Morning journal and courier., 1882-06-17
Secrets of the Druggists.


 medicine.-An Apotheeary Reveals
 Some of the Mysteries of the Trade
 How Sovereign Cures are Placed on the
 Market and Become PopuIar-Great
 Extent Of the Business.
 rFrom the New York Tiunes.l
 Those who find amusement in proving around apothecary shops may sometimes wonder whether the papered and linked prep arations which stand forth like armies ready to do battle contain, as is pretended, cures for all the ills that flesh Is heir to, or wheth- CT death lurks-if death ever lurks-among them A mild eyed, gentle, unassumlng apothecary, who has more friends to the square mile than any other apotheeary ln America looked wistfully at Times reporter who surveyed regular army division of bot ties on the shelves of & much frequented shop in this city. 'Wonderful how many or these things there are," said the apothecary, picking up a bottle of toothsche drops Then his oratorical foodgates were opened wide and the reporter listened He said that in country places where the yender of patent medicine appears with one half of his wagon filled with circulars and the other half with some astonishing cure sales are rapidly made. The vender transacts his business In public While holding forth before an audience that finds entertainment in listening to him the vender calls upon anyone in the crowd who may be suffering with the toothache, eRrache, rheumatism, or any of the one thousand and one complaints that hIs great remedy will promptly set aside, to step forward and be cured Some one with the toothache, per haps approaches the vender and, amid the excitement which such an important event in his life is sure to create, has the remedy ap- piled and is ready to immediately acknoBl- edge that the ache has disappeared. The reputation of the remedy is made at once. Everybody buys it, and, in the language of the vender, children cry for it and old maids sigh for it." The circulars inform the won der stricken crowds that the remedy is sold at every respectable apothecary shop In New York: The vender is sure to meet some one who wishes to buy the exclusive right to sell the remedy, and to such one, upon the re- ceipt of a more or less handsome sum of money, he disposes of his right, title and in- tersst in say Fthe Golden Stairs Toothache Annihilator." The vender and the new pur- chaser go on their way rejoicing. The first continues to prepare and sell the same reme- dy as before, but twists the. name into the 'Tally-ho Toothache Bulldozer," and the second prepares and sells the old original Golden Stairs Toothache Annihilator." Both are made by the same formula, and both find ready sale The exclusive right to sell these articles is sold as often as purchas- CTS can be found, and the original sellers are merely put to the trouble of securing new names TOT the SaI16 Olu htuH "AiCA tASy COh tinue to manufacture
 The apothecary picked up 8 package of whooping cough remedy and said that it would perhaps tell the story of many other preparations clerk in 8 printing estab- lishment had three children suffering with whooping cough. He secured from physl- clan a prescription that called for something that unquestionably greatly relieved the ehil- dren The clerk was pecuniarily embarrassed, as some other clerks have been, and was una ble to pay the physician for his attendance. At such a time as this necessity was again the mother of invention. The clerk hit upon the idea of having the remedy prepared for sale in apothecary shops so that he might accumulate enough wealth to pay his pbysl- cian's bill and now the remedy is done up in neat packages and belongs to the regular army of preparations di-played in the shops. The apotheoary then displayed several packa- ges of ''teas'' which have high sounding names on the wrappers, and said that they were made of salts and senna, with little ginger or anise seed added. One of these bottles sells for 50 cents, and the same amount of salts or senna, which would serve the purpose equally as we'll, would cost about cents Then the apothecary grasped seve- ral bottles of beef, wine and iron by the neck, and laughed at their worthlessness. The idea of beef, wine and iron mixed, he said, was good one, but those who prepared it vied with each other in their endeavors to place it on the market at cheap rates, and thus made it absolutely worthless for any purpose The apothecary said that he could not at that moment refrain from deploring the fact that men who were never graduated from a college of pharmacy are proprietors of apothecary shops in this city. The law requires that apothecaries shall be graduates of such colleges, and these men evade the law by hiring clerks who are graduates, The apothecary said that in no other trade was it so important that a man should thor oughly understand his business. Patent medicines are kept in shops for so great a length of time that they lose their merit, if they ever had any. Changes are going on as time flies, the liquids evaporate. or get into such a state that it becomes a very serious matter whether they should be used upon man or beast. The man who does not un- derstand his business buys all the old stock of patent medicines offered to him at cheap rates, and is unknowingly ready to deal death and destruction among the rest of mankind.
 The apothecary continued that physicians are greatly to blame for recognizing patent medicines at all. For an instance, one of them writes out prescription for standard preparation and gives it to a patient. The patient is one of the knowing kind, like the majority of patients, and when he reads the name of some well known patent medicine man on his prescription he immediately re solves to ogtwit the physician, Going to the apothecary shop, he says to the clerk, ''Give me a bottle of Blanks, uh-uh-ah-ah, femme sec" He has forgotten what Blanks remedy is called and he tugs at the prescrip- tion in his pocket and reads it. "Oh, yes" he resumes ''giye me bottle of Blanks High and Mighty Bazouk" The clerk smiles. He knows what he would have done if the patient had given him that prescription. He would have taken bottle of Blanks High and Mighty Bazouk washed the label from it. and placed upon it a label bearing the di- rections for use which the physician had or dered Should the patient use the prepsra- tion according to such directions, there would be possibility that the remedy would be of service to him. But the patient pockets the bottle as he laughs in his sleeve, and hasten ing to bis home he begins to fill himself with the preparation. The result in such 8 case as this is generally disastrous. The patient finds that in endeavoring to remove the cause of one complaint he has brought another, and perhaps worse, ailment upon himself.