Part 24

“But a drug-store can’t sell opium or morphine except on prescription, can it?” asked Mr. Clyde.

“It can in a patent medicine,” replied the doctor. “That’s one of the ugly phases of the drug business. Yet it’s possible to find honest people who believe in these dopes and even give testimonials to them.”

“Some testimonials are hard to believe,” said Mrs. Clyde, thankfully accepting the chance to shift the conversation to a less painful phase of the topic. “Old Mrs. Dibble in our church is convinced that she owes her health to Hall’s Catarrh Cure.” Dr. Strong smiled sardonically. “That’s the nostrum which offers one hundred dollars reward for any case it can’t cure; and when a disgusted dupe tried to get the one hundred dollars, they said he hadn’t given their remedy a sufficient trial: he’d taken only twenty-odd bottles. So your friend thinks that a useless mixture of alcohol and iodide of potassium fixed her, does she?”

“Why shouldn’t she? She had a case of catarrh. She took three bottles of the medicine, and her catarrh is all gone.”

“All right. Let’s extend her line of reasoning to some other cases. While old Mr. Barker, around on Halsey Street, was very ill with pneumonia last month, he fell out of bed and broke his arm.”

“In two places,” said Mrs. Sharpless. “I saw him walking up the street yesterday, all trussed up like a chicken.”

“Quite recovered from pneumonia, however. Then there was little Mrs. Bowles: she had typhoid, you remember, and at the height of the fever a strange cat got into the room and frightened her into hysterics.”

“But she got well,” said Mrs. Clyde. “They’re up in the woods now.”

“Exactly. Moral (according to Mrs. Dibble’s experience with Hall’s Catarrh Cure): for pneumonia, try a broken arm; in case of typhoid, set a cat on the patient.”

Mr. Clyde laughed. “I see,” he said. “People get well in spite of these patent medicines, rather than by virtue of them. Post hoc, non propter hoc, as our lawyer friends say.”

“You’ve got it. The human body keeps up a sort of drug-store of its own. As soon as disease fastens on it, it goes to work in a subtle and mysterious way, manufacturing a cure for that disease. If it’s diphtheria, the body produces antitoxin, and we give it more to help it on. If it’s jaundice, it produces a special quality of gastric juices to correct the evil conditions. In the vast majority of attacks, the body drives out the disease by its own efforts; yet, if the patient chances to have been idiot enough to take some quack ‘cure’ the credit goes to that medicine.”

“Or to the doctor, if it’s a doctor’s case,” suggested Grandma Sharpless, with a twinkle of malice.

“Show me a doctor who boasts ‘I can cure you,’ whether by word of mouth or in print, and I’ll show you a quack,” returned the other warmly.

“But what is a doctor for in a sick-room, if not to cure?” asked Mrs. Clyde.

“What is a captain for on a ship?” countered Dr. Strong. “He can’t cure a storm, can he? But he can guide the vessel so that she can weather it. Well, our medical captains lose a good many commands; the storm is often too severe for human skill. But they save a good many, too, by skillful handling.”

“Then there is no such thing as an actual cure, in medicine?”

“Why, yes. In a sense there are several. Antitoxin may be called a cure for diphtheria. Quinine is, to some extent, a specific in malaria. And Ehrlich’s famous ‘606’ has been remarkably, though not unfailingly, successful in that terrible blood-plague, born of debauchery, which strikes the innocent through the guilty. All these remedies, however, come, not through the quack and the drug-store, but through the physician and the laboratory.”

“May not the patent medicines, also, help to guide the physical ship through the storm?” asked Mrs. Clyde, adopting the doctor’s simile.

“On to the rocks,” he replied quickly. “Look at the consumption cures. To many consumptives, alcohol is deadly. Yet a wretched concoction like Duffy’s Malt Whiskey, advertised to cure tuberculosis, flaunts its lies everywhere. And the law is powerless to check the suicidal course of the poor fools who believe and take it.”

“Why, I thought the Pure Food Law stopped all that,” said Mrs. Clyde innocently.

“The Pure Food Law! The life has been almost crushed out of it. Roosevelt whacked it over the head with his Referee Board, which granted immunity to the food poisoners, and afterward the Supreme Court and Wickersham treated it to a course of ‘legal interpretations,’ which generally signify a way to get around a good law.”

“But the patent medicines aren’t allowed to make false claims any more, as I understand it,” said Mr. Clyde.

“That applies only to the label on the bottle. So you’ll find that the words ‘alcohol,’ ‘opium,’ ‘acetanilid,’ ‘chloral,’ and other terms of poison, have sprouted forth there, in very small and inconspicuous type. But there’s a free field for the false promises on sign-boards, in the street-cars, in the newspapers, everywhere. Look in the next drug-store window you pass and you’ll see ‘sure cures’ exploited in terms that would make Ananias feel like an amateur.”

“You make out a pretty poor character for the druggists, as a class,” observed Mr. Clyde.

“Not at all. As a class, they’re a decent, self-respecting, honorable lot of men.”

“Then why do they stick to a bad trade?” asked Mrs. Clyde.

Dr. Strong got to his feet. “Let one of them answer,” he said. “Mr. Gormley, who runs the big store in the Arcade, usually passes here about this time, and I think I see him coming now.”

“They can talk all they like,” said Grandma Sharpless emphatically, as the doctor walked across to the front fence, “but I wouldn’t be without a bottle of cough syrup in the house.”