THE TEETOLIA TREATMENT.
The following is an extract from an advertisement of a “Teetolia Treatment Association,” giving an address in London:
After years of Drink and Drug taking—
Cured in 4 days.
... The Teetolia treatment acts so rapidly and so efficiently that within four days from the commencement of administration the insistent craving for drink is absolutely destroyed—so much so, that even the thought of alcohol becomes nauseating.... Thousands have been cured by this treatment, and we guarantee to cure you. If you write to-day, you will receive by return of post a private consultation sheet, together with a valuable book on this subject, post free in plain envelope, and you will be a free man within a week.
On application being made for further particulars, a booklet of twenty pages, entitled The Teetolia Treatment for Alcoholic Excess, Drug Habits, and Resultant Nervous Diseases, was sent, together with a letter and a form to be filled up with particulars of the case to be treated. The following are extracts from the booklet:
The discovery of the Teetolia method and treatment for the permanent eradication of the crave for drink and drugs marks an era in medical science. It is the outcome of a life’s study of the subject by one of our best known West-End physicians.
You can, whilst undergoing the treatment, pursue your ordinary methods of living. You continue to take your daily modicum of alcohol; but somehow about the third or fourth day of treatment, without having made any physical or mental effort, you feel that you no longer want a drink; it holds out no attractions to you; its magnetic influence has gone....
We are willing to supply you with sufficient medicine for eight days’ treatment free of all charge. This will enable you to determine whether the treatment is acting successfully, for at the end of the fourth day an obvious and perceptible effect should be experienced. We impose no condition; we rely on your candour, honesty, and gratitude that at the end of the eight days’ treatment, if you are convinced of the value of the Teetolia Treatment, you will forward to us the ordinary fee—£1 1s.—for same, but if you have derived no benefit from the treatment at the end of the same period, then you are under no obligation whatever to pay us one single penny.
The letters were on headed paper, at the top of which was printed, “All communications strictly confidential,” and “Consultations with Physician by appointment.” The first letter concluded as follows:
Please therefore fill in and return without delay the special statement sheet and upon our receiving it the Physician will go carefully into the case and will prescribe special medicine, which will reach you with expert advice in the course of two or three days in a perfectly plain sealed package.
The “expert advice,” in a letter purporting to be from “The Medical Superintendent,” sent with the medicine, contained these passages:
I want, if possible, the patient to use his own endeavours to try and keep off alcohol during the first few days of treatment; if this cannot be done, then the treatment must be commenced when the patient is not drinking, in order to give the medicine a better hold on the system. The dislike for alcohol, which we claim, does not come on all at once.
The eight days’ treatment is enough to show you that it will do good, but not sufficient in this case to effect a permanent cure. I would advise the patient to continue for at least a month to six weeks.
This is somewhat widely at variance with the statements quoted above. “You continue to take your daily modicum of alcohol” and “you will be a free man within a week.”
The one guinea “treatment” consisted of 2⅙ fluid ounces of a liquid of the nature of a vegetable fluid extract.
The directions were:
Half a teaspoonful to be taken in a little water every four hours during the day at 10, 2, 6, and 10 o’c.
Analysis showed this to contain 29·3 per cent. by volume of alcohol and 2·3 per cent. of alkaloid, which consisted principally of quinine. The liquid agreed generally with a diluted liquid extract of cinchona; the amount of alkaloid was just under half what is contained in the official liquid extract of cinchona. Treatment with suitable solvents extracted a trace of a non-alkaloidal bitter substance resembling the bitter substances obtainable from quassia, chiretta, &c.; a preparation of chiretta appeared to be the more probable. No strychnine was present, and no evidence was obtained of any other ingredient.
SOME OTHER DRUG CURES
FOR INEBRIETY.
A somewhat frequent constituent of preparations for the treatment of inebriety is atropine, while other preparations contain one or more of the alkaloids belonging to the same group, usually known as the solanaceous alkaloids from the fact that they are all derived from plants of the nat. ord. Solanaceae. These alkaloids closely resemble each other in their chemical nature and in their pharmacological properties; the principal members of the group are:
Atropine, C₁₇H₂₃NO₃; obtained chiefly from Atropa belladonna (deadly nightshade) and Scopola carniolica.
Hyoscyamine, C₁₇H₂₃NO₃, obtained chiefly from Hyoscyamus niger (henbane) and Scopola species.
Hyoscine, or scopolamine, C₁₇H₂₁NO₄, obtained chiefly from Scopola species, Hyoscyamus niger, and Datura alba.
The two following were originally described as separate substances, but have more recently been shown to consist of mixtures:
Duboisine, obtained from Duboisia myoporoides, consists chiefly of hyoscyamine and hyoscine.
Daturine, from Datura stramonium (thornapple) consists chiefly of hyoscyamine, with a variable proportion of atropine.
A certain preparation for inebriety is said to contain “stramonine”; as no alkaloid has been described and characterized under this name, it is probably only a variant of daturine, which, as has been said, consists of a natural mixture of hyoscyamine and atropine.
To the above may be added the artificial alkaloid homatropine (C₁₀H₂₁NO₃), which has not been found in a plant, but is prepared synthetically; in chemical constitution it is mandelyl-tropeine, atropine being tropyltropeine.
The differences in the action of the four principal solanaceous alkaloids are briefly as follows:
Atropine has a stimulant action on the central nervous system especially on the motor area; it depresses and in large doses paralyses the nerve endings of secretory glands, plain muscle, and the heart.
Hyoscyamine is intermediate in its action between atropine and hyoscine; causes less stimulation of the central nervous system than atropine, and is a weaker sedative and hypnotic than hyoscine. It has the same action peripherally as atropine but is twice as powerful.
Hyoscine resembles atropine in its paralysing effect upon peripheral nerve endings, the action being quicker, more powerful, and less lasting. It does not possess the stimulating effect of atropine upon the brain; depression of the motor area is marked from the first.
Homatropine resembles atropine in its action but is less powerful.
CHAPTER XX.
CURE ALLS.
The greater number of the proprietary medicines described in these pages are advertised as cures for a wide range of ailments, but usually there is some one disease for the treatment of which they are particularly recommended, so that it has been possible to classify them according to their alleged purposes. In very many other cases, however, the claims made are so wide that the article is put forward as a sort of cure-all. Thus one of the articles described is stated to cure such different disorders as constipation, rheumatism, St. Vitus’s dance, heart disease, rickets, sleeplessness, kidney complaints, and women’s special ailments, among many others, and is said to be “a real elixir of life in solid form”; the facts as to its composition, ascertained by analysis, show what the possibility of its being a “cure”—for heart disease, for instance—is. As to “Pink Pills,” another of the nostrums analysed, which probably owes its popularity partly to bold advertisement and partly to its alliterative name, the method followed appears to be to recommend them for different diseases in different advertisements; personal testimony, or what is put forward as such, from sufferers who have been cured, is made the basis of most of these, and illustrations are employed to catch the eye of the casual reader. Analysis showed that these pills were practically the ordinary iron-carbonate pills commonly called Blaud’s pill, which ought to be freshly made. The Pink Pills are of lower strength than usually prescribed, and to judge by the proportion of iron that was found to be in the higher state of oxidation, very carelessly prepared. They differ vastly, however, from other Blaud’s pills in the price charged for them. Thus the proprietary Pink Pills are sold at a little over a penny each, while coated Blaud’s pills can be bought retail at a few pence a gross, and wholesale in large quantities at a little over a penny a gross. The analyses of other proprietary preparations show a similar disparity between the market price of the drug supplied and the price charged to the person who is beguiled into purchasing; thus thirteen-pence-halfpenny, two shillings and sixpence, and two shillings and ninepence are the selling prices of nostrums, the ingredients of which are estimated to cost respectively one-eighth, one-third, and one-tenth of a penny.
Preparations of this class are not in all cases very clearly marked off from those recommended for some special disease, such as have been dealt with in previous chapters, for many of them are recommended for some one disease, of which nearly all others are asserted to be variations.