Secret remedies, what they cost and what they contain, based on analyses made for the British Medical Association.

  • British Medical Association.
Date:
1909
Catalogue details

Licence: In copyright

Credit: Secret remedies, what they cost and what they contain, based on analyses made for the British Medical Association. Source: Wellcome Collection.

Provider: This material has been provided by Royal College of Physicians, London. The original may be consulted at Royal College of Physicians, London.

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accompanied by the patient's answers to printed questions and description of his symptoms, is not only of no value, but may be a source of danger by giving a false sense of security. It is curious indeed to note that one of these secret preparations, Marmola, does not appear to be advertised to the public as a proprietary article at all, but is named as one ingredient among others in a prescription which is recommended in a paragraph apparently dictated solely by pity for suffering fat people ; the chemist to whom the prescription will be taken to be compounded, however, is the recipient of advertising matter urging him to lay in a stock of the article to be in readiness for the demand. It is to be hoped that no chemist would dispense such a prescrip- tion without making it clear to his customer that what is supplied is a proprietary article, about the usefulness or in- nocuousness of which he knows nothing ; otherwise the customer, who finds it named along with preparations bearing the letters B.P., is Ukely to suppose that it is a known substance, and that the dispensing of the prescription by a chemist indicates that the mixture is a proper and safe one to take. Two of the other preparations described are evidently usually or always supplied to the pubhc without the agency of any retailer, the vendor thus securing the whole profit, which, it will be seen, is considerable. In both these cases the attempt is clearly made to get the customer to pay at once for as large a quantity at possible, presumably because he will be less likely to do so after giving the medicines a trial. The most alluring prospects are, of course, held out in the advertisements, but when the customer has been drawn into correspondence, and especially after he has begun to send his money, a process of hedging begins, as will be seen from the extracts quoted from letters sent by the vendors. Phenolphthalein—a chemical body sold sometimes under the ' trade names purgen, laxoin, laxatol, laxen, etc.—appears as an ingredient in two of the nostrums, and formamine (hexamethy- lene-tetramine)—which goes also by many names, urotropine, cystamin, cystogen, metramine, and vesalvine among others—