmacist. Stanley made himself a rich man.
You may not know his name, but you’ve certainly heard of Stanley’s time and place. It was the era of patent medicines—false and sometimes dangerous elixirs sold to men ...