When I was a teenager in the early 60's we used to go to the Gilbertsville Farmers Market on Saturday evenings. Among the things to do there was an old guy who performed feats of strength (like bending steel bars) and sold the elixir that made him strong enough to do it. He worked out of a trailer which was plastered with posters of him as a much younger guy doing the same kind of stuff. He looked to be as old as the hills at the time, and his pictures led me to believe that he had been doing it for 40 or 50 years. Then again maybe it was just too much elixir. Anyway, while not exactly a medicine show in the vain of the original post in this thread, this kind of stuff was still going on in the 60's. I was back to the farmers market about a year ago, and there was nothing like that anymore.