vol.
49, pp. 343-344.

A few manufacturers, as the years went by, fell afoul of this and other
provisions of the law. In 1918 a Reading, Pennsylvania, firm entered a
plea of guilty and received a fifty dollar fine for putting on the
market an adulterated and misbranded version of Dr. Bateman's Pectoral
Drops.[117] The law required that all medicines sold under a name
recognized in the _United States pharmacopoeia_ or the _National
formulary_, and Bateman's was included in the latter, must not differ
from the standard of strength, quality, or purity as established by
these volumes. Yet the Bateman Drops produced in Reading, the
government charged, fell short. They contained only 27.8 percent of the
alcohol and less than a tenth of the morphine that they should have
had. While short on active ingredients, the Drops were long on claims.
The wrapper boasted that the medicine was "effective as a remedy for
all fluxes, spitting of blood, agues, measles, colds, coughs, and to
put off the most violent fever; as a treatment, remedy, and cure for
stone and gravel in the kidneys, bladder, and urethra, shortness of
breath, straightness of the breast; and to rekindle the most natural
heat in the bodies by which they restore the languishing to perfect
health." Okell and Dicey had scarcely promised more. By 20th-century
standards, the government asserted, these claims were false and
fraudulent.

[117] Department of Agriculture, Bureau of Chemistry, Notices of
Judgment under the Food and Drugs Act, Notice of Judgment 6222,
United States vs. Pabst Pure Extract Co., 1919.

Other manufacturers sold Bateman's Drops without running afoul of the
law. In 1925, ninety-nine years after the Philadelphia College of
Pharmacy pamphlet was printed, one North Carolina firm was persuaded
that it still was relevant to tell potential customers, in a handbill,
that its Drops were being made in strict conformity with the College
formula.[118] For Compound Tincture of Opium and Gambir Compound,
however, most manufacturers chose to follow the _National formulary_
specifications, which remained official until 1936.

[118] Original handbill, distributed by Standard Drug Co.,
Elizabeth City, North Carolina, 1925, preserved in the files of
the Bureau of Investigation, American Medical Association,
Chicago, Ill.

Another old English patent medicine against which the Department of
Agriculture was forced to ta