DO NOT FOOL WITH MEDICINES.
UNLESS there exists the very best reason for the use of medicine, it should be left severely alone. If a person is ailing, the injudicious use of medicine is likely to do more harm than the ailment would do if left entirely alone. On the whole, more persons are injured by medicines than are helped. The people of to-day are unmistakably given to medicine-tippling. They diagnose their own diseases, and select their own remedies. Those who run soda-fountains understand this, and are ready to supply these unfortunate medicine-tippers with tinctures, bromides, chloral, bromo-caffein, aromatic spirits of ammonia, and all the extensively used nerve tonics. They keep on hand a supply of such medicines as are best calculated to upset the physical health, and to destroy the mind. The consumption of chloral and bromide—so little known twenty years ago—is something fearful to-day. Hundreds of tons of these drugs are being consumed annually. Habitual use of unhealthful products advertised as “nerve foods” is becoming exceedingly fashionable. If it requires so many sedatives to keep this generation at its proper level, what will the next require? All who take any of the drugs already referred to, whether at the soda-fountain or elsewhere, will do well carefully to consider the ultimate result that is sure to follow. Probably it will be easier for them to break off their drug habit to-day than at any future time.