doctor's fee is engendered
by those physicians who themselves write prescriptions for nostrums.
"Why not, indeed, eliminate this middleman (the doctor) and buy the
nostrums direct?" So say the unthinking. But what doctor worthy of the
name would prescribe a medicine the composition of which he was
ignorant? Yet it is frequently done. As Dr. Cabot has so aptly put it,
what would be thought of a banker or financial adviser who recommended
his client to buy a security simply on the recommendation of the
exploiter of the security? Yet that is exactly the position of a
doctor who recommends a nostrum.

In view of the fact, therefore, that persons of undoubted intelligence
are in the habit of purchasing and using remedies of this character
and since many of the most widely advertised preparations are
extremely harmful, even poisonous, we have taken the liberty of
pointing out a few "danger signals," in the guise of extravagant
assertions and impossible claims, which are characteristic signs of
the patent medicines to be avoided.

=DANGER SIGNALS.=--There are many picturesque and easily grasped
features in the literature, labels, and advertising of patent
medicines that spell danger. When these features are seen, the
medicine should be abandoned immediately, no matter what your friends
tell you about it, or how highly recommended it may have been by
others than your physician.

=Claiming a Great Variety of Cures.=--Perhaps of all features of
patent medicine advertising, this is the most alluring. No one drug or
combination of drugs, with possibly one or two exceptions, can or does
"cure" any disease. Patients recover only when the resistance of the
body is greater than the strength of the disease. This body resistance
varies in different persons, and is never just alike in any two
individuals or illnesses. The patient must be treated and not the
disease, so it is the aim of every conscientious physician to conserve
and strengthen the vital forces and, at the same time, guard against
further encroachment of the disease. There is no cure-all, and even if
a drug or combination of drugs were helpful in any single case, they
might easily be totally unsuited, or even harmful, in another case,
with apparently similar symptoms. When a maker claims that his
particular concoction will cure a long list of diseases, the assertion
bears on its face evidence of its falsity.

One of the most widely advertised and largely sold catarrh