I play housewife in my home, so I shop a lot. Over the past couple of days, a theme has emerged. I guess it’s always been there, but lately it has moved to the forefront of my thoughts: there are a lot of ‘medicine wagon’ remedies for sale in our culture.
That they exist at all is a testimony to the effectiveness of the traveling salesman and the gullibility of the consumer. We all know the stories of men traveling from town to town, selling liniments and tonics guaranteed to accomplish everything from hair restoration to longevity. He would stay long enough to achieve market saturation, deplete his inventory of herb-infused sugar water, and then move down the road. He never had to return, so he never had to worry about repeat business. The next shyster that came along had little trouble selling his wares, since people never seemed to be hesitant about giving their trust. Which brings us to the interesting question about our nature: why do we still give that trust to the traveling salesman, after generations of getting ripped off?
Of course, the salesman has evolved, staying well ahead of his customer base. Today he is in the pharmacies and health food stores, has branding campaigns and even carve-outs in federal regulatory law. So we don’t see the medicine wagon anymore. But that doesn’t mean that it isn’t there. On a recent trip to Whole Foods, I walked through the supplements section and found 
pollens, root extracts – everything but powdered rhino horn. People flock to these remedies without any reason to believe that they will help, other than what is printed on the label. And thanks to our Congress, led by Senator Orrin Hatch of Utah, the supplement industry is pretty much allowed to print anything they want on the label, and put anything they want in the product. The only difference between then and now is that the Whole Foods consumer has more disposable income.
Where does this come from? One hundred and forty years later, it is easy to describe the consumer of 1870 as ignorant, but I’m not really sure that does justice to the question. There is a more complicated process at work here for the medicine wagon to have survived for so long. Surely it begins with vanity: as a person, we desire ways to look better, perform better, and feel better. Aging is a bitch, and anything that mitigates its effects is welcomed. But what about effectiveness, the main lesson in the medicine wagon story? Today’s remedies provide no more assurance of that, and as I mentioned earlier, we don’t even know if they are adulterated. All we really have is trust in the brand, which is meaningless. In fact, more science and information about these products hasn’t impacted their popularity one bit. It’s almost as if Americans are adamant about buying from the medicine wagon.
Individualism and libertarianism are two characteristics that Americans have embraced with pride, but sometimes it’s taken a little too far. Not that you aren’t free to discard your money at the medicine wagon. It’s just that the only kind of ignorance that can explain it today is the willful kind. Modernity and science have extended our capabilities far beyond ourselves, but that can only be embraced if we give up a bit of our individuality. To remain a rugged frontiersman (metaphorically, of course) we must reject that which others can provide, including knowledge. I’d like to think that, 140 years from now, we’ll be less likely to support the medicine wagon. But I have never embraced the frontier, instead preferring to build upon what has come before me. While it’s important to explore and forge new directions, growth occurs from the assimilation of that exploration, after the fact. Both are critical to improving our lives, and learning the lessons of the medicine wagon.
