The Funny Side of Physic Part 7

[Ill.u.s.tration: THE WRONG PATIENT.]

While there have been great changes in the drug trade during the last fifty years, necessary to the increasing demand for drugs, the establishment of wholesale houses and some specialties, and in cities, the subst.i.tution of cigars, soda water, patent medicines, etc., for groceries and provisions, the dispensing apothecary is nearer to what he was hundreds of years ago, as we a.s.serted at the commencement of this chapter, than any other professional we know of. The paraphernalia of the shop is nearly the same. There is no improvement in pot, in jar, in tables, in spatula; the old, ungainly mortar is not _subst.i.tuted_ by a mill; the signs of ounces and drachms remain the same, though so near alike that they are easily and often mistaken one for the other, and the prescription before the dispenser is prefixed by a relic of the astrological symbol of Jupiter,--"the G.o.d of medicine to the ancient Greeks and Egyptians,"--as a species of superst.i.tious invocation. In our largest cities even, in the shop windows, the mammoth flashing blue bottles, "a relic of empiric charlatanry," still brighten our street corners, and frighten our horses at night, as in the days of our forefathers.

We intimated that "patent medicines" had added greatly to the trade. This we shall treat of under its proper head. Many have arisen from penury to affluence, from obscurity to renown, in the drug trade of later years; but take away the tobacco trade, the soda fountain, and the outside patent nostrums, and wherein would the apothecary now differ from his predecessors?

"The Yankees bate the divil for swallowing drugs," said an Irishman.

"A paddy will take nothing but castor oil," replied the Yankee.

Yankee or Irish, English or Scotch, French or German, they all rush to the drug store for pills, for powder, for whiskey (?), for tobacco, for patent medicines, and the druggists flourish.

From the window near which I write this, I overlook a wholesale drug store on a "retail street." The front windows contain only _patent medicines_, and the flashy signs that announce their virtues. Few prescriptions are dispensed within. Before the door, piled nearly a story high, I have just counted ninety-eight boxes, and some barrels. There are hundreds of these drug houses scattered over this city; and every other city of America has its quota.

Yes, the Irishman had the right of it; "the Yankees _do_ bate the divil for swallowing drugs." Further, it is my positive opinion that his infernal majesty beats a good many of them by the encouragement of their purchase; and, kind reader, if you have the ghost of a doubt of the truth of our intimation, don't, I pray, promulgate it, but, like a wise judge, withhold your decision until the evidence is in; until you hear our exposition of "patent medicines."

A patient comes to the city for the purpose of consulting some experienced physician for a certain complaint. Probably he gets a prescription, with instructions to go to a certain respectable druggist or apothecary in town to have the necessary medicines put up. Of course a respectable physician knows of a reliable apothecary. The patient, in nine cases out of ten, desires to retain the prescription, and often does so. He goes to another drug store, more convenient, for a second quant.i.ty of the same; and now let me ask the patient,--no matter who or where he is,--did you ever get the same kind of medicine, in _look_, color, quant.i.ty, and taste,--all,--the second time, from the same prescription? I have often heard the patient complain that he could not get the same put up at the very store where he got the original prescription compounded.

I once was called to visit a lady who was laboring under great prostration; "sickness at the stomach," with constipation.

"What is the disease?" inquired the anxious husband, who had previously employed two regular physicians for the case, and discharged them both.

"Nux vomica," was the reply.

I gathered up three of the vials on the table, and, taking them to the designated apothecary's, I demanded the prescriptions corresponding with the numbers on the vials. These were duplicates.

He had made a mistake! that's all. He had compounded an ounce of tincture of nux instead of a drachm! Not that a drachm could be taken at a dose with impunity; but whatever the dose was, the patient was continually taking eight times as much as the physician intended to prescribe.

Another reason of the failure of the prescribing physician meeting the expectation antic.i.p.ated, is the use of old and inert medicines.

Where a man's treasure is, his heart is also. An apothecary's interest is more in nostrums, tobacco, _soda_, etc., than in medicines; how, then, can he follow the excellent advice of Dr. Bullyn, in article "14, that he peruse often his wares, that they corrupt not."

But the greatest cheat is in the "subst.i.tuting" business; the "_quid pro quo_." Horse aloes may be bought for ten cents a pound. Podophyllin costs seventy-five cents an ounce. They each act as cathartic, and I have detected the former put in place of the latter. How is the physician to know the cheat? How is the patient to detect it? Perhaps the former _stuff_--aloes--may have given the victim the hemorrhoids. One dose may be quite sufficient to produce that distressing disease. This only calls for another prescription! So it looks a deal like a "you tickle me, and I'll tickle you" profession, at best. Thus the patient becomes disgusted, and resorts to our next--"Patent Medicines."

In closing this chapter on Apothecaries, I must relate a little scene to which I was an eye-witness. Meantime, let me say to the "respectable druggist," Don't be offended if I have slighted you by leaving you out, in my description of the various kinds of apothecaries enumerated above.

There is a respectable cla.s.s of druggists whom I have not mentioned, and doubtless you belong to that order.

On going home one evening, not long since, I observed several boys, loud and boisterous, surrounding a lamp post. As I approached, I heard, among the cries and vociferations,--

"Howld to it, Jimmy; it'll be the makin' of ye."

I drew nearer, and discovered a sickly-looking lad leaning up against the lamp post, with the stump of a cigar in his mouth, and a taller boy endeavoring to hold him up by his jacket collar, while a short-set urchin was stooping behind to a.s.sist in the task. They were evidently endeavoring to teach "Jimmy" to smoke. The poor fellow was deathly sick, and faintly begged to be let off.

"O, no, no. Stick to it, Jimmy; it'll be the makin' of yese," was repeated.

"Sure, ye'll niver do for a _sample clark in a potecary shop_," said another, as he blew a cloud of smoke from his own cigar stump into the pale face of the victim to modern accomplishments.

[Ill.u.s.tration: A CANDIDATE FOR THE PRESIDENCY.]

"General Grant smokes, Jimmy, and you'll never be a man if you don't learn," added a voice minus the brogue.

A policeman here interfered, and rescued the wretched "Jimmy."

"What is a sample clerk, my lad?" I asked of the boy who had used the above expression.

"O, sir, he's the divil o' the 'potecary shop; the lean, pimply-faced urchin what tastes all the pizen drugs for the boss. If his const.i.tution is tough enough to stand it the first year, then they makes a clark of him the nixt."

[Ill.u.s.tration]

III.

PATENT MEDICINES

"Expunge the whole."--POPE.

"These are terrible alarms to persons grown fat and wealthy."--SOUTH.

PATENT MEDICINES.--HOW STARTED.--HOW MADE.--THE WAY IMMENSE FORTUNES ARE REALIZED.--SPALDING'S GLUE.--SOURED SWILL.--SARSAPARILLA HUMBUGS.--S. P. TOWNSEND.--"A DOWN EAST FARMER'S STORY."--"WILD CHERRY" EXPOSITIONS.--"CAPTAIN WRAGGE'S PILL" A FAIR SAMPLE OF THE WHOLE.--HOW PILL SALES ARE STARTED.--A SLIP OF THE PEN.--"GRIPE PILLS."--SHAKSPEARE IMPROVED.--H. W. B. "FRUIT SYRUP."--HAIR TONICS.--A BALD BACHELOR'S EXPERIENCE.--A LUDICROUS STORY.--A WOLF IN SHEEP'S CLOTHING.

In the former chapters are shown some of the causes which led to the present immense _demand_ for proprietary nostrums, or patent medicines.

The conflicting "_isms_" and "_opathies_" of the medical fraternity, their quarrels and depreciations of one and another, their expositions of each other's weaknesses, frauds, and duplicities, disgusted the common people, who finally resorted to the irregulars, to astrologers, and humbugs of various pretensions, and to the few advertised nostrums of those earlier periods.

"While there is life there is hope," and invalids would, and still continue to seize upon almost any promised relief from present pain and antic.i.p.ated death. Speculative and unprincipled men have seldom been wanting, at any period, to profit by this misfortune of their fellow-creatures, and to play upon the credulity of the afflicted, by offering various compounds warranted to restore them to perfect health. At first such medicines were introduced by the owner going about personally and introducing them; subsequently, by employing equally unprincipled parties, of either s.e.x, to go in advance, and tell of the wonderful cures that this particular nostrum had wrought upon them. And to listen to these lauders, one would be led to suppose that they had been afflicted with all the ills nameable, adapting themselves to the parties addressed,--yesterday, the gout; to-day, consumption, etc.,--regardless of truth or circ.u.mstance. The physician created the apothecary. The two opened the way for the less principled patent medicine vender.

"Are not physicians and apothecaries sometimes owners of patent medicines?" is the inquiry raised. Yes, certainly; but the true physician, or honorable apothecary, is then sunk in the nostrum manufacturer. Next we have the mountebanks. These were attendant upon fairs and in the marketplaces, who, mounted upon a bench,--hence the name,--cried the marvellous virtues of the medicine, and, by the a.s.sistance of a _decoy_ in the crowd, often drove a lucrative business.

Finally, upon the general introduction of printing, physician, apothecary, mountebank, speculator, all seized upon the "power of the press," to more extensively introduce their "wonderful discoveries."

When you notice the name--and, O, ye G.o.ds, such names as are patched up to attract your attention!--to a new medicine, systematically and extensively advertised in every paper you chance to pick up, you wonder how any profit can accrue to the manufacturer of the compound after paying such enormous prices as column upon column in a thousand newspapers must necessarily cost. "If the articles cost anything at the outset," you go on to philosophize, "how can the manufacturers or proprietors make enough profit to pay for this colossal advertising?" The solution of the problem is embodied in your inquiry. They cost nothing, or as near to nothing as possible for worthless trash to cost. This is the secret of the fortunes made in advertised medicines.

When we _know_ the complete worthlessness of the majority of the articles that are placed before the public,--yea, their more than worthlessness, for they are, many of them, highly injurious to the user,--the fact of their enormous consumption is truly astonishing. The drug-swallowing public has grown lean and poor in proportion as the manufacturers and venders of these villanous compounds have grown fat and wealthy.

Said the proprietor of "Coe's Cough Balsam" and "Dyspepsia Cure" to the author, "If you have got a _good_ medicine, one of value, don't put it before the public. I can advertise _dish water_, and sell it, just as well as an article of merit. It is all in the advertising." As the above preparations were advertised on every board fence, and in every newspaper in New England at least, did his a.s.sertion imply that those articles were mere "_dish water_"?

"SPALDING'S GLUE."

I was informed by a Mr. Johnston, who engineered the advertising of the preparation, that it cost but one eighth of a cent per bottle. If you want to make a liquid glue, dissolve a quant.i.ty of common glue in water at nearly boiling point, say one pound of glue to a gallon of water; add an ounce or less of nitric acid to hold it in solution, and bottle. The more glue, the stronger the preparation.

The pain-killers and liniments are the most costly, on account of the alcohol necessary to their manufacture; and, in fact, the princ.i.p.al item of expense in all liquid medical articles put up for public sale, is in the alcohol essential to their preservation against the extremes of heat and cold to which they may be subjected.

SOURED SWILL.

There is an article which "smells to heaven," the acidiferous t.i.tle of which glares in mammoth letters from every road-side, wherein the audacious proprietor obviates the necessity of alcohol for its preparation or preservation. It is merely fermented slops--"dish water," minus the alcohol. Take a few handfuls of any bitter herbs, saturate them in any dirty pond water,--say a barrel full,--add some nitric acid, and bottle, without straining! Here you have _Vinegared Bitters_! The cheeky proprietor informs the "ignorant public" that, "if the _medicine_ becomes sour (ferments), as it sometimes will, being its 'nature so to do,' it does not detract from its medical virtues." True, true! for it never possessed "medical virtues."