532 POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY 



ordinary ' stomach-ache/ due to indigestion, and buys some ' pain- 

 killer ' or ' dyspepsia tablet ' with which he experiments on himself for 

 two or three days; the physician called too late finds appendicitis 

 gone on to a stage perhaps where a fatal issue is unavoidable. Again, 

 in the spring of the year a feeling of languor is diagnosed by the doctor- 

 patient as ' spring fever/ for which he doses himself religiously with 

 some stimulating ' blood purifier/ while the real nature of the case 

 may be a beginning typhoid fever. The list of such conditions which 

 may and do occur might be drawn out ad infinitum, but enough has 

 been said to show the great fundamental objection to all nostrums. 



This danger, it must be confessed, however, is after all a com- 

 paratively remote one. The great imminent peril which threatens the 

 life and health of the nation lies in the fact that a large number of 

 these remedies contain poisonous and habit-forming ingredients. The 

 most horrible instance of this is the ' soothing syrups.' These are uni- 

 versally loaded down with morphine. The immediate deaths which 

 have followed an overdose of some opium-containing ' soothing syrup ' 

 are numerous enough, but the thought of the hundreds of children con- 

 demned from the cradle to a life of invalidism, to which the grave 

 is preferable, by the formation of a morphine habit from which the 

 delicate nervous system is never able to recuperate, is horrible. The 

 poor ignorant mother is usually not to blame, but the devilishness of 

 the nostrum vender who deliberately sets out to poison helpless infants 

 puts him below the murderer in criminal immorality, and the supineness 

 of a government which permits such crime to go unpunished must 

 bring a blush of shame to the face of every thinking citizen. 



Another frequent offender of this class is the ' cough syrup ' or 

 ' pectoral.' These nearly all contain either opium or some closely allied 

 drug. Those of the headache powders and other remedies for the 

 relief of pain which do not contain opium almost without exception are 

 preparations of acetanilid, a substance derived from coal tar, which, 

 although perhaps not so dangerous as morphine, produces an insidious 

 weakening of the heart when used repeatedly, and whose victims num- 

 ber into the thousands. 



Those who employ patent medicines from the second motive men- 

 tioned, that is, with the hope of obtaining better results than are prom- 

 ised by the regular medical profession, are naturally found chiefly among 

 the less educated classes of society. To an intelligent mind it is evi- 

 dently improbable that an untrained observer whose interests are purely 

 commercial should know of some remedy of great value which genera- 

 tions of devoted physicians and scientists had failed to discover. The 

 claims made by this group of nostrum mongers are so palpably impos- 

 sible as to be ridiculous to all thinking men. Yet it is surprising to 

 find how many persons of presumable intelligence, driven by the des- 



