NARKINE
The Intangible Product of the Tilden Laboratory
A little book, published by the Druggists Circular, and called “Modern Materia Medica,” gives in dictionary form the information regarding new remedies which that journal publishes in its monthly issues. Such information is not always acceptable to the manufacturers of various preparations of doubtful value. A case in point is brought to notice with reference to a remedy called Narkine, put out by the Tilden Company of St. Louis. In this little book the following appears:
“Narkine is described as ‘an opium preparation from which all deleterious qualities have been eliminated’; an unsupportable claim, as all opiates and other hypnotics are essentially deleterious.”
The Tilden Company wrote to the Druggists Circular, stating that they guaranteed Narkine “to be absolutely free from coal-tar or opium derivatives,” yet the “literature” of the company describes it as
“a specially prepared product of opium devoid of the nauseating and disagreeable properties of this drug, yet possessing the anodyne and soporific principles of same in the highest degree.”
To remove from opium all its derivatives and yet retain the anodyne and soporific principles attached to nothing in particular, indicates a degree of pharmaceutical skill seldom attained. One is irresistibly reminded of the Cheshire cat in “Alice in Wonderland,” whose smile remained long after the cat had vanished.
The absurdity of the thing, however, has apparently not occurred to many physicians, for these disembodied spirits of the pharmacologic world are evidently being prescribed.
The Druggists Circular is to be congratulated on exposing this latest pharmaceutical freak. It does so in a rather striking manner by means of photographic reproductions of the claims of the Tilden Company.—(From The Journal A. M. A., Oct. 24, 1908.)