For one, there was no regulatory state of the kind we now take for granted-no FDA to test medicines before they were sold to the public. Efforts to charge sellers of potions with violating common law had largely failed: their promises were gratuitous, and quaffing a product was an assumption of risk by nineteenth-century legal standards. In addition, the press had long displayed little interest in offending an industry that was perhaps its greatest single source of advertising revenue.*2 That changed in 1905, when the editor of Collier's Weekly, one of the new muckraking magazines, commissioned Adams to investigate mischief in the patent medicine business.

Tim Wu, The Attention Merchants, loc. 109