SINCE the dawn of history medicines have been employed for treating the sick and ailing. We read of the use of herbs in the oldest books and legends. The gods in Olympus were treated with medicine. In every savage tribe medicines are used. They must have been employed in prehistoric ages. Savages learn the use of medicines from the animals around them. Herdsmen notice that in certain diseases the animals under their care eat certain herbs, and they try these herbs on themselves.
The oldest medical documents were those of ancient Egypt, Greece and India. In the Papyrus Ebers a very large number of drugs are enumerated. Hippocrates, the father of medicine, who flourished twenty-three centuries ago, was a great surgeon and a great nature curer. He employed sun and air baths, water cure, exercises, rest, massage, etc., but he also employed numerous medicines. Needless to say, he was an advocate of a correct diet. He left the saying, that a good doctor must be a good cook. He insisted that every doctor should know the different curative effects of bread made from wholemeal flour, and bread made from refined white flour, etc.
In the course of ages, thousands and thousands of substances have been used medicinally. Medication has changed from century to century, and with the rise of modern chemistry, medicines are changing from year to year and from day to day in an absolutely bewildering fashion. The great drug houses wish to push their products, and they try their best to destroy the use of the oldest, and therefore most reliable drugs and medicines, which have proved their value by thousands of years of use.
Several decades ago, every doctor had to study botany so as to enable him to gather curative herbs. If he was called to an isolated farmhouse, or cottage in the wilds, he was able to find in the garden or in the meadows and woods the medicine required by the sick man. That wonderful knowledge has been destroyed, partly by the great drug houses, and partly by the medical schools, which treat with contempt every natural remedy.
If it is known that a certain herb has wonderful curative power, then the manufacturing chemists proclaim that the curative principle should be isolated and used. China bark, which was a wonderful natural remedy, has been repeated by Quinine, its extractive. Quinine is in most respects vastly inferior to China bark. The homoeopath uses China bark.
Digitalis is a valuable remedy in heart disease and is universally employed by doctors. It is true it is used with indiscretion, and probably does more harm than good. However, the manufacturing chemists have endeavoured to destroy the use of Digitalis by producing numerous extractives, which are supposed to contain the curative principle in a concentrated form. Not withstanding their endeavours, the digitalis plant has not been suspected by any chemical production. All the extractives are inferior to the natural article.
Opium is a valuable natural drug, and it is comparatively safe to use. Its extractive, Morphia, is extremely unsafe. Addicts to the deadly drug are usually morphinists, not opium takers, except among the yellow races. Coca is a benumbing herb which has been used by the Indians since time immemorial as a tonic. It is relatively safe. Its extractive Cocaine, is extremely dangerous.
This list of drugs could be lengthened interminably. Nature has combined in the healing plants a number of curative elements which act most beneficially in their balanced entirely. The entire natural drug is as superior to the extractives as wholemeal bread, as entire sugar is to refined sugar, as entire salt is to refined salt.
Medication is subject to fashion. Every drug house throws on the market new drugs in large numbers in order to obtain a profitable monopoly. Medical and pharmaceutical authorities are induced by the drug houses to experiment with every new drug recommended by them. Innumerable drugs which we were told were of inestimable value, have disappeared after a few years, or after a few months.
Doctors are bombarded every day with circulars extolling the curative powers of certain drugs, and numerous commercial travellers go from doctor to doctor, teaching them the use of new drugs and injections, leaving samples, and urging them to experiment with these new remedies, and to give to the makers written opinions as to their value.
The bewildering changes in drug fashions have brought about a complete change in medication. The modern doctor uses an entirely different set of drugs from those which were used fifty or a hundred years ago. The proprietors of the various drugs tell us in their advertisements, that their latest drug or injection is “most scientific”, and they publish in support of their contention the opinions of distinguished professors and general practitioners, which may, or may not, have been obtained for a cash consideration.
Many scientists are impecunious, and there are in every country, men with a professional title who are willing to recommend almost any article produced by the great drug houses.
The way in which drugs are evolved, produced, recommended, and sold is somewhat scandalous, and innumerable doctors are disgusted with the way in which drugs are boosted in the public press and also in the scientific press. The consequence has been that many doctors refuse to employ new drugs, that the literature and samples which reach doctors every day are thrown with a contemptuous grimace into the wastepaper basket.
There are two kinds of proprietary medicines. There are those which are recommended directly to the public in the popular press, such as Beechams Pills, Owbridges Lung Tonic, Kruschen Salts, and innumerable others. One need not go to the doctor and be told that one should use a remedy which is recommended in every newspaper, and on countless gigantic posters on the hoardings.
There are those manufacturers of drugs who wish to sell to the public directly, and there are others who wish to sell their drugs to the public through the doctors. The second kind of drug is advertised exclusively in medical journals. Medical men are probably as gullible as the generality of men. Busy medical men have not much time to study the professional literature. The prosperity of the medical journals depends very largely on the number of advertisements which they publish. The leading medical journals publish every week, twenty, thirty, forty or more pages of advertisements, and the bulk of these are recommendations of certain proprietary medicines.
These advertisements, which frequently cover an entire page, are very carefully drawn up so as to draw attention to the salient matter at a mere glance. If influenza is about, then there may be in the medical journals, page advertisements with the caption, “Fluelite for Flu”, or there may be other advertisements such as, “Rheumatisan for Rheumatism”, “Diphtherosan for Diphtheria”, “Somulan for Sleep”, etc.
The busy doctor who is worried by an old lady who cannot sleep, sees in very large letters the caption, “Somulan for Sleep”. He glances at the very alluring text underneath the heading, and next day he writes out a prescription for “Somulan”, explaining to the old lady that it is the latest and most scientific drug. The various drug titles given are not drug names as far as I know. They are fancy names which I have invented on the spur of the moment.
The proprietary medicines, which are advertised only in the medical journals, are probably no more scientific than the well- known drugs advertised in the lay press. They have this advantages to the doctor, that he can prescribe drugs of which the average patient has never heard. Consequently, by prescribing them, the doctor obtains a certain prestige, especially if the drug possesses a very scientific or inspiring name.
Many experienced elderly doctors have so often been disappointed when using drugs advertised in the professional journals, or even recommended in the professional journals in apparently weighty articles, that they have almost given up prescribing medicine. I have met a considerable number of doctors who have explained to me that medicines are useless, that their efficacy cannot be relied upon, that they prescribe practically no medicine unless the patient insists upon their prescription, and they potter along leaving patients more or less to nature and to their fate.
From the point of view of many doctors, ordinary drugs are quite unreliable. The only reliable drugs are those which give sleep and which abolish pain. It is therefore not surprising to find that doctors carry with them enormous quantities of deadly drugs. Hence it often happens that when a doctor loses his medicine case, great alarm is created, for we are told that the lost medicine case contains sufficient poison to kill a considerable number of people. There are, of course, a few drugs which doctors can rely upon.
An adequate dose of castor oil, rhubarb or aloes, and of various salts, has a well-known effect. These are frequently prescribed, but here again we find that the old- fashioned, simple drugs, such as those mentioned, are being replaced by far more expensive drugs, which are extolled as being far more scientific, etc.
James Ellis Barker wrote a very large number of books, both under the name James Ellis Barker and under his real German name Otto Julius Eltzbacher, The Truth about Homœopathy; Rough Notes on Remedies with William Murray; Chronic Constipation; The Story of My Eyes; Miracles Of Healing and How They are Done; Good Health and Happiness; New Lives for Old: How to Cure the Incurable; My Testament of Healing; Cancer, the Surgeon and the Researcher; Cancer, how it is Caused, how it Can be Prevented with a foreward by William Arbuthnot Lane; Cancer and the Black Man etc.