The case of the carbolic smoke ball

To cure the flu, a guarantee too good to be true

In the early 1890s, the maker of the Carbolic Smoke Ball took out an advertisement for its flu prevention treatment. It promised £100 to anyone who caught influenza despite using the product correctly. Louisa Elizabeth Carlill took them up on it.

Courtesy the Wellcome Collection. How about that client list!

In a raging pandemic, some smelled opportunity

An influenza pandemic was ravaging the world. Estimates place the death toll at around a million. People were desperate to avoid it and desperate for a cure.

Enter the Carbolic Smoke Ball, which, according to the BBC, was:

"...a peculiar device marketed as a cure for various ailments including influenza. It consisted of a rubber ball, filled with powdered carbolic acid. You squeezed the ball sending a puff of acidic smoke right up a tube inserted into your nose. The idea was that your nose would run and the cold would be flushed out."

Carbolic acid killed germs…and sometimes people

Carbolic acid was widely used in hospitals in the late 1800s to disinfect. It was effective on surgical instruments, but could be dangerous if ingested. According to the NIH’s National Cancer Institute, carbolic acid is "a very poisonous chemical substance made from tar and also found in some plants and essential oils. Carbolic acid is used to make plastics, nylon, epoxy, medicines, and to kill germs."

Whether it was safe to squirt carbolic dust up your nose is debatable. But people at the time would have known about the benefits of carbolic acid as a germ fighter and probably been quite comfortable with the idea of coating their nasal passages with it.

The carbolic smoke ball didn’t work for Carlill. So she sued.

Carlill tried the smoke ball and ended up catching influenza. She wrote in, asking for her one hundred pounds, only to be denied. So, in 1892, at a time when medical quacks were selling nostrums all over the place, she took the company to court.

In Carlill v Carbolic Smoke Ball, Carlill's lawyers argued that advertising a reward amounted to a contract with buyers. Carlill won.

Setting a precedent for combatting scammy medical advertising

This piece by the Australian Broadcast Company, "The carbolic smoke ball was a 19th century health scam. It changed the way medicine can be marketed forever," leaves no doubt about the importance of the case.

"[It] reminded advertisers that there is a legal boundary they can't cross...And while the case is over a century old, there are modern parallels.

"When you think about the kind of wellness industry that we have now, we have plenty of treatments that are equally silly looking, or will be silly looking 100 years from now," Chamberlain says [Erica Chamberlain, is dean of the law school at Canada's Western University.]"

We see advertisers playing around the margins all the time, to this day. Think of the words “natural” and “clean,” or the claims of supplement makers, or even the lies we were told about the (not-so) safety of opioids. Buyer beware.

I’d love to hear about your favorite “this is probably a scam” products!