Harry M. Hoxsey, a former coal miner with an 8th grade education and no medical training made millions hawking quack cancer “cures” , to desperate patients for more than three decades until FDA was able to help remove the products from the market in the 1950s. Hoxsey had inherited the recipe for his botanical tonic, Hoxide, from his veterinarian father, who was the first to treat cancer patients with the dark brown liquid, which was derived from licorice, red clover blossoms, burdock root, Stillingia root, barberis root, poke root, Cascara Sagrada, prickly ash bark, and buckthorn powder.

Hoxsey began selling his cancer “cure” in the mid-1920s and was forced to relocate from Illinois and Iowa for violating medical licensure laws. In 1936, he obtained a medical license in Texas and set up a cancer clinic in Dallas. In addition to seeing patients in his clinic, Hoxsey had a lucrative mail order business selling his signature tonic, a pink version that consisted of elixir of lactated pepsin and potassium iodide, and tablets based on the formulas for both tonics – all of which were worthless as anti-cancer agents. For skin cancers, he also topically applied a caustic “cancer paste” (made of arsenic, antimony and zinc) that essentially burned off skin tissue. For all this, he charged patients a minimum of $400, or the equivalent of more than $3,500 today. Some patients came to Hoxsey having been previously diagnosed by another doctor, but many did not and for them, Hoxsey used perfunctory methods to diagnose cancer, and never confirming the existence with a biopsy, as was standard medical protocol for the time. As a result, he “treated” – and maimed – many patients who did not actually have cancer. And those that did lost precious time, money and hope under his care.

Between 1950 and 1960, the FDA twice prosecuted Hoxsey in federal court for misbranding his products as cures for cancer and succeeded in enjoining the interstate sale of his products. However, because the FDA oversees products, not the practice of medicine, Hoxsey was still able to treat patients at his Texas clinic. He even audaciously opened a second clinic in Pennsylvania and increased promotional activities. In the mid-1950s, Hoxsey bragged that he treated 20-30 new patients a day! To discourage patients, FDA used its bully pulpit, issuing a warning in April 1956 that was printed in nationally circulating periodicals and the following year was posted in Post Offices throughout the country. Wallace Janssen, Director of the Division of Public Information reflected that “the Hoxsey warning was the most effective use ever made of the Government’s authority and duty to warn the public against quackery. Without it, the distribution of the medicine would have continued on a large scale at least two more years, whereas it was virtually put out of business after the Post Office poster was issued.”