ain Baby Friend,--a touching
name, and in which one would not expect to find an enemy in the guise of
a deadly poison,--is a combination of sweetened water and morphine. This
disgraceful mixture, considering the use for which it was designed,
would be bad enough if it was the evil concoction of a man rendered
irresponsible by a strenuous craving for blood-money, but to know that
its proprietor is a woman seems beyond belief. I wonder if she would
feel sufficiently respectable and decently clean enough to stand on the
platform and face an audience of American mothers? I think not.

Catarrh powders contain, as a rule, cocaine, one of the most insidious
and dangerous of drugs. None of them cure catarrh, they simply relieve
for the time being at the expense of injuring more vital parts. Their
use also very frequently disposes the victim to postpone treatment that
would be beneficial until too late. M----'s Kidney Pills were said to
cure Bright's disease, gravel, all urinary troubles and pain in the back
or groins from kidney disease. Analysis showed them to consist of
ordinary white sugar. They contained absolutely no medication, and yet
they were freely sold to cure the above serious conditions. A famous
expectorant and an equally famous cough syrup contain opium and when
taken for the cure of cough are distinctly dangerous.

It is foolish and unnecessary to name any other patent medicine in the
list of those that are distinctly harmful and dangerous to use. There
are hundreds of them. It would take a book of a thousand pages to give
their names and write the data that have been obtained against them.
Every advertised medicine should be absolutely avoided. I could fill
this book with the death certificates of those who have died as a
result of the indiscriminate use of advertised nostrums. It is an
appalling record; the unfortunate part being that it is impossible to
acquaint every citizen with the facts.

Duplicity and misrepresentation are not confined to patent medicines.
Even the mineral waters are misrepresented and lied about. A
much-advertised lithia water, before the passage of the pure food and
drugs act, was highly vaunted as a uric acid eliminant because of the
lithia it was said to contain. Thousands, probably millions of gallons
of it have been sold during the past twenty years, to people who could
not very well afford to pay for it, because of this claim, despite the
fact that it is well known that lithia i