Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 68.djvu/536

 532 ordinary 'stomach-ache,' due to indigestion, and buys some 'painkiller' or 'dyspepsia tablet' with which he experiments on himself for two or three days; the physician called too late finds appendicitis gone on to a stage perhaps where a fatal issue is unavoidable. Again, in the spring of the year a feeling of languor is diagnosed by the doctor-patient as 'spring fever,' for which he doses himself religiously with some stimulating 'blood purifier,' while the real nature of the case may be a beginning typhoid fever. The list of such conditions which may and do occur might be drawn out ad infinitum, but enough has been said to show the great fundamental objection to all nostrums.

This danger, it must be confessed, however, is after all a comparatively remote one. The great imminent peril which threatens the life and health of the nation lies in the fact that a large number of these remedies contain poisonous and habit-forming ingredients. The most horrible instance of this is the 'soothing syrups.' These are universally loaded down with morphine. The immediate deaths which have followed an overdose of some opium-containing 'soothing syrup' are numerous enough, but the thought of the hundreds of children condemned from the cradle to a life of invalidism, to which the grave is preferable, by the formation of a morphine habit from which the delicate nervous system is never able to recuperate, is horrible. The poor ignorant mother is usually not to blame, but the devilishness of the nostrum vender who deliberately sets out to poison helpless infants puts him below the murderer in criminal immorality, and the supineness of a government which permits such crime to go unpunished must bring a blush of shame to the face of every thinking citizen.

Another frequent offender of this class is the 'cough syrup' or 'pectoral.' These nearly all contain either opium or some closely allied drug. Those of the headache powders and other remedies for the relief of pain which do not contain opium almost without exception are preparations of acetanilid, a substance derived from coal tar, which, although perhaps not so dangerous as morphine, produces an insidious weakening of the heart when used repeatedly, and whose victims number into the thousands.

Those who employ patent medicines from the second motive mentioned, that is, with the hope of obtaining better results than are promised by the regular medical profession, are naturally found chiefly among the less educated classes of society. To an intelligent mind it is evidently improbable that an untrained observer whose interests are purely commercial should know of some remedy of great value which generations of devoted physicians and scientists had failed to discover. The claims made by this group of nostrum mongers are so palpably impossible as to be ridiculous to all thinking men. Yet it is surprising to find how many persons of presumable intelligence, driven by the