[Article VIII]
Tyree’s Antiseptic and Aseptinol
It may seem paradoxic to say that recent progress in the medical sciences has made therapeutic chaos possible, but it is true nevertheless. Revolutions are sometimes slow and orderly, sometimes sudden and attended with confusion. The revolutionary changes in the medical sciences have been so numerous and so rapid that the general practitioner has been unable to keep pace with them, and in the resulting confusion the nostrum maker has seen his opportunity for exploiting his useless, dangerous or unscientific preparations. The greater the confusion, the greater his opportunity; and it is no exaggeration to say that he has been the most potent factor in maintaining the chaos of therapeutics.
The majority of our readers would probably say that the existing scientific medical literature insures the permanence of established beliefs, but every one who has delved into the literature has found instances of truths that had been established and forgotten—buried under the ever-increasing avalanche of contributions to that literature.
Typical half-page Tyree advertisement appearing in medical journals.
Rapid advances are still being made in the medical sciences and unless constant vigilance is exercised therapeutics will return to the chaotic condition from which it has so recently emerged. It was in recognition of these facts—the danger of this return to chaos, and the difficulty, in fact, impossibility, of any individual’s keeping pace with all of the medical sciences—that the American Medical Association secured the cooperation of men in various branches of medicine in the Council on Pharmacy and Chemistry, in order that it may place the results of therapeutic progress before the readers of The Journal in an impartial manner.
Are you profiting by this work, or are you still depending on your unaided efforts to distinguish the false teachings of the nostrum venders from that of scientific medicine? Are you prescribing “Antikamnia” and “Ammonol” or a simple member of the group, such as acetanilid or phenacetin? Are you depending on “Tyree’s Antiseptic,” so called, or are you using an antiseptic about which there is no mystery, for which no false claims are made, and one which is really effective? In short, are you using drugs of unquestioned value, such as are described in “Useful Drugs,” or are you taking your therapeutic instructions from nostrum makers’ circulars?