The handwriting of Macready, the actor, was curiously illegible, and
especially when writing a pass to the theatre. One day, at New Orleans,
Mr. Brougham obtained one of these orders for a friend. On handing it to
the latter gentleman, he asked,--
"What is this, Brougham?"
"A pass to see Macready."
"Why, I thought it was a physician's prescription, which it most
resembles."
"So it does," acquiesced Mr. Brougham, again looking over the queer
hieroglyphics. "Let us go to an apothecary's and have it made up."
Turning to the nearest druggist's, the paper was given to the clerk, who
gave it a careless glance, and proceeded to get a vial ready.
With a second look at the paper, down came a tincture bottle, and the vial
was half filled. Then there was a pause.
Brougham and his friend pretended not to notice the proceedings. The clerk
was evidently puzzled, and finally broke down, and rang for the
proprietor, an elderly and pompous looking individual, who issued from the
inner sanctum. The clerk presented the paper, the old dispenser adjusted
his eye-glasses, examined the document for a few seconds, and then, with a
depreciating expression,--a compound of pity and contempt for the
ignorance of the subordinate,--he proceeded to fill the vial with some
apocryphal fluid, and, giving it a professional "shake up," duly corked
and labelled it.
[Illustration: THE "FREE PASS" PRESCRIPTION.]
"A cough mixture, gentlemen," he said, with a bland smile, as he handed it
to the gentleman in waiting, "and a very excellent one, too. Fifty cents,
if you please."
In a copy of the London Lancet, 1844, is reported Dr. Graham's bill. In
the same number of which is a reply by an apothecary, who asks if "the old
and respectable class of apothecaries are to be forever abolished;" and
he quotes the assertion from one of the articles in the bill: "Is it not a
notorious fact that the masses of chemists and druggists know nothing of
the business in which they are engaged?" Dr. Graham certainly ought to
have known.
Druggists are liable to make mistakes,--as are all men; but carelesness
and ignorance, one or both, are usually to be found at the bottom of the
fatalities so common in the dispensing of prescriptions. I know an old and
experienced druggist who sold a pot of extract belladonna for extract
dandelion. In the same city, on the same street, I know another who was
prosecuted for dispensing opium for taraxicum, which carelesness caused
the death of two children. The following mistake was less fatal, but only
think of the poor lady's feelings!
A servant girl was sent to a certain drug store we know of, who, in a
"rich brogue," which might have caused General Scott's eyes to water with
satisfaction, and his ears to lop like Bottom's after his transformation
by the mischievous fairy, she asked for some "caster ile," which she
wished effectually disguised.
"Do you like soda water?" asked the druggist.
"O, yis, thank ye, sir," was the prompt reply; "an' limmun, sir, if ye
plaze; long life to yeze."
The man then proceeded to draw a glass, strongly flavored with lemon, with
a dose of oil cast upon its troubled waters.
"Drink it at one swallow," said he, presenting it to the smiling Bridget.
This she did, again thanking the gentlemanly clerk.
"What are you waiting for?" he inquired, seeing that she still lingered.
"I'm waitin' for the caster ile, sir," said the girl.
"O! Why you have just taken it," replied the soda-drug man.
"Och! Murther! It was for a sick man I wanted it, an' not meself at all."
[Illustration: THE WRONG PATIENT.]
While there have been great changes in the drug trade during the last
fifty years, necessary to the increasing demand for drugs, the
establishment of wholesale houses and some specialties, and in cities, the
substitution of cigars, soda water, patent medicines, etc., for groceries
and provisions, the dispensing apothecary is nearer to what he was
hundreds of years ago, as we asserted at the commencement of this chapter,
than any other professional we know of. The paraphernalia of the shop is
nearly the same. There is no improvement in pot, in jar, in tables, in
spatula; the old, ungainly mortar is not _substituted_ by a mill; the
signs of ounces and drachms remain the same, though so near alike that
they are easily and often mistaken one for the other, and the prescription
before the dispenser is prefixed by a relic of the astrological symbol of
Jupiter,--"the god of medicine to the ancient Greeks and Egyptians,"--as a
species of superstitious invocation. In our largest cities even, in the
shop windows, the mammoth flashing blue bottles, "a relic of empiric
charlatanry," still brighten our street corners, and frighten our horses
at night, as in the days of our forefathers.
We intimated that "patent medicines" had added greatly to the trade. This
we shall treat of under its proper head. Many have arisen from penury to
affluence, from obscurity to renown, in the drug trade of later years; but
take away the tobacco trade, the soda fountain, and the outside patent
nostrums, and wherein would the apothecary now differ from his
predecessors?
"The Yankees bate the divil for swallowing drugs," said an Irishman.
"A paddy will take nothing but castor oil," replied the Yankee.
Yankee or Irish, English or Scotch, French or German, they all rush to the
drug store for pills, for powder, for whiskey (?), for tobacco, for patent
medicines, and the druggists flourish.
From the window near which I write this, I overlook a wholesale drug store
on a "retail street." The front windows contain only _patent medicines_,
and the flashy signs that announce their virtues. Few prescriptions are
dispensed within. Before the door, piled nearly a story high, I have just
counted ninety-eight boxes, and some barrels. There are hundreds of these
drug houses scattered over this city; and every other city of America has
its quota.
Yes, the Irishman had the right of it; "the Yankees _do_ bate the divil
for swallowing drugs." Further, it is my positive opinion that his
infernal majesty beats a good many of them by the encouragement of their
purchase; and, kind reader, if you have the ghost of a doubt of the truth
of our intimation, don't, I pray, promulgate it, but, like a wise judge,
withhold your decision until the evidence is in; until you hear our
exposition of "patent medicines."
A patient comes to the city for the purpose of consulting some experienced
physician for a certain complaint. Probably he gets a prescription, with
instructions to go to a certain respectable druggist or apothecary in town
to have the necessary medicines put up. Of course a respectable physician
knows of a reliable apothecary. The patient, in nine cases out of ten,
desires to retain the prescription, and often does so. He goes to another
drug store, more convenient, for a second quantity of the same; and now
let me ask the patient,--no matter who or where he is,--did you ever get
the same kind of medicine, in _look_, color, quantity, and
taste,--all,--the second time, from the same prescription? I have often
heard the patient complain that he could not get the same put up at the
very store where he got the original prescription compounded.
I once was called to visit a lady who was laboring under great
prostration; "sickness at the stomach," with constipation.
"What is the disease?" inquired the anxious husband, who had previously
employed two regular physicians for the case, and discharged them both.
"Nux vomica," was the reply.
I gathered up three of the vials on the table, and, taking them to the
designated apothecary's, I demanded the prescriptions corresponding with
the numbers on the vials. These were duplicates.
He had made a mistake! that's all. He had compounded an ounce of tincture
of nux instead of a drachm! Not that a drachm could be taken at a dose
with impunity; but whatever the dose was, the patient was continually
taking eight times as much as the physician intended to prescribe.
Another reason of the failure of the prescribing physician meeting the
expectation anticipated, is the use of old and inert medicines.
Where a man's treasure is, his heart is also. An apothecary's interest is
more in nostrums, tobacco, _soda_, etc., than in medicines; how, then, can
he follow the excellent advice of Dr. Bullyn, in article "14, that he
peruse often his wares, that they corrupt not."
But the greatest cheat is in the "substituting" business; the "_quid pro
quo_." Horse aloes may be bought for ten cents a pound. Podophyllin costs
seventy-five cents an ounce. They each act as cathartic, and I have
detected the former put in place of the latter. How is the physician to
know the cheat? How is the patient to detect it? Perhaps the former
_stuff_--aloes--may have given the victim the hemorrhoids. One dose may be
quite sufficient to produce that distressing disease. This only calls for
another prescription! So it looks a deal like a "you tickle me, and I'll
tickle you" profession, at best. Thus the patient becomes disgusted, and
resorts to our next--"Patent Medicines."
In closing this chapter on Apothecaries, I must relate a little scene to
which I was an eye-witness. Meantime, let me say to the "respectable
druggist," Don't be offended if I have slighted you by leaving you out, in
my description of the various kinds of apothecaries enumerated above.
There is a respectable class of druggists whom I have not mentioned, and
doubtless you belong to that order.
On going home one evening, not long since, I observed several boys, loud
and boisterous, surrounding a lamp post. As I approached, I heard, among
the cries and vociferations,--
"Howld to it, Jimmy; it'll be the makin' of ye."
I drew nearer, and discovered a sickly-looking lad leaning up against the
lamp post, with the stump of a cigar in his mouth, and a taller boy
endeavoring to hold him up by his jacket collar, while a short-set urchin
was stooping behind to assist in the task. They were evidently endeavoring
to teach "Jimmy" to smoke. The poor fellow was deathly sick, and faintly
begged to be let off.
"O, no, no. Stick to it, Jimmy; it'll be the makin' of yese," was
repeated.
"Sure, ye'll niver do for a _sample clark in a potecary shop_," said
another, as he blew a cloud of smoke from his own cigar stump into the
pale face of the victim to modern accomplishments.
[Illustration: A CANDIDATE FOR THE PRESIDENCY.]
"General Grant smokes, Jimmy, and you'll never be a man if you don't
learn," added a voice minus the brogue.