Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 39.djvu/91

Rh or other articles of manufacture, and, instead, provided for registering such labels in the Patent Office. Several States still have "trade-mark laws," by means of which the name of a popular patent medicine is secured against imitation.

In our own day, the patent-medicine business has developed into alarming proportions. There never was a time when so many people put faith in patent compounds. There never was a time when so many nostrums with mysterious ingredients have been sold. And, lastly, there never was a time when nostrums had so few claims in the healing art.

It is surprising that the American people still retain their faith in patent medicines. Rather than pay an educated physician a fee of two dollars, some people will spend that amount for a bottle or a box of patent medicine. They will try one nostrum after another until they are cured or killed. The superstition is not confined to the common folk alone. People who should know better are among the best customers of the nostrum-vender. The steady purchasers of patent medicines are the poor and ignorant. To be ignorant is to be credulous, and it is to the credulity of our people that the nostrum-vender appeals so strongly. The farmers and their families are afraid of the doctor, but they make riendsfriends [sic] with the quack. A correspondent of the New York Sun, in describing the peculiarities of Western farmers, says: "If one patent medicine fails, it is because it is not the right patent medicine, and they try another. They prefer patent medicine, partly because there is a certain mystery about the ingredients, and they are put up in an attractive form."

It is not easy to calculate how many millions of dollars are spent by Americans on patent medicine every year. Think of the enormous expense required to keep a preparation before the public eye—calendars, almanacs, cook-books, cards, high-priced articles in all the daily papers. Of course, the money to pay for this comes from only one source—from people who buy the stuff. The sale of a certain "vegetable" compound is said to have amounted in one year to three million dollars, and one third of that went the next year in advertising. Now, to yield three millions at least six million bottles must have been sold. That gives one some idea of the number of people who use such preparations.

It would appear, then, from the lavish manner in which our people pour out their hard-earned money, that they like to be humbugged, so the veteran Barnum once bluntly remarked. If they want to spend their cash for patent medicine, is not that their own business? Yes; but should not the law step in and save the poor and ignorant from their own folly? No; that very