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.

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    -QUACKS, FALSE REMEDIES AND THE PUBLIC HEALTH. RACE deterioration is one of the great problems that face the British statesman of to-day. Itis the outcome of many influences that steadily sap the mental, moral, and bodily sanity of the nation. The present purpose is to discuss the influence of secret remedies upon the health of the community, with an inquiry into the state of the present law as regards quacks and quackery, and suggestions as to their future control. THE EXISTENCE OF THE EVIL, In the following pages there will be no formal attempt to define the existence and extent of the damage resulting from the use of patent and proprietary medicines. The evil is notorious and has been exposed for generations past in the medical journals and else- where. Our medieval forefathers were alive to the injury inflicted by it upon the public weal. In the reign of Henry VIII. scientific medicine received its first formal recognition in the shape of a charter to the Royal College of Physicians of London: That body, in return for the many privileges conferred upon it, was entrusted with absolute control of false medicines and false practice, with summary powers in London and seven miles round, which have never been repealed, for the committal to prison of offenders (in modern verbiage, “quacks”? and nostrum vendors), and to. seize and destroy their wares. The College has failed in its duty, but the powers remain and can be readily revived by Parliament. This point will be referred to later under “recommendations,” and elsewhere. The trade which was thus vigorously legislated against in the time of Henry VIII. has grown to an enormous size in the present day. Huge fortunes are amassed at the expense of the community by the sale of so- called remedies which are some of them inert, some of them potent, some deadly, but most of them fraudu- lent, inasmuch as they profess not only to cure a host of symptomatic maladies that could not possibly be thus affected by a single remedy, but also to cure the incurable. To take an instance, a nostrum is adver- tised to “cure” locomotor ataxy, a disease due to certain structural changes in the spinal cord. No cure for: this complaint is known to medical science, and