Quack Medicine | AdventAI

Seventh-day Adventist Missionary Society · Oakland, California · Mar 16, 1882

Quack Medicine.

QUACKS fatten on the ignorance and credulity of their victims. People who use good judgment in other matters, seem to lose all power of judging for themselves in so important a matter as the care of their health. The more disgustingly exaggerated the claims of the nostrum, the more eagerly is it seized. Here is the composition of a few of these nostrums which cure everything. The analysis was made by Dr. A. B. Prescott, Professor of Chemistry in Michigan University:—

An “Elixir of Life Bitters,” put up in New York, is reported from Berlin to contain aloes, cinnamon, sweet flag, angelica root, saffron, burned sugar, glycerine, and strong alcohol.

A Swedish “Essence of Life” consists of aloes, rhubarb, saffron, myrrh, and roots of sedoary, gentian, and galangal, in alcoholic tincture with sugar.

A German “Aromatic Salt of Life,” to correct acidity of the stomach, insure a good appetite, and supply all the saline elements proper to the human body, consists of baking soda, table salt, Glauber’s salt, and sugar, flavored with a fragrant spirit of cinnamon, cardamon, bitter orange peel, and roots of violets. This mixture is sold—for constant use with the food—at a quarter of a dollar a pound.

Quite different was a Swiss “Elixir of Life” and “Cure for Lung Diseases,” found to be pure spring water, directed to be given in small doses.

Also a “Soothing Powder,” presented, with careful directions for sparing use, was found by Hager to be pure rice starch.

The “Wondrous Salt,” for a number of particularly designated diseases, was a fair grade of saltpeter.

A notorious “Renovating Resolvent” that has fastened its alliterating trade-name before our faces, the analyst finds to be a sugared extract of ginger and cardamon.

A “Nerve Balsam” consists of alcohol, with essential oil of lemon and bergamot.

A “Nerve Spirit” consists of alcohol, with oils of lavender and rosemary.

A “Golden Medical Discovery,” and a “Favorite Prescription,” companion catch-words of enforced familiarity in two hemispheres, have flourished just as well since their analyses were published five or six years ago—the former consisting of laudanum, lettuce-extract, honey, and very raw whisky; the latter of savine, agaric, opium, chinchonia, cinnamon, anise oil, gum arabic, and alcohol.