Page:The Great American Fraud (Adams).djvu/44

 designed for the drugging of helpless infants, even the trade does not know how many have risen, made their base profit, and subsided. A few survive, probably less harmful than the abandoned ones, on the average, so that by taking the conspicuous survivors as a type I am at least doing no injustice to the class.

Some years ago I heard a prominent New York lawyer, asked by his office scrub woman to buy a ticket for some "association" ball, say to her: "How can you go to these affairs, Nora, when you have two young children at home?"

"Sure, they're all right," she returned blithely; "just wan teaspoonful of Winslow's an' they lay like the dead till mornin'."

What eventually became of the scrub woman's children I don't know. The typical result of this practice is described by a Detroit physician who has been making a special study of Michigan's high mortality rate:

"Mrs. Winslow's Soothing Syrup is extensively used among the poorer classes as a means of pacifying their babies. These children eventually come into the hands of physicians with a greater or less addiction to the opium habit.  The sight of a parent drugging a helpless infant into a semi-comatose condition is not an elevating one for this civilized age, and it is a very common practice.  I can give you one illustration from my own

hospital experience, which was told me by the father of the girl. A middle-aged railroad man of Kansas City had a small daughter with summer diarrhea. For this she was given a patent diarrhea medicine. It controlled the trouble, but as soon as the remedy was withdrawn the diarrhea returned. At every withdrawal the trouble began anew, and the final result was that they never succeeded in curing the daughter of the opium habit which had taken its hold on her. It was some years afterward that the parents became aware that she had contracted the habit, when the physician took away the patent medicine and gave the girl morphin, with exactly the same result which she had experienced with the patent remedy. At the time the father told me this story his daughter was 19 years of age, an only child of wealthy parents, and one who could have had every advantage in life, but who was a complete wreck in every way as a result of the opium habit. The father told me, with tears in his eyes, that he would rather she had died with the original illness than to have lived to become the creature which she then was."

The proprietor of a drug store in San José, Cal., writes to Collier's as follows:

"I have a good customer, a married woman with five children, all under 10 years of age. When her last baby was born, about a year ago, the first thing she did was to order a bottle of Winslow's Soothing Syrup, and every

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