A  January ,Pi9™'}     Publicity  on  the  Standing  of  Nostrums.  33 
their  continued  use  may  be  placed  where  it  belongs.  It  is  the  prov- 
ince of  the  Council  of  Pharmacy  and  Chemistry  to  point  out  and 
recommend ;  the  individual  members  of  the  medical  and  pharma- 
ceutical professions  must  then  proceed  to  act  upon  these  recom- 
mendations. 
It  must  also  be  remembered  that  mankind  has  always  shown  a 
tendency  to  worship  new  and  strange  gods.  The  words  of  P.  T. 
Barnum,  that  ,( the  American  people  like  to  be  humbugged,"  were 
never  more  true  than  they  are  to-day,  and  the  disciples  of  Ananias 
who  write  the  literature  of  most  of  the  nostrums  have  never  had 
more  abundant  opportunity  to  ply  their  arts  upon  a  willingly  gullible 
public. 
Intelligibility  of  nomenclature  should  be  insisted  upon  as  a 
primary  requisite  in  the  case  of  new  preparations.  St.  Louis,  the  home 
of  medical  charlatanism  and  pharmaceutical  fakery,  has  already  fur- 
nished names  enough  which  might  with  equal  propriety  apply  to 
parlor  cars  or  summer-resort  boarding-houses. 
There  is  not  enough  attention  paid  in  the  medical  schools  to  pre- 
scription writing,  practical  therapeutics  and  incompatibility.  Most 
education  along  medical  lines  seems  to  reach  diagnosis  and  then  fall 
short.  A  recent  case  in  point  known  to  the  writer  was  where  a 
practitioner  used  almost  every  known  appliance  and  aid  known  to 
diagnosticians,  including  a  blood-count  and  a  cryoscopic  test  of  the 
urine,  and  then  prescribed  a  nostrum  with  the  composition  of  which 
he  was  unacquainted. 
If  the  publicity  attendant  upon  the  nostrum  evil  has  no  other 
effect  than  to  direct  medical  and  pharmaceutical  education  to  lines 
which  have  heretofore  been  neglected,  it  willr  serve  the  ultimate  pur- 
pose of  bringing  both  of  the  professions  to  a  realization  of  the 
responsibility  which  they  jointly  share  in  the  discouragement  of 
conditions  which  are  detrimental  not  only  to  the  professions  them- 
selves but  to  their  constituents,  the  American  public. 
