Chapter 6 turns to the consumption of patent medicines and toiletries and their impact on the Colombian market. By following their distribution, it explores the mechanisms and strategies employed by foreign manufacturers to infiltrate the market and gain widespread attention. It also shows how producers of patent medicines were the first to introduce modern advertising techniques to Colombians. As a result of such advertising, popular sectors were gradually incorporated into the world of foreign nostrums and toiletries, embracing the ideas that these commodities promoted and enforced. In spite of this, as the chapter demonstrates, Colombian men and women still transformed and domesticated their uses and their meanings in interesting and often unpredictable ways.

“Elixirs” discusses how hunger artists’ fasts were associated with a huge range of drugs, liquors and mineral waters, which provoked scientific controversies and public disagreements, but, at the same time, strengthened advertising campaigns in the medical market. The chapter also discusses the close link between hunger artists and homeopathic doctors in specific local contexts, in particular in the case of Succi’s fast in Barcelona in 1888, and the analogies between fasting practices and homeopathic regimes. The ingestion of specific liquors, which supposedly helped the fasters to withstand the pain of hunger in the first days -such as Succi’s famous liquor-, never achieved consensus among analytical chemists and doctors, nor was there any agreement on their narcotic or nutritive nature. Equally, in the battle to draw boundaries between orthodox and heterodox science, the composition of different mineral waters was an extra tool for advertisements in which doctors and hunger artists became active, complementary agents of credibility. Again, issues of trade, fraud and scientific objectivity resulted in controversy and frequent disagreements, but strengthened the promotion of hunger artists and their performances in the marketplace.

In the years following FDA approval of direct-to-consumer, genetic-health-risk/DTCGHR testing, millions of people in the US have sent their DNA to companies to receive personal genome health risk information without physician or other learned medical professional involvement. In Personal Genome Medicine, Michael J. Malinowski examines the ethical, legal, and social implications of this development. Drawing from the past and present of medicine in the US, Malinowski applies law, policy, public and private sector practices, and governing norms to analyze the commercial personal genome sequencing and testing sectors and to assess their impact on the future of US medicine. Written in relatable and accessible language, the book also proposes regulatory reforms for government and medical professionals that will enable technological advancements while maintaining personal and public health standards.

In the years following FDA approval of direct-to-consumer, genetic-health-risk/DTCGHR testing, millions of people in the US have sent their DNA to companies to receive personal genome health risk information without physician or other learned medical professional involvement. In Personal Genome Medicine, Michael J. Malinowski examines the ethical, legal, and social implications of this development. Drawing from the past and present of medicine in the US, Malinowski applies law, policy, public and private sector practices, and governing norms to analyze the commercial personal genome sequencing and testing sectors and to assess their impact on the future of US medicine. Written in relatable and accessible language, the book also proposes regulatory reforms for government and medical professionals that will enable technological advancements while maintaining personal and public health standards.

In the years following FDA approval of direct-to-consumer, genetic-health-risk/DTCGHR testing, millions of people in the US have sent their DNA to companies to receive personal genome health risk information without physician or other learned medical professional involvement. In Personal Genome Medicine, Michael J. Malinowski examines the ethical, legal, and social implications of this development. Drawing from the past and present of medicine in the US, Malinowski applies law, policy, public and private sector practices, and governing norms to analyze the commercial personal genome sequencing and testing sectors and to assess their impact on the future of US medicine. Written in relatable and accessible language, the book also proposes regulatory reforms for government and medical professionals that will enable technological advancements while maintaining personal and public health standards.