Читать книгу The Great American Fraud - Samuel Hopkins Adams - Страница 18

A distinguished public health official and medical writer once made this jocular suggestion to me:

"Let us buy in large quantities the cheapest Italian vermouth, poor gin and bitters. We will mix them in the proportion of three of vermouth to two of gin, with a dash of bitters, dilute and bottle them by the short quart, label them 'Smith's Reviver ana Blood Purifier; dose, one wineglassful before each meal'; advertise them to cure erysipelas, bunions, dyspepsia, heat rash, fever and ague, and consumption; and to prevent loss of hair, smallpox, old age, sunstroke and near-sightedness, and make our everlasting fortunes selling them to the temperance trade."

"That sounds to me very much like a cocktail," said I.

"So it is," he replied. "But it's just as much a medicine as Peruna and not as bad a drink."

Peruna, or, as its owner, Dr. S. B. Hartman, of Columbus, Ohio (once a physician in good standing), prefers to write it, Pe-ru-na, is at present the most prominent proprietary nostrum in the country. It has taken the place once held by Greene's Nervura and by Paine's Celery Compound, and for the same reason which made them popular. The name of that reason is alcohol.* Peruna is a stimulant pure and simple, and it is the more dangerous in that it sails under the false colors of a benign purpose.

* Dr. Ashbel P. Grinnell of New York City, who has made a

statistical study of patent medicines, asserts as a provable

fact that more alcohol is consumed in this country in patent

medicines than is dispensed in a legal way by licensed

liquor venders, barring the sale of ales and beer.

According to an authoritative statement given out in private circulation a few years ago by its proprietors, Peruna is a compound of seven drugs with cologne spirits. This formula, they assure me, has not been materially changed. None of the seven drugs is of any great potency. Their total is less than one-half of 1 per cent, of the product. Medicinally they are too inconsiderable, in this proportion, to produce any effect. There remains to Peruna only water and cologne spirits, roughly in the proportion of three to one. Cologne spirits is the commercial term for alcohol.