injection, growing larger with each following injection. The intervals
between injections vary a good deal, but a week is an average. The
number of injections that should be given depends largely on the purpose
in view. If the salvarsan is relied on to produce a cure, the number may
be large--as high as twenty or more. If it is used only to clear up a
contagious sore, a single injection may be enough for the time being.
But when only a few injections are used, mercury becomes the main
reliance, and a patient who cannot have all the salvarsan he needs
should not expect two or three doses of it to produce a cure. The
publicity which has been given to this form of treatment has led many
patients to take matters into their own hands and to go to a physician
and ask him to give them a dose of salvarsan, much as they might order a
highball on a cold day. The physician who is put in a position like this
is at a disadvantage in caring for his patient, and the patient in the
end pays for his mistaken idea that he knows what is good for himself.
The only judge of the necessity of giving salvarsan, and the amount and
the frequency with which to give it, is the expert physician, and no
patient who is wise will try to take the thing into his own hands. There
are even good reasons for believing that the patient who is
insufficiently treated with salvarsan is at times worse off than the
patient who, unable to afford the drug at all, has had to depend for his
cure entirely on mercury.

It is one of the tragedies of the modern private practice of medicine
that the physician has so often to consult the patient's purse in giving
or withholding salvarsan, and for that reason, except in the
well-to-do, it is seldom used to the best advantage. Such a drug, so
powerful an agent in the conservation of the public health, should be
available to all who need it in as large amounts as necessary, without a
moment's hesitation as to whether the patient can afford it or not. It
is not too much to urge that private patent rights should not be allowed
to control the price and distribution of such a commodity to the public.
Upon the payment of suitable royalties to the inventor the manufacture
of such a drug should be thrown open to properly supervised competition,
as in the case of diphtheria antitoxin, or be taken over by the
Government and distributed at cost, at least to hospitals. To bring
about such a revision of our patent law every thinking man a