Am  Jour  Pharm.)        The  Patent  Medicine  Problem.  261 
June,  iyi4:.  j 
cussion  of  a  plan  or  plans  to  remedy  the  "  cutting  of  prices."  The 
seriousness  with  which  time  was  wasted  on  the  discussion  of  the 
several  plans  that  were  suggested  at  that  time  serves  well  to  illus- 
trate the  comparative  importance  that  has  been  accorded  the  purely 
economic  side  of  this  problem  by  various  branches  of  the  drug  trade. 
At  the  semi-centennial  meeting  of  the  American  Pharmaceutical 
Association,  in  1902,  several  papers  were  again  presented,  bearing 
on  existing  abuses  in  connection  with  patent  and  proprietary  reme- 
dies. These  papers  dealt  principally  with  the  abuse  of  so-called 
proprietary  medicines  and  their  use  by  physicians,  and  perhaps  con- 
tributed somewhat  at  least  to  the  renewed  interest  on  the  part  of  the 
American  Medical  Association  in  matters  relating  to  the  use  of 
secret  or  semi-secret  remedies  by  medical  practitioners. 
At  the  meeting  of  the  American  Medical  Association  in  New 
Orleans  in  1903,  a  number  of  papers  were  presented  criticising 
medical  journals  for  the  nature  and  kind  of  advertising  carried  by 
them,  and  a  resolution  adopted  by  the  then  Section  on  Materia 
Medica  and  Pharmacy  condemned  much  of  the  advertising  then  car- 
ried in  the  Journal  of  the  Association  itself.  At  this  meeting  of  the 
Association  provision  was  also  made  for  pharmaceutical  member- 
ship in  the  American  Medical  Association,  and  at  the  meeting  in 
Atlantic  City  the  following  June  a  number  of  pharmacists  were 
elected  and  the  discussions  on  materia  medica  subjects,  with  the 
resolutions  adopted  at  Atlantic  City  in  1904,  no<  doubt  were  directly 
responsible  for  the  inauguration  of  a  Council  on  Pharmacy  and 
Chemistry,  the  object  of  which  was  to  endeavor  to  differentiate 
between  good  and  bad  proprietary  remedies  used  by  or  offered  to 
physicians. 
A  preliminary  meeting  of  persons  interested  was  held  in  Phila- 
delphia on  December  29,  1904,  and  the  Council  itself  was  organized 
in  Pittsburg  on  February  11,  1905.  This  Council  was  immediately 
set  to  work  and  by  June  of  the  same  year  the  comprehensive  and  at 
that  time  startling  report  on  the  acetanilide  mixtures  was  published 
in  the  Journal  of  the  American  Medical  Association  and,  as  was 
expected,  precipitated  the  wrath,  not  alone  of  pharmaceutical  manu- 
facturers, but  also'  of  medical  journals  that  depend  so  largely  on 
their  advertising  pages  for  existence.  The  so-called  acetanilide  re- 
port served,  however,  to*  arouse  the  better  class  of  medical  men  to 
an  appreciation  of  their  duty  as  professional  men  and  the  endorse- 
