Quack medicine, a useless remedy. This term comes from nineteenth-century traveling medicine shows that touted cure-all elixirs made from Chinese snakes. Eugene O’Neill used it in this sense in his play The Iceman Cometh (1946): “I’ll bet he’s standing on a street corner in hell right now, making suckers of the damned, telling them there’s nothing like snake oil for a bad burn.” Later the term was extended to mean a worthless remedy for any kind of problem, as in “Advertisers who try to lubricate the wheels of our economy with snake oil” (Washington Post, May 10, 1961).