As physicians we are largely responsible for the sale of secret remedies. We help to create the demand. We feed it.
We feed it because it is shown that 44 per cent. of the prescriptions filled at one of the best of our Back Bay drug stores in Boston call for nostrums—secret remedies of whose constituents we are ignorant.
The conditions are the same or worse elsewhere. The manufacturers and those whose living depends on the sale of these nostrums, have done their best to obscure the issue by vilifying the leaders of the present vigorous crusade against secret nostrums; I mean Dr. Simmons and Dr. Billings. The nostrum makers and a group of medical journals which are their organs, try to deceive us into believing that the great crusade for honest, open, intelligent prescribing and against fraud and ignorance in therapeutics, is all the work of those splendid leaders,