{"podcast":{"title":"Disturbing History","slug":"disturbing-history-7341005","podcast_index_feed_id":7341005,"rss_url":"https://www.spreaker.com/show/6628223/episodes/feed","website_url":"https://www.spreaker.com/podcast/disturbing-history--6628223","image_url":"https://d3wo5wojvuv7l.cloudfront.net/t_rss_itunes_square_1400/images.spreaker.com/original/f42011dc1c8c8130e84fb37f20a9046e.jpg","author":"Paranormal World Productions LLC","episode_count":145,"summary":"Disturbing History is a dark history podcast uncovering the strange, sinister, and little-known stories the past tried to bury. Each week, we explore unsolved mysteries, secret societies, forgotten crimes, eerie folklore, lost civilizations, historical conspiracies, and disturbing events that never made it into your high school textbook .Hosted by author, investigator, and storyteller Brian King-Sharp, Disturbing History dives deep into: Unsolved historical mysteries Secret societies and hidden power structures Dark folklore and urban legends Lost colonies and vanished civilizations True crime cases buried by time Historical conspiracies and cover-ups Paranormal events rooted in real history Through immersive storytelling and investigative research, we uncover the shadowy corners of the past — the uncomfortable truths, forgotten tragedies, and disturbing secrets that shaped our world.If you’re fascinated by dark history, obsessed with unexplained events, or drawn to stories that blur the line between fact and legend, this podcast is for you. Because the past isn’t always dead. Sometimes it’s just been buried. Follow Disturbing History and turn on automatic downloads for weekly dee…","last_synced_at":"2026-09-07T04:18:26.325177+00:00","page_url":"https://stenobird.com/podcast/disturbing-history-7341005"},"episode":{"title":"The Poison Bottles America Trusted","slug":"the-poison-bottles-america-trusted","published_at":"2026-07-03T04:00:03+00:00","page_url":"https://stenobird.com/podcast/disturbing-history-7341005/the-poison-bottles-america-trusted","show_page_url":"https://stenobird.com/podcast/disturbing-history-7341005","url":"https://www.spreaker.com/episode/the-poison-bottles-america-trusted--72791045","audio_url":"https://dts.podtrac.com/redirect.mp3/api.spreaker.com/download/episode/72791045/dhpoisonfinal.mp3","summary":"Before the Food and Drug Administration, before warning labels, before anyone had to prove a medicine was safe or even admit what was inside it, America ran on the bottle. This episode opens the cabinet on the patent medicine era, the long stretch of years when a quarter and a clipped newspaper advertisement could buy a family a cure-all that promised relief from nerves, weakness, pain, sleeplessness, women's complaints, and almost anything else a body could suffer, and then it asks the only question that matters, which is what those beautiful bottles actually held. We start in a winter farmhouse with a crying baby and a spoonful of morphine, then trace the machinery of the whole trade, the secret formulas that were never really patented, the newspapers bought and silenced by advertising money, the torchlit medicine shows rolling out of town before dawn, the fake Indian remedies of the Kickapoo Medicine Company, and Clark Stanley's famous snake oil that a federal laboratory found contained no snake at all. From there we look hard at the soothing syrups that dosed infants with morphine until doctors gave them the name baby killers, at the women's tonics that hid hard liquor and harder drugs behind a kindly face, at the electric belts sold to ashamed men, and at the mercury and arsenic ladled into cures for the dying. We follow cocaine into children's toothache drops and into a famous Atlanta soda fountain, and heroin into a cough remedy sold by a household name, and we end up at the glowing horror of Radithor and the millionaire whose jaw rotted off his face. Then comes the reckoning, the muckraker Samuel Hopkins Adams and his Great American Fraud, the government chemist Harvey Wiley and his Poison Squad, the Pure Food and Drug Act of nineteen oh six and the two enormou…","meta_description":"Before the Food and Drug Administration, before warning labels, before anyone had to prove a medicine was safe or even admit what was inside it, America r…","key_points":[],"chapters":[],"topics":[],"duration_seconds":3557,"processing_state":"not_requested","actions":[{"name":"request_transcript","method":"POST","url":"https://stenobird.com/v1/public/podcasts/disturbing-history-7341005/episodes/the-poison-bottles-america-trusted/transcription-requests","description":"Idempotently request low-priority transcript generation for this episode."},{"name":"read_markdown","method":"GET","url":"https://stenobird.com/podcast/disturbing-history-7341005/the-poison-bottles-america-trusted.md","description":"Read the agent-friendly Markdown representation of this episode resource."}]}}