With best wishes, we beg to remain,
Yours very truly,
Kress & Owen Company.
Glyco-Thymoline has been discussed in these pages. A report of the Council on Pharmacy and Chemistry pointed out that this “patent medicine” is simply a weak antiseptic, so feeble that even in full strength it does not kill Staphylococcus aureus in four hours and is of little, if any, greater therapeutic value than sterile salt solution. Yet, Glyco-Thymoline has been recommended by its manufacturers, either directly or inferentially, for such diseases as diphtheria, ophthalmia neonatorum and consumption. Today its manufacturers put it forward as one of the safest prophylactic measures against infantile paralysis and have the effrontery to make this suggestion, not to the uninstructed public but to the medical profession. Presumably, as a business organization, the concern believes it will convince a sufficient number of physicians of the therapeutic efficacy of its product to pay for the cost of this advertising campaign. If it appraises the situation correctly there need no longer be any wonder expressed that in the recent suit against The Journal, “patent medicine” makers were able to enlist the help of medical men.—(From The Journal A. M. A., Sept. 16, 1916.)
GLYKERON: COLD STORAGE TESTIMONIALS [N]
The law which limits the length of time that food products may be kept in cold storage could with advantage have its scope extended to include “patent medicine” testimonials. Physicians recently received through the mails—at a time when the mails were frightfully congested with Christmas business—a sixteen page pamphlet sent out in a plain envelop as first class matter. The caption of the pamphlet reads: “Cough and Its Treatment in Pulmonary and Laryngeal Tuberculosis: By Henry Levien, M.D., While Medical Director and Physician-in-Charge of the Liberty Sanitarium, Liberty, N. Y. From the Buffalo Medical Journal.” The pamphlet is devoted to the alleged virtues of that dangerous and widely advertised nostrum, “Glyco-Heroin (Smith),” whose more recent and less descriptive name is now “Glykeron.” Physicians might assume, and doubtless will assume, from the pamphlet that this reprint represents a recent pronouncement on the subject with which it deals. The facts are that the “Liberty Sanitarium” has, apparently, been out of existence for at least fifteen years, while the article itself originally appeared more than eighteen years ago—September, 1901. One of many physicians who sent in the copies received called attention to the fact that he had left the address to which the pamphlet was directed, more than six years ago. Even at that, the mailing lists of the concern that sells this heroin-containing nostrum are more than twelve years ahead of its “clinical reports.”—(Editorial from The Journal A. M. A., Jan. 17, 1920.)
GRAY’S GLYCERINE TONIC: “WHOSE BREAD I EAT HIS SONG I SING”
Last September the United States Department of Agriculture issued a press bulletin describing the work of the Bureau of Chemistry in prosecuting the venders or manufacturers of fraudulently exploited “patent medicines.” At the end of the bulletin was a tabulated list of “other preparations against which the government’s charge that they were falsely or fraudulently labeled was sustained by the federal courts.” Tucked away in the list was a product often euphemistically described as an “ethical proprietary” but none the less essentially a “patent medicine”—“Gray’s Glycerine Tonic.” The editor of the Atlanta Journal of Medicine, apparently not having read the bulletin with any great degree of care, published it verbatim. Thus it was that the Atlanta Journal-Record of Medicine for September, 1915, presented the interesting sight of a half-page advertisement of “Gray’s Glycerine Tonic” in the same issue that contained the government’s article classifying “Gray’s Glycerine Tonic” among the false and fraudulent products! What happened? In the very next issue the Atlanta Journal-Record of Medicine apologized thus editorially: