The victims were mostly immigrants and the poor.
It is estimated that about 50,000 people became paralyzed as a result of drinking Jake adulterated with TOCP. TOCP later proved to be toxic, damaging nerves especially in the spinal cord and leading to temporary or permanent paralysis.
In the late 1920s, Harry Gross, president of Hub Products Corporation, began adding a toxic mixture containing a substance called triorthocresyl phosphate (TOCP) to his company’s Jake as an alternative to castor oil. Manufacturers of this bitter-tasting version of Jake began to seek ways of making it more palatable and so started using ingredients like castor oil and molasses in place of the government-approved bitter-tasting ginger. However, a fluid extract version with a bitter taste was allowed in over-the-counter purchases. In 1921, the government of the United States restricted the original combination of Jake from an over-the-counter product to a prescription-only product.
Jake became more popular in the 1920s during the prohibition of the sale of alcohol in the United States. Jake was a patent medicine that contained 70-80 percent alcohol and was obtainable over the counter at drug stores without a prescription. In Water for Elephants, Sara Gruen created awareness about the victims who became paralyzed as a result of consuming a toxic version of a drink called Jamaica Ginger Extract and known colloquially as ‘’Jake’’. According to her, Jacob and Marlena’s love story was entirely from her imagination, but many of the other events in the novel were from anecdotes she gathered in her research. Sara Gruen then began researching about the circus, interviewing performers, gathering anecdotes, and learning about elephants to get details for the book. Sara Gruen began writing Water for Elephants in the year 2003 after she read an article about a photographer whose works centered on traveling circuses in the 1920s and 1930s. The novel was written in the early 2000s and has some interesting backstories that inspired the author Sara Gruen to base her novel on the context of those specific events in history. Water for Elephants alternates between two timelines- the early 2000s when the narrator Jacob is in his nineties, and Jacob’s flashbacks to the 1930s.
0 kommentar(er)
