Quacks, false remedies and the public health / [David Walsh].

  • Walsh, David
Date:
1909
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: Quacks, false remedies and the public health / [David Walsh]. Source: Wellcome Collection.

    14/68 (page 10)
    claims, their grossly extortionate cost, their catchpenny advertisements, are one and the same whatever the country in which they are sold. The steel and penny- royal pills, sent out from a Midland town of England, are sold to credulous women at a high price in Melbourne and all over the world, for suggested pur- poses that it is impossible they could fulfil. Worse still, other pills, containing most deadly drugs (as shown by analysis) are sold in a similar fashion without any- thing on the wrapper to intimate that a dangerous drug is contained therein. Not all the British colonies, however, are foolish enough to permit their citizens to be deprived of their health and robbed of their money for the behoof of the patent medicine trader. Another valuable mine of facts is to be found in the little volume, “Secret Remedies: What they Cost and What they Contain,” published by the British Medical Association. It reproduces a series of articles based upon the analysis of a long list of proprietary articles, and appends to each an estimate of bare cost —that is to say, of the remedies apart from package, wrapper, labels, and so on. The disproportionate profits thus disclosed may be illustrated by a few examples taken at random. Thus the first one given is that of a catarrh cure, sold at a shilling, against an estimated cost of one-thirtieth of a farthing. Of a cure for consumption sold by an American company, with a London agency, at a price of £2 10s. for a month’s treatment, it is stated that the approximate cost of the two bottles that are supplied amounts together to 24d. <A notorious blood mixture, sold at 2s. gd. a bottle, contained ingredients valued at 14d. A rheumatic cure consisted of 50 tablets, costing 8d., and sold at 4s. 6d., and of qo pills valued at 4d., and sold at 1s. 14d. An enormously advertised ointment, the claims of which have been scathingly condemned by a British judge, sold at 1s. 13d. a box, the contents of which are valued at 4d. An internal preparation for making the hair grow, sold at 2s. 6d., was found on analysis to contain ingredients valued at 1d. The question of the prime cost of the merchandise, however, and of the profits accruing therefrom, is quite a minor matter. The cost of the raw material not infrequently bears a small proportion to the ulti- mate selling price when a finished article has gone through the various stages of production and dis- tribution. The objections to the trade in secret reme- dies are based on other and more serious issues, as, for instance, the non-recognition of disease by the drug taker, especially in the earliest stages of cancer, consumption, and infectious diseases. What is easier for an uneducated person than to take some pain-killer