Bile Beans
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Bile Beans was a laxative herbal tonic first marketed in the 1890s.[1][2] The product supposedly contained substances extracted from an extremely rare vegetable by a fictitious chemist known as Charles Forde.[3] In the early years, Bile Beans were marketed as "Charles Forde's Bile Beans for Biliousness", and sales relied heavily on newspaper advertisements. Among other cure-all claims, Bile Beans promised to "disperse unwanted fat" and "purify and enrich the blood".[4]
Although the manufacturer claimed that the formula for Bile Beans was based on a rare vegetable known only to Aboriginal Australians, the actual active ingredients, which included cascara, rhubarb, liquorice and menthol, were commonly used by doctors of the period. A court case initiated in Scotland in 1905 found that the Bile Bean Manufacturing Company's business was based on a fraud and conducted fraudulently, but Bile Beans nevertheless continued to be sold until the 1980s.
Charles Edward Fulford (1870–1906) and Ernest Albert Gilbert (1875–1905) first sold Bile Beans in Australia in late 1897, marketed as "Gould's Bile Beans".[5] Fulford was a Canadian who had travelled to Australia to sell Dr. Williams' Pink Pills for Pale People for his uncle, George Taylor Fulford.[6][7]
Fulford and Gilbert established the Bile Bean Manufacturing Company in Leeds, England, in 1899. It was claimed that the formula for Bile Beans was created by an Australian scientist Charles Forde in 1898, based on research he had conducted on a vegetable source known only to Aboriginal Australians. In reality, Charles Forde did not exist; the name was used as an alias for Charles Fulford, who had no scientific training. The beans were initially manufactured in America by Parke Davis & Co. of Detroit, until the Bile Bean Manufacturing Company set up a production facility in Leeds, England,[8] trading under the name of C. E. Fulford Limited. It also sold other patent medicines, including the Zam-Buk ointment,[a] Pep pastilles and later Vitapointe hair conditioner.[1][b]
The product sold by Fulford and Gilbert was not the first patent medicine marketed as "Bile Beans". A different type of Bile Beans was invented by James F. Smith, a chemist from Texarkana, Texas, in the 1870s or 1880s, and J.F. Smith & Co traded out of St Louis, Mo. The firm also produced a product called "Smith's Blood Beans", claimed to "purify the blood" and was "put up in packages similar to Bile Beans" with "sugar coating blood red in color", and a "wrapper [...] lithographed in red ink instead of black".[11] In 1902, the Bile Bean Manufacturing Company acquired the trade mark of "J. F. Smith's Bile Beans" in the UK, which had been registered in 1887.[12]
According to a 1903 report published in the British Medical Journal, the chief ingredients of Bile Beans were cascara, rhubarb, liquorice and menthol, packaged as a gelatine-coated pill,[13] all ingredients commonly found in pharmacies of the period.[14] It was not until 1941 that English companies were legally required to disclose the active ingredients in their non-prescription drugs.[15] By the 1940s, the ingredients included various purgatives, cholagogues, and carminatives, including aloin (aloe), Podophyllum, cascara, scammony, jalap, colocynth, leptandrin, saponis (soap), cardamom, capsicum, ginger, peppermint oil, and gentian, mixed with liquorice, powdered gum (acacia or tragacanth) and glucose, coated with black charcoal or carbon powder to form ovoid pills.[16]
Findings of fraud
In 1905 the Bile Beans Manufacturing Company initiated a passing off court case in Scotland against an Edinburgh chemist, George Graham Davidson, who sold "Davidson's Bile Beans", seeking to prevent him from selling any product using the name "bile beans" except that supplied by the company. The presiding judge, Lord Ardwall, rejected the case, as he considered that the plaintiff's business was "founded on, and conducted by fraud", there being no secret ingredient and no connection with any plant found in Australia.[14][17] The Court of Session dismissed an appeal because it considered that the Bile Bean Manufacturing Company had deliberately defrauded the public by making false factual statements about the product, concluding that it was not entitled to any legal protection against the use of the term "bile beans".[12]
