“The newspapers. The patent-medicine advertisers fill the daily columns with their claims, and create a demand by the force of repeated falsehood. Do you know the universal formula for the cost of patent cures? Here it is: Drugs, 3 per cent; manufacturing plant, 7 per cent; printing ink, 90 per cent. It’s a sickening business. If I could afford it, I’d break loose like that fellow McConnell in Chicago and put a placard of warning in my show window. Here’s a copy of the one he displays in his drug-store.”
Taking a card from his pocket, Mr. Gormley held it up for the circle to read. The inscription was:—
“Please do not ask us what any old patent, medicine is worth, for you embarrass us, as our honest answer must be that it is worthless.
“If you mean to ask us at what price we sell it, that is an entirely different proposition. When sick, consult a good physician. It is the only proper course. And you will find it cheaper in the end than self-medication with worthless ‘patent’ nostrums.”
“Has that killed his trade in quackery?” asked Dr. Strong.
“Nothing can kill that. It has cut it down by half, though. It’s a peculiar and disheartening fact that the public will believe the paid lie of a newspaper advertisement and disregard the plain truth from an expert. And see here, Dr. Strong, when you doctors get together and roast the pharmaceutical trade, just remember that it’s really the newspapers and not the drug-stores that sell patent medicines.”
“Are all of them so bad?” asked Mrs. Clyde.
“All that claim to cure. They’re either frauds, appealing to the appetite by a stiff allowance of booze, like Swamp Root and Peruna, or disguised dopes,—opium, hasheesh or chloral,—masquerading as soothing syrups, cough medicines, and consumption cures; or artificial devices for giving yourself heart disease by the use of coal-tar chemicals in the headache powders and anti-pain pills.”
“Well, you can’t make me believe, Mr. Drug-man,” said Grandma Sharpless with a belligerent shake of her head, “that a patent medicine which keeps on being in demand for years, on its own merits, hasn’t something good in it.”
“No, ma’am, I can’t,” agreed the visitor. “I wouldn’t want to. There isn’t any such patent medicine.”
“There’s hundreds of ‘em,” contradicted the old lady, with the exaggeration of the disputant who finds the ground dropping away from underfoot.