“The National Dispensatory, fifth edition, says:
“The utility of retaining lactucarium as an official medicine is very doubtful. It may possibly be desirable as a hypnotic for very impressionable persons, with whom faith in a remedy supplies its want of intrinsic efficiency.”
“The official modus operandi for making this syrup looks laborious, but the innocent-looking task of reducing the drug to a coarse powder is a revelation to the uninitiated.
“It was {a} hot day in July and it took my 175-pound clerk and me all that day to reduce 50 gm. of lactucarium to a satisfactory condition. The stuff looked like old pieces of discarded rubber shoes, and it really appeared to act like rubber. After perspiring all day with the Pharmacopeia and iron mortar, imagine our disgust, if you can, on reading in the National Dispensatory the following:
“This alcoholic preparation of lactucarium is quite as valueless and more objectionable than the syrup of the same drug.”
“Moral: Why pay $6.50 a pound for material that has no medicinal value, and is so hard to manipulate as lactucarium when decrepit rubber shoes are so cheap? You can have just as much fun on a hot summer day in reducing the latter to a coarse powder with clean sand in an iron mortar as you can with the more expensive material.”
One of the advantages claimed for ready-made prescriptions over the made-to-order variety, or even over pharmacopeial preparations, is that they are more elegant in appearance and less offensive to the nostrils and palate. This is the common experience of physicians who, having prescribed some ready-made mixture, wish to change the dose of one of its constituents and write a prescription or ask their pharmacists to prepare a similar preparation. The inability of the pharmacist to prepare a preparation even approaching the original in appearance, color or taste usually leads to increased confidence in the skill of the manufacturer of the proprietary and a correspondingly decreased belief in the pharmacist’s professional attainments. But these conclusions, although natural, are based on false premises. As the proprietary did not have the composition declared on the label, a mixture based on the formula differed more or less widely from the proprietary it was expected to resemble.—(From The Journal A. M. A., Nov. 9, 1912.)
A Protest and a Reply
Three months after publishing the foregoing we received a nine-page communication from Comar & Co. of Paris, the promotors of Aubergier’s Syrup of Lactucarium, in which they took issue with some of the statements in our article. The company claimed that a possible reason for the difficulty experienced by Mr. Louis Emmanuel in trying to make the Syrup of Lactucarium from the crude drug is that he did not use the same variety of Lactucarium that it employs. Furthermore, it said that the presence of morphin in the product was acknowledged before the passage of the Food and Drugs Act. On more careful investigation, we find that this is true—that the presence of “a certain proportion of extract of opium” in the preparation was mentioned even before the federal Food and Drugs Act compelled the morphin content to be published on the label. Technically, then, The Journal was incorrect in making the implication that the medical profession was not apprised of the fact that Aubergier’s Syrup of Lactucarium contained morphin; practically it was right. The information that Comar & Co. gave to physicians was buried in its advertising “literature” so that it is fair to assume that not one physician in ten thousand knew—previous to the Food and Drugs Act—that Aubergier’s Syrup of Lactucarium contained morphin.—(From The Journal A. M. A., Nov. 9, 1912.)