We named the company after the most famous fraud in the history of medicine. That was deliberate, and this is the part where we explain ourselves.
The story is also more interesting than the version you have heard — because the original snake oil probably worked, the man who ruined the phrase was punished for the wrong thing, and the term did not mean "fraud" until a decade after he was caught.
The real stuff, and the evidence for it
In the 1860s and 70s, thousands of Chinese labourers worked on the American transcontinental railroad. Among the things they brought was a traditional liniment made from the fat of the Chinese water snake, rubbed on joints and muscles after long days of physical work. It was shared with co-workers, and by most accounts people found it helpful.
The modern claim is that it was pharmacologically real, and it traces to one source: a 1989 letter from Richard Kunin in the Western Journal of Medicine, reporting that Chinese water snake oil is roughly 20% EPA — an omega-3 fatty acid with genuine anti-inflammatory activity.
Now the part that most retellings leave out, and that we would be hypocrites to leave out ourselves.
That is a one-page letter to the editor, not a peer-reviewed study, and it has never been replicated. It is the entire evidentiary basis for "snake oil actually worked." A comparison figure for American rattlesnake fat also circulates widely, and the secondary sources reporting it do not agree with each other on the number, so we are not going to quote one.
So: a plausible mechanism, one unreplicated measurement, and a long tradition of use. If we applied our own claim standard to it, we would call that mechanism-level evidence and refuse to promise an outcome.
That is a more honest verdict than either "snake oil was always a scam" or "actually, snake oil worked."
Clark Stanley, who was not selling that
Stanley called himself the Rattlesnake King. His origin story — that he learned his remedy from a Hopi medicine man in Arizona — comes entirely from his own promotional material and has never been independently documented. Treat it as marketing, because that is what it is.
What is documented is the 1893 World's Columbian Exposition in Chicago, where he performed the demonstration that made him: killing rattlesnakes in front of a crowd and preparing his liniment on the spot. It was showmanship, and it worked. He sold a great deal of Clark Stanley's Snake Oil Liniment.
Then federal investigators tested it.
Their analysis found it contained no snake oil at all. What it did contain: mineral oil, about 1% fatty oil believed to be beef tallow, capsaicin from chilli peppers, turpentine, and camphor.
Read that list again. The capsaicin and camphor are why it felt warm on the skin. That sensation was the product. Underneath it was mineral oil.
Stanley pleaded no contest and was fined twenty dollars.
(Sources disagree on the year — the Smithsonian's own object record says 1916 while its magazine says 1917, most likely the difference between the case and its publication. We are flagging that rather than picking whichever is tidier.)
The detail that matters most to us
Here is the part almost nobody mentions, and it is the reason this article exists.
Stanley was not punished for selling something that did not work. He was punished for lying about what was in the bottle.
The Pure Food and Drug Act of 1906 was a misbranding law. It governed whether you told the truth about a product's identity and contents. It did not prohibit false therapeutic claims — a limitation the Supreme Court confirmed in United States v. Johnson in 1911, holding that the Act reached false statements about ingredients, not false promises about curing disease.
So Stanley's crime was that his snake oil contained no snake. Had he printed an accurate ingredient list and still claimed it cured everything, the 1906 Act would have had considerably less to say about it.
It took the Food, Drug and Cosmetic Act of 1938 to require that new drugs be shown safe before marketing.
And the phrase did not turn on him
The popular telling has Stanley's case single-handedly converting "snake oil" into a synonym for fraud. The dates do not support it.
The literal product is attested in American English by 1858. The figurative sense — a phony cure, a quack remedy — is dated to 1927, more than a decade after Stanley's case, with the earliest cited usage in Stephen Vincent Benét's poem John Brown's Body.
Stanley contributed to a shift already underway. He did not cause it. The whole era of patent medicine did — the same era that produced Samuel Hopkins Adams' eleven-part 1905 Collier's series, "The Great American Fraud," which helped drive the 1906 Act into existence.
Correcting that is the point of this page. A company that lectures other people about evidence and then repeats an unchecked origin story deserves whatever it gets.
What that history changed, and what it did not
The uncomfortable parallel, stated flatly.
Under current US law, dietary supplements are not approved by the FDA before they go on sale. The agency's own language: it "does not have the authority to approve dietary supplements before they are marketed," and "there are no provisions in the law for FDA to approve dietary supplements for safety before they reach the consumer."
That is not a loophole somebody found. It is how the framework has worked since 1994. Responsibility for a product's safety and for the truth of its claims sits with the company selling it.
Which means the thing standing between you and a modern Clark Stanley is mostly whether the company is honest.
So why name a company after it
Because of everything above.
We could have picked something that sounded clinical and borrowed credibility it had not earned. Half this category does. Instead we took the name that guarantees nobody extends us the benefit of the doubt.
That is a constraint we chose on purpose, and it shows up in what we publish:
- We have written that drinking water does not prevent a hangover, which is inconvenient for a product you mix with water.
- We have said that our showcase botanical ingredient has no published human trial behind it.
- We have told readers that no food has ever been tested against hangover outcomes, our own category included.
- We have told them that if maximum rehydration is what they want, buy an oral rehydration solution from a pharmacy instead.
- We have said our own drink does one of recovery's three jobs, and named the two it does not.
None of that is modesty. It is the only position available to a brand called Snake Oil.
The original was a real product with a plausible mechanism and thin evidence, sold honestly. The fraud was a man who printed one thing and bottled another. Those are two different failures, and only the second one is unforgivable.
We would rather sell you something narrow and true than something broad and unprovable.
Frequently asked questions
Why is snake oil a synonym for fraud? Because of the American patent medicine era, and Clark Stanley's liniment in particular — though the figurative sense is not recorded until 1927, over a decade after his case, so he contributed to a shift rather than causing it.
Did real snake oil work? Possibly, for muscle and joint aches. Chinese water snake oil has been measured as roughly 20% EPA, an omega-3 with real anti-inflammatory activity — but that measurement comes from a single unreplicated letter to the editor, so it is mechanism-level evidence rather than proof.
What was actually in Clark Stanley's snake oil? No snake oil. Federal analysis found mineral oil, roughly 1% beef fat, capsaicin, turpentine and camphor.
What happened to Clark Stanley? He pleaded no contest under the Pure Food and Drug Act and was fined twenty dollars. Sources differ on whether that was 1916 or 1917.
Are supplements FDA approved today? No. The FDA does not approve dietary supplements before they are sold. Responsibility for safety and for the accuracy of claims rests with the manufacturer.
Why would a company call itself Snake Oil? Because it makes the easy version of supplement marketing unavailable to us. Nobody gives a brand with this name the benefit of the doubt, which means we have to show our work.
These statements have not been evaluated by the Food and Drug Administration. This product is not intended to diagnose, treat, cure, or prevent any disease.
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