ArAu|usrt,i908!'m'}       American  Medical  Association,  379 
As  pharmacists  we  may  easily  imagine  the  state  of  knowledge  of 
medicines  by  a  considerable  portion,  probably  one-half  of  the  prac- 
tising physicians  of  this  country,  when  the  character  of  the  litera- 
ture is  considered.  Some  of  these  medical  publishers,  always  opti- 
mistic in  the  use  of  drugs,  may  also  have  been  altruistic — actuated  by 
motives  other  than  purely  mercenary  and  sordid — in  extolling  their 
special  manufactures.  But  as  manufacturers  they  were  helpless, 
often  down-right  ignorant  as  to  the  chemical  or  pharmaceutic  char- 
acter of  their  preparations  or  their  constituents.  Relying  mostly 
on  some  manufacturing  pharmacist  for  their  preparations,  they  were 
often  at  the  mercy  of  those  who,  becoming  aware  of  their  lack  of 
knowledge,  imposed  on  them  to  the  disadvantage  of  the  medicines. 
In  several  well-known  specialties  from  such  proprietors  the  com- 
position has  been  changed  without  change  in  the  formula,  until 
attention  thereto  was  directed.  Important  ingredients  have  been 
omitted  and  others  substituted  with  perfect  abandon,  without  chang- 
ing the  formula  or  the  literature,  and  upon  the  correctness  of  the 
latter  being  challenged,  such  change  or  substitution  has  been  frankly, 
sometimes  naively,  admitted  as  being  of  no  special  importance  or 
consequence.  One  of  these  medicine-manufacturing  publishers, 
who  is  exploiting  doctors  with  a  line  of  quack  specialties  and  with 
unloading  on  the  credulous  readers  of  his  journal,  self-perpetuating, 
gold-bearing  bonds  of  the  company,  and  who  poses  as  a  great  author- 
ity on  alkaloids,  is  continuously  waging  relentless  war  on  the  uncer- 
tain, instable  and  unsafe  galenicals,  and  insists  that  every  doctor 
should  employ  active  principles,  and  of  course  these  only  in  the  form 
of  this  company's  tablets. 
REAL  SUBSTITUTION. 
Among  these  are  found  tablets  of  digitalin  as  a  perfect  substitute 
for  digitalis ;  cicutine  for  conium  and  aconitine  for  aconite,  which, 
at  least  until  recently,  was  not  the  official  alkaloid,  the  only  depend- 
able substitute  for  this  drug.  Tablets  of  veratrin  are  extolled  to  the 
doctors  as  far  more  certain  than  veratrum,  the  tincture  of  which  is 
the  cardiac  sheet-anchor  to  the  physicians,  especially  in  the  South — 
this  great  alkaloidal  exponent  being  apparently  perfectly  oblivious 
to  the  fact  that  veratrin  is  not  the  active  principle  of  veratrum  viride, 
but  an  indefinite  mixture  of  principles  from  the  cevadilla  seed,  whose 
only  therapeutic  use  is  an  irritant  externally,  applied  as  an  oint- 
ment or  oleate,  and  popularly  used  as  a  parasiticide. 
