More secret remedies : what they cost & what they contain secret remedies--second series / based on analyses made for the British Medical Association.

  • British Medical Association.
Date:
1912
Catalogue details

Licence: In copyright

Credit: More secret remedies : what they cost & what they contain secret remedies--second series / based on analyses made for the British Medical Association. Source: Wellcome Collection.

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    “ No one can reasonably deny an instinctive knowledge and a physical power exerted in the stomach by a conscious principle which selects and rejects, and which in its natural purity may be ranked as a nerve of sense ” ; another that ‘ ‘ Immediately the liniment has been applied it sets out upon its message of discovery and healing, travelling with light- ning rapidity to the seat of the trouble ” ; yet another calls his |)reparation “ A subtle extract from the vegetahle king- dom, the hidden fire or life of plants and flow^ers, the ‘ Quint- essence of Life.’ Among these articles, as in most other groups of nostrums, the claims made hy rival proprietors are mutually exclusive; those dealt with in this chapter include the following : “ Greatest and latest discovery in medicine . . . . there is nothing known in medicine ^which will compare with it”; ‘‘the only efficient remedy ever discovered for these disorders”; ‘‘the finest cure for these complaints,” curing ‘‘ when all other remedies fail ”; ‘‘we guarantee magic foot drafts to cure any case of rheumatism ”; ‘‘ it is the one remedy that achieves a complete and permanent cure the most effective scientific remedy.” Obviously, such claims cannot all be true. Most advertisers of jDroprietary medicines seem unable to resist dragging in references to the medical profession into their advertisements. There are two principal ways in which this is done : the one is to claim to he receiving the support and recommendations of medical men, and the other is to vilify and slander them as rogues and fools, or both. These two methods are both illustrated here; the former includes ‘‘ highly endorsed by the leading medical profes- sion ” and ‘‘physicians are already using them in their regular practice, and recommending them”; the latter is exemplified by ‘‘ certain medical men have done their best by tongue and pen to persuade the public that Box’s Golden Fire is poisonous .... Those who raise the cry of