An influenza epidemic swept across the planet at the end of World War I, killing as many as 100 million people in 1918 and 1919. Many companies tried to capitalize on the epidemic, playing up their offerings in newspaper ads. “Some of those were scams,” says John Barry, a scholar at the Tulane School of Public Health and Tropical Medicine. “Some of them were probably sincerely held beliefs.”

Source: Wall Street Journal June 12, 2020 15:26 UTC