The great American fraud : Articles on the nostrum evil and quacks, in two series, reprinted from Collier's weekly / by Samuel Hopkins Adams.

  • Samuel Hopkins Adams
Date:
[1906]
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: The great American fraud : Articles on the nostrum evil and quacks, in two series, reprinted from Collier's weekly / by Samuel Hopkins Adams. Source: Wellcome Collection.

Provider: This material has been provided by the Francis A. Countway Library of Medicine, through the Medical Heritage Library. The original may be consulted at the Francis A. Countway Library of Medicine, Harvard Medical School.

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    * designed for the drugging of helpless infants, even the trade does not know how many have risen, made their base profit, and subsided. A few survive, probably less harmful than the abandoned ones, on the average, so that by taking the conspicuous survivors as a tyjDe I am at least doing no injustice to the class. Some years ago I heard a prominent New York lawyer, asked by his office scrub woman to buy a ticket for some association ball, say to her: How can you go to these affairs, Nora, when you have two young children at home? Sure, they're all right, she returned blithely: just wan teaspoonful of Winslow's an' they lay like the dead till mornin'. What eventually became of the scrub woman's children I don't know. The typical result of this practice is described by a Detroit physician who has been making a special study of Michigan's high mortality rate: ]M,rs. Winslow's Soothing Syrup is extensively used among the poorer classes as a means of pacifying their babies. These children eventually come into the hands cf physicians with a greater or less addiction to the opium habit. The sight of a parent drugging a helpless infant into a semi- comatose condition is not an elevating one for this civilized age, and it is a very common practice. I can give you one illustration from my own A DANGEROUS SAMPLE BOX WHICH GOES THROUGH THE MAILS. Enougli tablets were contained in this package, marked No Heart Effect, to stop the heart entirely if taken all at once. The chief ingredient of antikamnia is acetanilid. hospital experience, which was told me by the father of the girl. A middle- aged railroad man of Kansas City had a small daughter with summer diar- rhea. For this she was given a patent diarrhea medicine. It controlled the trouble, but as soon as the remedy Avas withdrawn the diarrhea re- turned. At every withdrawal the trouble began anew, and the final result was that they never succeeded in curing the daughter of the opium habit which had taken its hold on her. It was some years afterward that the parents became aware that she had contracted the habit, when the physician took away the patent medicine and gave the girl morphin, with exactly the same result which she had experienced with the patent remedy. At the time the father told me this story his daughter was 19 years of age. an only child of wealthy parents, and one who could have had every advantage in life, but who was a complete wreck in every way as a result of the opium habit. The father told me, Avith tears in his eyes, that he would rather she had died with the original illness than to have lived to become the creature which she then Avas. The proprietor of a drug store in San Jose, CaL, Avrites to Collier's as f olloAVS: I hav^e a good customer, a married Avoman Avith five children, all under 10 years of age. When her last baby Avas born, about a year ago, the first thing she did Avas to order a bottle of WinsloAv's Soothing- Syrup, and every