The Stepansky Medical Encyclopedia View in Timeline →

1906

Passage of Pure Food and Drugs Act, main thrust of which was to control adulteration of food by providing Department of Agriculture with legal power to enforce reasonable standards of purity for processed foods. Its regulatory work aimed at controlling patent medicine, and its tangible achievement in first years was to reduce the alcohol and narcotic levels in patent medicine and to standardize state laws (Liebenau, 90-97).