Bile Beans

Bile Beans was a laxative herbal tonic first marketed in the 1890s. The product supposedly contained substances extracted from an extremely rare vegetable by a fictitious chemist known as Charles Forde. In the early years, Bile Beans were marketed as "Charles Forde's Bile Beans for Biliousness", and sales relied heavily on newspaper advertisements. Among other cure-all claims, Bile Beans promised to "disperse unwanted fat" and "purify and enrich the blood". Although the manufacturer claimed that the formula for Bile Beans was based on a rare vegetable known only to Aboriginal Australians, the actual active ingredients, which included cascara, rhubarb, liquorice and menthol, were commonly used by doctors of the period. A court case initiated in Scotland in 1905 found that the Bile Bean Manufacturing Company's business was based on a fraud and conducted fraudulently, but Bile Beans nevertheless continued to be sold until the 1980s.