s of remedies that are without effect or that
do not produce the effects credited to them. I am relying on high
therapeutical authority for this statement. Now when the sick man is told
by his own physician to discard angleworm poultices, and herbs plucked in
the dark of the moon, on which he had formerly relied, it is any wonder
that he has ended by being suspicious also of calomel and ipecac, with
which they were formerly classed? And when the man who believed that he
received benefit from some of these magical remedies is told that the
result was due to auto-suggestion, is it remarkable that he should fall an
easy prey next day to the Christian Scientist who tells him that the
effects of calomel and ipecac are due to nothing else than this same
suggestion? The increased use and undoubted value of special diets,
serums, aseptic surgery, baths, massage, electrical treatment,
radio-therapeutics, and so on, makes it easy for him to discard drugs
altogether, and further, it creates, even among those who continue to use
drugs, an atmosphere favorable to the belief that they are back numbers,
on the road to disuse. Just here comes in the second factor to persuade
the layman, from what has come under his own observation, that drugs are
injurious, dangerous, even fatal. Newly discovered chemical compounds with
valuable properties, have been adopted and used in medicine before the
necessary time had elapsed to disclose the fact that they possessed also
other properties, more elusive than the first, but as potent for harm as
these were for good. Many were narcotics or valuable anesthetics, local or
otherwise, which have proved to be the creators of habits more terrible
than the age-long enemies of mankind, alcohol and opium. When the man
whose wife takes a coal-tar derivative for headache finds that it stills
her heart forever, the incident affects his whole opinion of drugs. When
the patient for whom one of the new drugs has been prescribed by a
practitioner without knowledge of his idiosyncrasies reacts to it fatally,
it is slight consolation to his survivors that his case is described in
print under the heading, "A Curious Case of Umptiol Poisoning." When a
mother sees her son go to the bad by taking cocaine, or heroin, or some
other drug of whose existence she was ignorant a dozen years ago, she may
be pardoned for believing that all drugs, or at least all newly discovered
drugs, are tools of the devil.

And this feeling is