Over the course of the 19th century snake oil transformed from folk remedy, to industrial medicine, to notorious fake.
In the late autumn of 1901 a woman named Laura Masall set off alone into the rocky grasslands of central Oklahoma to hunt for rattlesnakes. Contemporary newspapers painted Masall as one of the most successful snake hunters in the United States of America. She had begun her professional life as a circus performer, but some unspecified accident had left her with a ‘disfigured’ face severe enough to push her out of show business and into the snake trade. From her home in the foothills of the Wichita Mountains – an area called ‘Venom Spring’ by locals because it was reputed to be ‘infested with snakes of all sorts’ – she sold live snakes to snake charmers and zoological gardens, taxidermy snakes to curators of museums, and snake venom to experimental chemists and physicians. One of the most ‘remunerative’ parts of her business, though, was in the preparation and sale of snake oil.