coggeshall's  valedictory  address. 
203 
sented  to  you,  continually  forced  upon  your  attention  as  practition- 
ers of  pharmacy,  is  one  that  is  at  once  the  reproach  of  medicine 
and  the  bane  of  society — Quackery.  It  is  ever  present  and  ever 
ready  with  its  temptations,  in  opposition  to  the  common  under- 
standing of  right  minded  men  connected  with  the  regular  profes- 
sions of  medicine  and  pharmacy,  that  discoveries  of  any  means 
calculated  to  alleviate  human  suffering  should  be  made  generally 
known,  that  all  whose  province  it  is  to  prepare  or  apply  remedies, 
may  have  the  knowledge  requisite  for  their  proper  manipulation 
and  use,  be  enabled  to  suggest  improvements,  and  to  combine  or 
separate,  so  as  to  adapt  them  to  particular  cases;  and  that  to  keep 
secret  any  useful  discovery  in  medicine  for  the  selfish  purpose  of 
gain,  is  unworthy  of,  and  below  the  honorable  standard  of  charac- 
ter, that  every  physician  and  pharmaceutist  should  scrupulously 
maintain  ;  while  the  tampering  with  medicines  by  ignorant  persons, 
and  the  manufacture  of  worthless  trash  under  its  name,  are  grades 
of  depravity  with  which  no  compromise  should  ever  be  made. 
The  monstrous  growth  of  quackery  in  modern  times  has,  at  least, 
kept  pace  with  the  advancement  of  the  age  in  arts  and  sciences, 
designed  to  benefit,  or,  when  State  policy  requires,  more  expertly 
to  destroy  the  human  race.  It  protrudes  itself  with  the  most  busi- 
ness-like assurance  into  all  classes  and  circles  of  society  ;  it  is 
ever  present  at  the  corners  of  the  streets  and  in  our  dwellings, 
mixes  with  our  daily  news,  buying  up  the  easily  purchasable  pub- 
lic press,  which  subsists  in  a  great  measure  upon  it,  (the  only 
honorable  exception,  so  far  as  we  know,  being  Arthur's  Home 
Gazette,  an  excellent  weekly  published  in  Philadelphia,)  and  it 
promptly  makes  up  all  deficiency  of  fact  with  brazen  falsehood. 
History,  ancient  and  modern,  is  ransacked,  or  even  made  when  it 
is  needed  ;  current  events  and  discussions  of  general  interest,  po- 
litical, social,  moral  and  religious,  all  are  used  as  material  for 
introductory  paragraphs  to  the  most  preposterous  eulogies  of  quack 
medicines.  Many  of  these  literary  productions  are  by  a  class  of 
scribblers  of  prose  and  verse,  (such  as  it  is,)  who,  not  esteemed  in 
any  other,  and  probably  incapable  of  any  better  employment  of 
their  talents,  hire  themselves  to  write  puffs  of  nostrums  they  know 
nothing  about.  Great  names  are  dragged  into  base  connexion 
with  pills,  mixtures,  lotions,  plasters,  etc.,  to  give  them  currency, 
and  fictitious  ones  are  often  substituted,  as  more  likely  to  be  popu- 
