Amazing Mentholatum and the Commerce of Curing the Common Cold

"By focusing on the intersection between the pharmaceutical industry and popular culture, Alex Taylor succeeds in telling one of the great tales of American civilization - the heroic effort to conquer the common cold. Both scholarly and enteraining, crammed full with colorful and exotic detail, Amazing Mentholatum is an amazing achievement." --Jonathan Kirsch, Los Angeles based author, attorney, and book review columnist"I loved this book. Played out in the prairie factories of Wichita and the mint fields of Japan - and luxuriously illustrated - this is a tale of an early-twentieth-century battle royal between patent medicines, of Horatio Alger-style entrepreneurship, hucksterism and good works, vividly portrayed against a backdrop of the formative years of today's multi-billion-dollar industry devoted to the common cold as it coevolved with government regulation to curb its colorful and sometimes lethal excesses." --George H. Caughey, M.D. Chief, Pulmonary and Critical Care Medicine, San Francisco Veterans Affairs Medical Center; Professor of Medicine, UCSF; Investigator, Cardiovascular Research Institute"The graphic design is outstanding, but so is the research and writing. It's a fine contribution to local history and beyond." --Craig Miner, Willard W. Garvey Distinguished Professor of Business History, Wichita State University