The report was submitted to the manufacturers. Their replies were evidently based on commercial consideration, and called for no modification in the report.
The referee recommended that the preceding report be published together with the following extracts from the replies of the manufacturers:
From Armour and Company:
“We are selling a good deal of Lecithol and it seems to be giving satisfactory results in some quarters.... We shall continue to advertise Lecithol along the lines we have employed heretofore.”
From the Abbott Laboratories:
“We can assure you of our confidence in the therapeutic value of Neuro-Lecithin. This has been attested by the reports of favorable results sent us by many physicians, as well as by the periodical literature of the last few years which contains a considerable number of very encouraging references to lecithin therapy.”
From Fairchild Bros. & Foster:
“We would like simply to say that the physician and the Council must be aware of the circumstances and the purposes which actuated us in placing lecithin at disposal, viz., the studies—research—of lecithin and the properties attributed to it and which led to inquiry for and consideration of it. The quantities proposed for medicinal use were not suggested by us; the suggestion of lecithin in small quantities as a therapeutic agent was obviously directed by those who proposed it.... The question whether lecithin, per se, has therapeutic properties in contrast to lecithin as naturally contained in food substances, is something we do not undertake to decide. The Council, on purely theoretical grounds, decides in the negative notwithstanding clinical experience—internal and hypodermic—and thus would deny lecithin the status of a new and nonofficial remedy, worthy of at least tentative progressive clinical consideration. We can only say that we offered bona fide lecithin and that we did not make the investigation of lecithin a pretext for the sale of all sorts of lecithin ‘jumbles’ with lecithin in small proportions, taking their name and making their bid on lecithin.”
Below appears the general article which has been omitted from N. N. R.: