PILLS POTIONS, AND PLASTERS. Their Mysteries to be Revealed.

Free Lance, Volume V, Issue 230, 26 November 1904, Page 6

PILLS POTIONS, AND PLASTERS. Their Mysteries to be Revealed.

PEOPLE who have for years been repositories for patent medicines are annoyed at the new law, not yet m operation, which will compel owners of proprietary cure-alls to state on the label a list of the contents. Chemists will be glad, for there isn't a patent medicine known to the distressed or diseased that any ordinary chemist cannot exactly copy. In the. near future, when the person who has been treating his liver to his favourite mil or mixture, instead of to> violent exercise, sees "Poison" staring him m the face from the label, he will perhaps cry off and shake' that organ up by a twenty-mile walk. The chemist will be able to imitate that pill with absolute exactness, but he won't put "Poison" on the label, that's all He will score. * • Both the "Post" and the "Times" defend the secresy of the patent medicine, and think the new law will rob the people of their favourite cures, and the vendors of their New Zealand profits. Of course, Cockle and Holloway are household words, and all that sort of thing, and if the suffering settler with a liver reads on the box that Squeakem's pills were composed of aloes, ginger, and chemist's soap, he'd get the chemist to make for him the pill that made millions for the patentee But the new law won't hurt any patent medicine that has won a deserved reputation with the public. It is only the bogus mixtures of ignorant quacks that will find a setback. » • * The assumption that the State isn't keeping faith with patentees by disclosing formulae is not quite logical. The formula of every patent medicine is known to the chemist. If it isn't, he can find out The State gives a firm a right to use a name for a mixture of drugs. It doesn't give anybody a sole right to sell any special combination of drugs. Nobody, for instance, could prevent you turning out a pill built on the Beecham principle and the Beecham ingredients If you called it "Brown's Early Kise Pills" or "Smith's Sunset Cubes," you could

make a fortune- like , Tom,- of St Helen's— if you advertised well.

We believe that it is absolutely essential to the health of the community, and especially the infant part of it, that patent medicinesshould be branded "with their contents. Infant powders, cough mixtures, and so on, harmless enough insmall doses, may cause death m the hands of ignorant and persistent users of everything that is advertised. The ignorant know what a red "Poison" label means, however, and the new law is possibly for thenu The fact that patent medicine proprietors make immense fortunes, and chemists, who could compound anexactly similar medicine, don't make immense fortunes, shows that the chief virtue of the said medicines — to the vendors — is in the name. The new law proposes to find out what's in a name, and it is a good law despite dyspeptic twaddle to the contrary.