Snake oil

Clark Stanley's Snake Oil Liniment, c. 1905

Actor Ross Nelson as Snake Oil salesman Thaddeus Schmidlap, at a theme park in the United States

In English, snake oil is the name for a product (usually a drug) that has no real effect but is advertised as a real treatment.

History

Many 18th-century European and 19th-century American entrepreneurs advertised and sold mineral oil as "snake oil liniment". Snake oil salesmen added different herbs and spices to the mineral oil, and claimed it could be used to cure many illnesses. Sometimes, "snake oils" also contained other drugs, but they never contained any products made from snakes.

Drugs that claimed to be a panacea were extremely common from the 18th century until the 20th. This was especially true when salesmen sold addictive drugs (including cocaine, amphetamine, alcohol, and opium-based products) at medicine shows. There, they disguised the drugs by saying they were medication or products promoting health.