This is an I-Heart podcast.

Guaranteed Human.

Welcome to Stuff You Missed in History Class, a production of IHeart Radio.

Hello and welcome to the podcast. I'm Holly Fry.

And I'm Tracy V. Wilson.

This is part two of a two-parter, and this is an instance where you really do have to listen to the first part before you jump into

this one, or it's not going to make any sense. Uh, because we are picking up right in the middle

of the fraud case against E. Virgil Neal's company, force of life for the completely bogus treatments

that it advertised and sent consumers through the mail.

We are also in this episode going to get to the company

that finally shifted Neal into a position

as a head of a pretty respected business in the beauty industry, although it too had some roots in its old charlatan ways in its beginnings.

So we left off in part one as the news was breaking that investigators on a joint task force headed up by the Postmaster General had been digging into Neal's business dealings for about a

year to put together a case against Force of Life, and that is where we are picking up.

So the investigation into Force of Life quickly revealed that not only Neil and his immediate associates,

but also a number of prominent men,

were all part of this company. A lot of them were high-ranking officers at one or more banks.

Others had invested heavily in a company called New York Food and Chemical Company,

which was a wholesaler that Force of Life purchased medications from. But the biggest

scandal was that the company was tied to General James R. O'Burn, sometimes reported incorrectly as

John R. O'Burn. James Rowan O'Burn was born in Ireland on September 25, 1839.

His family moved to the U.S. before he turned one to escape the Great Hunger,

...