all drugs were good:  when one “took something” internally for everything that happened to him.  Now the pendulum has swung to the other side—­that is all.  If we can ever settle down to the rational way of regarding these things, we shall discover, what sensible medical men have always known, and what druggists as well as mere laymen can not afford to neglect, that there is no such thing as a panacea, and that all rational therapeutics is based on common sense study of the disease—­finding out what is the cause and endeavoring to abate that cause.  The cause may be such that surgery is indicated, or serum, or regulation of diet, or change of scene.  It may obviously indicate the administration of a drug.  I once heard a clever lawyer in a poisoning case, in an endeavor to discredit a physician, whom we shall call Dr. Jones, tell the following anecdote:  (Dr. Jones, who had been called in when the victim was about to expire, had recommended the application of ice).  Said the lawyer: 

“A workman was tamping a charge of blasting-powder with a crowbar, when the charge went off prematurely and the bar was driven through the unfortunate man’s body, so that part of it protruded on either side:  A local physician was summoned, and after some study he pronounced as follows:  ’Now, if I let that bar stay there, you’ll die.  If I pull it out, you’ll die.  But I’ll give you a pill that may melt it where it is!’ In this emergency,” the lawyer went on to say, “Dr. Jones doubtless would have prescribed ice.”

Now the pill to melt the crowbar may stand for our former excessive and absurd regard for drugs.  The application of ice in the same emergency may likewise represent a universal resort to hydrotherapy.  Neither of them is logical.  There is place for each, but there are emergencies that can not be met with either.  Still, to abandon one method of treatment simply because additional methods have proved to be valuable, would be as absurd as to give up talking upon the invention of writing or to prohibit the raising of corn on land that will produce wheat.

No:  we shall doubtless continue to use drugs and we shall continue to need the druggist.  What can he do to make his business more valued and respected, more useful to the public and more profitable to himself?  For there can be no doubt that he will finally succeed in attaining all these desirable results together, or fail in all.  Here and there we may find a man who is making a fortune out of public credulity and ignorance, or, on the other hand, one who is giving the public more service than it pays for and ruining himself in the process; but in general and on the average personal and public interest run pretty well hand in hand.  Henry Ford makes his millions because he is producing something that the people want.  St. Jacob’s Oil, once the most widely advertised nostrum on the continent, cost its promoters a fortune because there was nothing in it that one might not find in some other oil or grease.