Great American Fraud / The Patent Medicine Evil

Samuel Hopkins Adams was an American writer and muckraker. The muckrakers (a term coined by President Theodore Roosevelt) were writers of the Progressive movement of the early twentieth century who exposed the corruption of businesses or government to the public. Often accused of being socialists or communists, they played a significant role in social justice movements by constantly reporting on the dark corners of American society, especially corporate America.1 We might say that they were the Michael Moores of their day. Adams was widely known for his writings on public health and patent medicines; he is often given much of the credit for the passage of the 1906 Pure Food and Drug Act.(Excerpt from Wikipedia)