The Patent-Medicine Evil
By L. A. S.
CONTINUING the subject of patent medicines containing subtle poisons, which, unconsciously to their victims, induce moral slavery, with resulting ruin of body and soul, Mr. Adams says:— “Recent years have added to the mortality records of our cities a surprising and alarming number of sudden deaths from heart failure. In the year 1902 New York City alone reported a death-rate from this cause of 1.34 per thousand of population; that is about six times as great as the typhoid fever death record. It was about that time that the headache powders were being widely advertised, and there is every reason to believe that the increased mortality, which is still in evidence, is due largely to the secret weakening of the heart by acetanilid. Occasionally, a death occurs so definitely traceable to this poison that there is no room for doubt.” Several cases of death from the use of orangeine powders are cited by Mr. Adams. He continues:— “Yet this poison is being recommended every day by people who know nothing of it and nothing of the susceptibility of the friends to whom they advocate it. For example, here is a testimonial from the orangeine booklet:— “‘Miss A. A. Phillips, 66 Powers St., Brooklyn, writes: ‘I always keep orangeine in my desk at school, and through its frequent applications to the sick, I am called both “doctor and magician.”’” “If the school herein referred to is a public school, the matter is one for the board of education; if a private school, for the health department or the county medical society. That a school-teacher should be allowed to continue giving, however well-meaning her foolhardiness may be, a harmful and possibly fatal dose to the children entrusted to her care, seems rather a significant commentary on the quality of watchfulness in certain institutions.” This dangerous drug, like opium and cocaine, fosters its own demand by creating a persistent craving on the part of the user. It is this slavery of the drug taker that makes the patent-medicine business so profitable. “I can conscientiously recommend,” says Mr. Adams, “orangeine, Koehler’s powders, royal pain powders, and others of that class to women who wish for a complexion of a dead, pasty white, verging to a puffy blueness under the eyes and about the lips.” Moral Depravity of Drug Takers
One of the worst features of the use of this class of patent medicines is the moral paralysis which ensues to the user, who frequently resorts to lying and deception to conceal the fact of their use, and to the most dishonorable methods of obtaining them. “Often it is difficult,” says Mr. Adams, “for a physician to diagnose these cases because the symptoms are those of certain diseases in which the blood deteriorates, and, moreover, the victim, as in opium and cocaine slavery, will positively deny having used the drug.” “Orangeine is less dangerous, except in extent of use, than many other acetanilid mixtures which are much the same thing under a different name. A friend of mine with a weak heart took the printed dose of laxative bromo quinine, and lay at the point of death for a week. There is no word of warning on the label. In many places samples of headache powders are distributed on the doorsteps. The St. Louis Chronicle records a result:— “‘HUNTINGTON, W. VA., Aug. 15, 1905.—While Mrs. Thomas Patterson was preparing supper last evening, she was stricken with a violent headache, and took a headache powder that had been thrown in at her door the day before. Immediately she was seized with spasms, and in an hour she was dead.’” Acetanilid is the active ingredient of all the following well-known “remedies:” orangeine, bromo-seltzer, royal pain powders, miniature headache powders, megrimine, anti-headache, Dr. Davis’s headache powders, antikamnia, ammonol, salacetin, phenalgin, cephalgin; but these do not by any means exhaust the list. “The prescribed dose of bromo-seltzer is dangerous, and has been known to produce sudden collapse. “Megrimine is a warranted headache cure that is advertised in several of the magazines. A newly arrived guest at a Long Island house party brought along several lots and distributed them as a remedy for headache and that tired feeling. It was perfectly harmless, she declared; didn’t the advertisement say ‘leaves no unpleasant effects’? As a late dance the night before had left its impress upon the feminine members of the house party, there was a general acceptance of the ‘bracer.’ That night the local physician visited the house party (on special ‘rush’ invitation), and was well satisfied to pull all his patients through. He had never before seen acetanilid poisoning by wholesale.” Dr. Davis’s anti-headache “describes itself as ‘a compound of mild ingredients, and positively contains no dangerous drugs.’ It is almost pure acetanilid.” Antikamnia “is simply half or more acetanilid, with other unimportant ingredients in varying proportions.” “The United States Post-Office, in its broad tolerance, permits the Antikamnia Company to send through the mails little sample boxes containing tablets enough to kill an ordinary man, and these samples are sent not only to physicians, as is the rule with ethical remedies, but to lawyers, business men, ‘brain workers,’ and other prospective purchasing classes. The box bears the lying statements: ‘No drug habit—no heart effect.’” “As to the ‘soothing sirups,’ 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 practise is described by a Detroit physician, who12has been making a special study of Michigan’s high mortality rate:— “‘Mrs. Winslow’s soothing sirup 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 practise. 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 sick 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 this daughter of the opium habit which had taken its hold upon 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 nineteen 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.’” “‘Making cocain fiends is another profitable enterprise. Catarrh powders are the medium. A decent druggist will not sell cocain as such, steadily, to any customer, except upon prescription, but most druggists find salve for their consciences in the fact that the subtle and terrible drug is in the form of somebody’s sure cure. There is need to say nothing of the effects of cocain, other than that it is destructive to mind and body alike, and appalling in its breaking down of all moral restraint. Yet in New York City it is distributed in ‘samples’ at ferries and railway stations. You may see the empty boxes and the instructive labels littering the gutters of Broadway any Saturday night, when the drug-store trade is briskest. “‘Birney’s catarrhal powder, Dr. Cole’s catarrh cure, Dr. Gray’s catarrh powder, and crown catarrh powder are the ones most in demand. All of them are cocain; the other ingredients are unimportant—perhaps even superfluous. “‘Whether or not the bottles are labeled with the amount of cocain makes little difference. The habitues know. In one respect, however, the labels help them by giving information as to which nostrum is the most heavily drugged. “‘People come in here,’ a New York City druggist tells me, ‘ask what catarrh powders we’ve got, read the labels, and pick out the one that’s got the most cocain. When I see a customer comparing labels, I know she’s a fiend.’” We have had space for a few only of the statements which have been made on good authority, exposing the perfidy and menace of the patent-medicine business. One verse from a rhyme by Wallace Irwin on this subject, entitled “Dr. Shekel and Mr. Snyde,” may perhaps fittingly conclude these quotations:— “I have read of his fame in the papers,
And gazed on his picture with pride.
‘DR. SHEKEL CAN CURE! THE FRIEND OF THE POOR!’
But I never have seen Mr. Snyde.
Yet in high patent-medical circles,
Where Shekel is lauded to fame,
I’ve heard it inferred, by a hint, by a word,
That Shekel and Snyde are the same!
That a psychical, strange metamorphical change
Comes over that healer of pain,
That at will he can slide to the aspect
Of Snyde,
Or presto! be Shekel again.”
“(Shekel and Snyde in a single man
Graft on a purely medicinal plan
To sell a brew to the idiots who
Believe in a heathen science;
Snyde in secret mixes the stuff,
Shekel in public sells enough
To get-rich-quick at the cost of the sick—
What a frightfully neat appliance!)”
To sum up the essential points of this series on the Patent-Medicine Evil: (1) The “bracer” class of patent medicines, peruna and the like, are mixtures depending for their effect wholly upon alcohol. They are simply intoxicants in disguise. (2) The “germicide” preparations, such as “liquozone,” are mostly water, with a little acid of various kinds, and if made strong enough to kill germs in the human system would necessarily kill the user first. (3) The headache and catarrh powders, sleeping powders, soothing sirups, and the like, act on the system through the presence of acetanilid, opium, or cocain, and are poisons of the most deadly character, on account of the moral slavery which they fasten upon the user. (4) There is no drug of any kind which is a necessity in the cure of disease, with the possible exception of quinin in some cases of malaria. (5) The government, while requiring the individual who would practise medicine to complete a long, hard course of study in a medical college, by some strange inconsistency, related often to patent-medicine lobbying at the legislatures, permits the patent-medicine manufacturer to sell his evil wares broadcast to any and every person in the land, and any and every person to prescribe for himself and take the “remedy” in such quantities as he sees fit. (6) There is a criminal alliance between the patent-medicine business and the newspapers, the public press being willing to maintain and foster this evil business in consideration of the lucrative sum paid for patent-medicine advertising. (7) The patent-medicine evil is a greater menace to health and temperance in this country than all the saloons and breweries in the land. And has it occurred to you, reader, in your perusal of this series of articles, that the one and only sure safeguard in the world against such an evil is that message of the gospel of health for both soul and body which has been committed to Seventh-day Adventists, giving light from heaven on healthful living and the causes and rational treatment of disease? Is not the world tremendously in need of this message, merely for its physical benefits, to say nothing of its remedy for moral ills? Ought not Seventh-day Adventists to be the mightiest force in this country in opposing every form of intemperance? Verily, God has given his church light in advance of the world, and placed it in the lead in every true work of reform.