Snake Oil, Hustlers and Hambones: The American Medicine Show PDF

Rating: (8 reviews) Author: Ann Anderson ISBN : 9780786422289 New from $29.98 Format: PDF

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Long before television and radio commercials beckoned to potential buyers, the medicine show provided free entertainment and promised cures for everything from corns to cancer. Combining elements of the circus, theater, vaudeville, and good old-fashioned entrepreneurship, the showmen of the American medicine show sold tonics, ointments, pills, extracts and a host of other "wonder-cures," guaranteed to "cure what ails you." While the cures were seldom miraculous, the medicine show was an important part of American culture and of performance history. Harry Houdini, Buster Keaton, and P.T. Barnum all took a turn upon the medicine show stage. This study of the medicine show phenomenon surveys nineteenth century popular entertainment and provides insight into the ways in which show business, advertising, and medicine manufacture developed in concert. The colorful world of the medicine show, with its Wild West shows, pie-eating contests, clowns, and menageries, is fully explored. Photographs of performers and of the fascinating handbills and posters used to promote the medicine show are included.

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• Product Details
• Table of Contents
• Reviews

• Paperback: 200 pages
• Publisher: McFarland Publishing Company (December 10, 2004)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0786422289
• ISBN-13: 978-0786422289
• Product Dimensions: 0.4 x 6.9 x 9.8 inches
• Shipping Weight: 10.4 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)

Snake Oil, Hustlers and Hambones: The American Medicine Show PDF

This terrific book is as fun as it is informative. Anderson's exhaustive research is evident on every page, and her writing style is perfect: spare enough to let the color of the topic shine through, but never dry. As she relates the history of the medicine show, she shows how modern medicine, advertising and entertainment evolved together; her skill at illuminating these linkages gives the book even more weight and depth. It's an outstanding work of scholarship...and a damned good read!

By Cathy Loup

August 6, 2000

Book Review - SNAKE OIL...GOOD FOR WHAT AILS YA!

Ann Anderson SNAKE OIL, HUSTLERS AND HAMBONES The American Medicine Show

McFarland & Company,Inc., Publishers

As an avid reader with very eclectic tastes, I found Ann Anderson's SNAKE OIL, HUSTLERS AND HAMBONES to be highly satisfying to my literary pallet. I am an actor who has made a living over the years doing T.V. commercials. It has long been of interest to me to know just how this crazy way of marketing came to be. However, any person that has ever watched a T.V. commercial, an info-mercial or read an advertisement in a magazine or newspaper, and wondered why ads are everywhere, will get a kick out of this book. This wonderful, funny, deliciously informative book is simply chock full of "Oh, I didn't know that!" and "So that's how that got started!" moments. She has also thought to delight our eye by including many authentic labels, illustrations and flyers from the periods she discusses. She has managed to be fastidiously scholarly in her research with out being at all dry or dull. Ms. Anderson's writing style is so accessible and real, it makes one feel you're having a cup of coffee and sitting down for a long lively chat with a very interesting friend. It's full of factual information both serious and humorous. It runs the gamut of historically profound and fancifully trivial information. She provides for us the "missing link", as it were, of how we got from there to here. SNAKE OIL, HUSTLERS AND HAMBONES is a darned good read. I'm looking forward to her next book.

By Stephanie Shayne Parkin