PACIFIC

MEDICAL AND SURGICAL JOURNAL.

VOL. XVI.-JUNE, 1874.-No. 1.

ORIGINAL COMMUNICATIONS.

Illustrations of the Literature of Quackery.

[Read before the California State Medical Society at the Annual Meeting, April 15, 1874.]

BY HENRY GIBBONS, M. D.

That " people like to be humbugged" is a saying more practical than elegant; and it is exemplified, more than in any other way, in the universal currency given to impostors and impostures that concern the public health. Physicians are often censured for not taking more pains to separate the false from the true, the spurious from the genuine, in medicine and medical practice, so that people may discriminate between them. If the discrimination were made, it is not certain that the popular current would be turned in the right channel. There is no doubt that many persons would be more attracted, as indeed they are already, by the meretricious trappings of charlatanry than by the more sober claims of science and truth. Whether for good or for evil, I propose, on the present occasion, to give utterance to some thoughts and observations bearing on this subject.

A large proportion of the patent and secret medicines with which simple-minded people delight to experiment on their organs, have been stolen from the regular profession. A patient who believes that he has been cured by a certain prescription, grows enthusiastic in favor of the remedy, and

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recommends it indiscriminately. It is surprising what multitudes of men and women will advise medicines and what multitudes will swallow them, on this primitive logic. One is reminded by it of the saying of Franklin, that when he considered to what bad uses human reason is often applied, he was ready to wish that Providence had bestowed on man a sensible instinct in its stead. Popular therapeutics seldom rise above the standard of the historic quack, who discovered by experience that a salt herring would cure a Scotchman of a fever, but would kill a Frenchman.

With better judgment and better opportunities, apothecaries sometimes prostitute their office and beget nostrums. Behind the counter, handling prescriptions, they have frequent means of ascertaining the effects of certain agents or combinations on certain diseases. Appropriating to their own illegitimate purposes the knowledge thus procured through the patients of the medical man who confides to them his prescriptions, they add to the already prolific spawn of secret cure-alls. Thus they become not only prescribers but quacks and nostrum-mongers. At this moment the street cars of San Francisco exhibit posters offering a thousand dollars reward for a case of whooping cough which cannot be cured by a compound prepared by one of our apothecaries.

The only female apothecary I ever knew flourished in my native town in the State of Delaware, when I was a lad. She was well educated for that day, and she educated herself still further by gathering from her customers all the information she could obtain as to the diseases which the prescriptions that they brought to her were designed for, and the effects. This information she recorded in a book kept for the purpose. Her ingenuity and industry were rewarded by a valuable clinical record, more complete and more practical, most likely, than any which were kept by the doctors who wrote. the prescriptions. In this way she learned the art of prescribing. It so happened that my father, who was a physician, was in the habit of prescribing for the flatulent colic of infants a mixture containing oil of anise, with magnesia or