“Show me a doctor who boasts ‘I can cure you,’ whether by word of mouth or in print, and I’ll show you a quack,” returned the other warmly.
“But what is a doctor for in a sick-room, if not to cure?” asked Mrs. Clyde.
“What is a captain for on a ship?” countered Dr. Strong. “He can’t cure a storm, can he? But he can guide the vessel so that she can weather it. Well, our medical captains lose a good many commands; the storm is often too severe for human skill. But they save a good many, too, by skillful handling.”
“Then there is no such thing as an actual cure, in medicine?”
“Why, yes. In a sense there are several. Antitoxin may be called a cure for diphtheria. Quinine is, to some extent, a specific in malaria. And Ehrlich’s famous ‘606’ has been remarkably, though not unfailingly, successful in that terrible blood-plague, born of debauchery, which strikes the innocent through the guilty. All these remedies, however, come, not through the quack and the drug-store, but through the physician and the laboratory.”
“May not the patent medicines, also, help to guide the physical ship through the storm?” asked Mrs. Clyde, adopting the doctor’s simile.
“On to the rocks,” he replied quickly. “Look at the consumption cures. To many consumptives, alcohol is deadly. Yet a wretched concoction like Duffy’s Malt Whiskey, advertised to cure tuberculosis, flaunts its lies everywhere. And the law is powerless to check the suicidal course of the poor fools who believe and take it.”
“Why, I thought the Pure Food Law stopped all that,” said Mrs. Clyde innocently.
“The Pure Food Law! The life has been almost crushed out of it. Roosevelt whacked it over the head with his Referee Board, which granted immunity to the food poisoners, and afterward the Supreme Court and Wickersham treated it to a course of ‘legal interpretations,’ which generally signify a way to get around a good law.”
“But the patent medicines aren’t allowed to make false claims any more, as I understand it,” said Mr. Clyde.