RUM REMEDIES. By DR. J. L. KAINE, MILWAUKEE, In all the relentless record of inhabited time, there is not a line to tell us of a happy period when there were no discomforting people going up and down the earth, murmuring against this or that popular belief- calling for proofs of things, and making matters of mathematics and chemics out of cherished faiths and traditions. Disturbers of opinions; a sort of people who prowl after unsettling facts and whose logic, if we listen to it, is as irresistible as that of the highwayman. Destroyers of the half-confidences in the miraculous, which have frightened and fascinated mankind in all ages, and which have given rise to some of the most beautiful conceptions in literature and art. There is a long line of these restless doubters, touching hands at one end with Damis, the Epicurean, who declared that even Zeus was a fraud, and at the other with the modern man of science. Through all the line there runs the same idea that man's best happiness is not to be found in the unreal pleasures of an unchained imagination, but in the honest pride and eternal profit of not being duped. The bliss of ignorance is delusive. Sooner or later it comes to inevitable smash. Ignorance has its short period of rash confidence, but in the end it is uncertainty, terror and destruction. It is doubtful if a man could start along the road of life with a better idea that that of not being a dupe - the most uncertain, least useful and by far the most pitiable of all creatures. Drunkards, liars, misers, spendthrifts, lunatics, and all weaklings are dupes, tricked and deluded by fair appearances and vain hopes. Not to be duped does not mean scepticism, but it means belief from knowledge alone. It means investigation, the learning of the limitations of things it means belief instead of the half-confidence Rum Remedies. which never endures the shocks the shocks of life which no man can elude. Domination there must be, either of the imagination or the intellect, over every man the one as capricious and misleading as the other is consistent and protective. "Not to be duped," has been the motive of all those whose tremendous exertions have raised man half out of the quagmire of delusions, superstitions and follies into which he was lured by the false shining of insubstantial will-o'-the-wisps masquerading as stars. Through all ages the restless doubters have murmured, have sometimes been clapt into dungeons for their temerity, but always with the effect of discrediting some delusion. In time, these investigators had become so deplorably logical that they spoke disrespectfully of the very elixirs of life of the waters, pills, powders and ointments of eternal youth which wigged doctors as well as wandering mountebanks sold to credulous people. Nobody now believes in Doctor Dolliver's drops for the renewal of youth, nobody seeks the fountain of youth any more than the philosopher's stone. Stoughton's "elixir magnum stomachi," Betton's "rock oil," Furlington's "balsam of life," have all gone the way of mummy powder" and other life-prolonging specifics. But 66 we still cling to fallacious kidney cures, liver pads, stomach bitters and the like, expending in this country alone some twenty-five millions a year for secret remedies the chief ingredients of which are rum and humbug. We laugh at the delusion of metallic tractors while girding our loins with "electrical" belts. The history of secret medicines would begin with the history of the race and it would be one long record of delusions, exposures and then new delusions. Here and there something worth while rescued from the deluge of elixirs, but for the most part the record is one of ignorant cupidity on the one hand and ignorant credulity on the other; but always the voices of a few sane men are raised against the prevailing folly. The last century in England was drug-drunken. Rum Remedies. "Surfeit water," "cephalic snuff," "pectoral drops," "rock oil" and endless elixirs and cordials were swallowed or snuffed to such extreme that the government, pressed by bills and an empty treasury, placed a tax on secret medicines and to-day derives an income of $1,000,000 a year from the penny stamp duty. An unfortunate thing, perhaps, since it is said that a large proportion of the people believe that a "patent" medicine is a medicine examined by the government and stamped with its approval, and therefore a sovereign remedy for the ills that befall even loyal subjects. The quantity of secret or "patent" medicine that finds its burning way down human gullets every year is tremendous. The wearisome statistician could tell us just how many miles of sorrowful intestine they irritate, just how much of a river, floating how many cargoes of pestiferous pills and powders, the annual inpouring of bitter and nauseous liquids would make. Frightful, but not surprising when we consider the prevalence of an obdurate faith in the power of drugs to restore or maintain the failing forces of life. Men, otherwise sensible, who have, by years of neglect of the conditions of health, come to a sudden collapse of energy, walk confidently into the physician's office for a prescription that will restore the bounce of health within a week. They are not willing to submit to the personal denial and personal care which the plain conditions declare, but demand in effect a draught of that cordial of health which no bottle ever did or ever will contain. With this confidence in the potency of drugs, useful in the highest degree when intelligently prescribed, there is nothing to wonder at in the appalling consumption of unknown nostrums compounded by unknown men. With "vext duodenum and agitated pylorus," due to irregularities or errors of living, immediate or ancestral, or with "a feeling of goneness," due entirely to a lack of fresh air and proper breathing, men become the easy victims of the habit of drugging and this habit easily leads them to seek panaceas for "all-overish" pains, mys Rum Remedies. terious "trembling in the legs," loss of appetite, and all the rest. In this glorious republic, under the protection of the expanded wings of the great American eagle, it is the privilege of every man to make what sort of receptacle he will of his own stomach The land, where, girt with friend or foe, If, in a moment of "goneness," the free citizen yearns for the sustaining vigor of Somebody's Revivifying Stomach Tonic, there is no iron hand of tyranny to restrain his utmost indulgence. But those restless disturbers of other men's opinions, those logical investigators who have in all times raised warning voices, are determined that a man shall know just what he takes that it is no priceless elixir of life, no precious drops such as transformed the senile Dolliver into a joyous youth, but mostly cheap rum. So under the provisions of the Food and Drugs act, some years ago, the Massachusetts health officials began an investigation into the character of popular "patent" or proprietary medicines, with particular reference to tonics and bitters, the widely advertised substitutes for alcholic drinks. The quantity consumed is enormous. In the spring, when the young man's fancy lightly turns to thoughts of girl, the fancy of most people solemnly turns to thoughts of "blood purifiers." There is traditional notion that the blood has accumulated an assortment of poisons which must be washed away or neutralized by herb bitters or tonics. The essential element of most of these is alcohol, which they contain in quantities as large as are found in ordinary alcoholic beverages. As "non-alcoholic blood purifiers they are a delusion and as "substitutes for whisky" they are a snare. The first examination of forty-six samples of tonics, blood purifiers and substitutes for whisky, gave this result. To understand just what this means a glance at the percentage of alcohol in ordinary beverages, taken for hilarious purposes, is necessary: A certain amount of alcohol is necessary to preserve some of the ingredients of the tonics, but if 4 per cent. of alcohol will preserve the elements of beer, 40 per cent. is hardly demanded to preserve the ingredients of any other mixture. The latest reports of the analysts show, for example, that in the weakest specimen of a much advertised "cure for inebriety," there is 35 per cent. of alcohol and a quarter of a grain of morphia to every ounce, and the victim is told to exceed the prescribed dose when an increase is needed. It is a most obstinate toper who cannot find in this mixture of bad whisky and opium a sufficient substitute for the watered whisky of the doggery. "Not a rum drink" is the enticing label of another popular tonic, yet it contains three times as much alcohol as beer, twice as much as Edinburgh ale and fully as much as the Spanish and Italian wines. The maximum dose of this anti-rum drink is equal to a pint bottle of claret a day. Dr. Farquharson, a high authority, fixes the maximum amount of alcohol that the regular drinker may take at about two ounces a day. The max |