Amjunue"i89h7arm'}  Proprietary  Preparations.  317 
THE  ETHICS  AND  ECONOMICS  OF  PROPRIETARY 
PREPARATIONS.1 
Dr.  Charles  Rice,  a  member  of  the  Committee  of  Revision  of  the 
United  States  Pharmacopoeia,  and  the  chemist  of  the  New  York 
department  of  public  charities,  has  lately  thrown  a  good  deal  of 
the  light  of  common  sense  on  the  question  of  the  advisability  of 
using  proprietary  preparations.  What  he  says  is  in  the  form  of  a 
report  to  the  committee  on  the  apothecary's  department  of  the 
medical  board  of  Bellevue  Hospital,  made  in  compliance  with  a 
request  from  that  body.  The  report  was  adopted  by  the  medical 
board  on  April  1st,  and  has  been  approved  by  the  board  of  commis- 
sioners. 
Dr.  Rice  defines  a  proprietary  article  as  one  of  which  some  person 
or  persons  have  exclusive  control  of  the  production,  sale  or  use — 
of  all  three  of  these  features  in  some  cases,  of  one  or  two  of  them 
only  in  others.  He  divides  such  articles  into  natural  and  artificial 
products,  and  again  into  these  three  classes  :  (1)  Products  of  nature 
prepared  under  patents  and  mostly  sold  under  copyrighted  names. 
(2)  Products  of  nature  that  have  never  been  made  under  patents  or 
are  no  longer  so  made,  but  are  sold  under  copyrighted  names. 
(3)  Artificial  preparations  sold  under  copyrighted  names.  As  regards 
patented  articles,  it  is  a  principle  in  patent  law,  says  Dr.  Rice,  that 
a  product  of  nature  cannot  be  patented ;  hence  no  patent  is  granted 
on  any  chemical  substance  of  a  definite  and  constant  composition, 
even  though  it  may,  at  the  time  when  the  patent  is  applied  for,  not 
yet  have  been  found  occurring  ready-formed  in  nature.  But  any 
process,  not  previously  known  or  used,  by  which  such  a  product  can 
be  formed  is  patentable.  Certain  articles  that  are  made  by  patented 
processes  may  also  be  made  by  processes  that  are  not  patented,  and, 
as  it  is  impossible  for  the  purchaser  to  distinguish  by  which  process 
they  have  been  made,  nobody,  says  Dr.  Rice,  would  think  of  raising 
any  objection  against  their  use  in  medicine.  As  an  example,  he 
mentions  salicylic  acid,  which,  in  the  form  of  methyl  salicylate, 
exists  in  oil  of  wintergreen  and  some  other  volatile  oils,  from  which 
the  acid  may  readily  be  prepared;  but  as  these  oils  would  be  utterly 
inadequate  to  supply  the  demand,  more  than  95  per  cent,  of  the 
salic)'lic  acid  used  in  medicine  is  produced  by  a  process  that  was 
1  Editorial  in  the  New  York  Medical  Journal,  May  22,  1897. 
