Part 25

“Nor I without my headache tablets,” added Mrs. Clyde. “I’d have had to give up the bridge party yesterday but for them.”

Mr. Clyde shot a sharp glance, first, at his wife, then at her mother. “Well, I’d like to see the labels on your particular brands of medicine,” he remarked.

“There’s nothing bad in mine,” asserted Mrs. Clyde. “Mrs. Martin recommended them to me; she’s been taking them for years.”

At this point Dr. Strong returned, bringing with him a slim, elderly man, whose shrewd, wide eyes peered through a pair of gold-rimmed glasses.

“So you want me to give away the secrets of my trade,” he remarked good-humoredly, after the greetings. “Well, I don’t object to relieving my mind, once in a while. So shoot, and if I can’t dodge, I’ll yell.”

“Why do you deal in patent medicines if they’re so bad?” asked Grandma Sharpless bluntly. “Is there such a big profit in them?”

“No profit, worth speaking of,” replied Mr. Gormley. “Though you’ll note that I haven’t admitted they are bad—as yet.”

“The bulk of your trade is in that class of goods, isn’t it?” queried Mr. Clyde.

“Worse luck, it is. They’ve got us through their hold on the public. And they not only force us to be their agents, but they grind us down to the very smallest profit; sometimes less than the cost of doing business.”

“But you aren’t compelled to deal in their medicines,” objected Mr. Clyde.

“Practically I am. My really profitable trade is in filling prescriptions. There I can legitimately charge, not only for the drugs, but also for my special technical skill and knowledge. But in order to maintain my prescription trade I must keep people coming to my store. And they won’t come unless I carry what they demand in the way of patent medicines.”

“Then there is a legitimate demand for patent medicines?” said Mr. Clyde quickly.

“Legitimate? Hardly. It’s purely an inspired demand.”

“What makes it persist, then?”

“The newspapers. The patent-medicine advertisers fill the daily columns with their claims, and create a demand by the force of repeated falsehood. Do you know the universal formula for the cost of patent cures? Here it is: Drugs, 3 per cent; manufacturing plant, 7 per cent; printing ink, 90 per cent. It’s a sickening business. If I could afford it, I’d break loose like that fellow McConnell in Chicago and put a placard of warning in my show window. Here’s a copy of the one he displays in his drug-store.”

Taking a card from his pocket, Mr. Gormley held it up for the circle to read. The inscription was:—

“Please do not ask us what any old patent, medicine is worth, for you embarrass us, as our honest answer must be that it is worthless. “If you mean to ask us at what price we sell it, that is an entirely different proposition. When sick, consult a good physician. It is the only proper course. And you will find it cheaper in the end than self-medication with worthless ‘patent’ nostrums.”

“Has that killed his trade in quackery?” asked Dr. Strong.

“Nothing can kill that. It has cut it down by half, though. It’s a peculiar and disheartening fact that the public will believe the paid lie of a newspaper advertisement and disregard the plain truth from an expert. And see here, Dr. Strong, when you doctors get together and roast the pharmaceutical trade, just remember that it’s really the newspapers and not the drug-stores that sell patent medicines.”

“Are all of them so bad?” asked Mrs. Clyde.

“All that claim to cure. They’re either frauds, appealing to the appetite by a stiff allowance of booze, like Swamp Root and Peruna, or disguised dopes,—opium, hasheesh or chloral,—masquerading as soothing syrups, cough medicines, and consumption cures; or artificial devices for giving yourself heart disease by the use of coal-tar chemicals in the headache powders and anti-pain pills.”

“Well, you can’t make me believe, Mr. Drug-man,” said Grandma Sharpless with a belligerent shake of her head, “that a patent medicine which keeps on being in demand for years, on its own merits, hasn’t something good in it.”

“No, ma’am, I can’t,” agreed the visitor. “I wouldn’t want to. There isn’t any such patent medicine.”

“There’s hundreds of ‘em,” contradicted the old lady, with the exaggeration of the disputant who finds the ground dropping away from underfoot.

“Not that sell on their own merits. Advertising and more advertising and still more advertising is all that does it. Let any one of them drop out of the newspapers and off the bill-boards, and the demand for it would be dead in a year.”

“Yet, as a student of business conditions,” said Mr. Clyde, “I’m inclined to side with Mrs. Sharpless and believe that any line of goods which has come down from yesterday to to-day must have some merit.”

The druggist took off his glasses, wiped them and waved them in the air, with a flourish.

And all our yesterdays have lighted fools The way to dusty death,