32  Publicity  on  the  Standing  of  Nostrums.    {A  j^ua?yfi907.m' 
standing  and  endorsement  of  the  nostrums  concerned  ?  If  we  go 
by  the  advertisements  in  the  daily  papers  the  effect  is  scarcely 
noticeable,  for  when  we  open  the  pages  of  almost  any  one  of  them 
we  are  confronted  with  the  familiar  faces  and  testimonials  of  those 
who  owe  their  lives  to  the  wonderful  curative  powers  of  these  self- 
same remedies  which  have  been  so  unsparingly  handled  by  Mr. 
Adams  in  Collier's  Weekly.  It  is  true  that  Mr.  Hartman  has  an- 
nounced that  after  years  of  patient  experimenting  he  has  been  able 
to  add  a  small  amount  of  a  laxative  drug  to  Peruna  which  removes 
from  it  the  slanderous  imputation  that  it  is  purely  a  "  booze," 
although  the  percentage  of  alcohol  has  not  been  reduced  ;  and  the 
death  of  Lydia  Pinkham  has  at  last  been  announced  to  the  public 
in  the  advertisements  of  that  nostrum  with  the  information  that, 
although  the  dear  old  lady  has  long  since  passed  to  her  reward,  her 
work  of  personally  attending  to  the  complaints  of  suffering  woman- 
hood is  still  attended  to  by  her  daughter-in-law,  although  why  the 
information  should  have  been  withheld  for  so  many  years  is  not 
vouchsafed.  The  greatest  obstacle  at  the  present  time  is  the  con- 
tinued opposition  of  the  general  lay  press  to  the  work  of  reform, 
the  information  in  Collier's  Weekly  having  reached  but  a  small  pro. 
portion  of  the  users  of  this  class  of  preparations.  The  Literary 
Digest  is  one  of  the  most  recent  periodicals  to  free  itself  from  the 
imputation  of  being  biased,  by  publishing  extracts  from  Mr.  Adams' 
papers,  which  are  now  published  in  the  form  of  a  booklet  and  sent 
out  by  the  Journal  of  the  American  Medical  Association  upon  the 
receipt  of  the  nominal  price. 
It  is  probably  too  soon  to  express  an  authoritative  opinion  on  the 
question  as  to  the  effect  of  all  this  publicity,  but  there  are  some 
considerations  which  must  not  be  lost  sight  of  at  this  stage  of  the 
work.  The  facts  already  published  should  not  be  allowed  to  lose 
their  potency  by  remaining  undisturbed  in  the  records  of  the  litera- 
ture of  the  time.  There  is  a  young  and  advancing  army  of  students 
to  whom  these  facts  should  be  presented  as  necessary  for  them  to 
know  to  keep  from  falling  into  the  evil  paths  of  many  of  their  pre- 
decessors. 
The  physician  of  the  future  who  prescribes  and  the  pharmacist 
who  dispenses  a  nostrum  of  this  character  should  not  do  it  in  igno- 
rance of  the  true  facts,  as  has  been  so  often  done  in  the  past,  but 
should  be  warned  in  no  uncertain  manner,  so  that  the  responsibility  for 
