and teetotaler, offered to pay for it as long as my
friend would take it faithfully. The irony of it makes one wonder how
many earnest advocates of total abstinence are in reality addicted to
the liquor habit.

Last summer a district nurse of the summer corps who visited city
babies under two years of age encountered in the hallway of a tenement
a bevy of frenzied women. A baby lay on the bed gasping and "rolling
its eyes up into the top of its head." The nurse asked the frightened
mother what she had been giving it. "Nothing at all," said the woman.
But a telltale bottle of soothing sirup showed that the child was dying
from morphine poisoning. Happily the nurse came in time to save it.

Is it not pitiful, this grasping for a poison in an extremity; this
seizing of a defective rope to escape the fire?

[Illustration: LEARNING HOW TO KEEP BABY WELL WITHOUT PATENT
MEDICINES
Recreation Pier, New York City, Summer, 1908]

The patent-medicine evil cannot be cured by occasional exposure or by
overexposure. Nor can it be cured by legislation, legislation,
legislation, unless laws are rigidly enforced.

Occasional exposure is no better than occasional advertising of good
things. The patent-medicine business thrives on constant, not
occasional, advertising. Leading advertisers expect so little from the
first notice that they would not take the trouble to write out a single
advertisement. That is the reason merchants charge advertising in the
programmes of church, festival, and glee-club concert to charity, not
to business. Warning people once does no more lasting good than sending
a child to school once a month. The exposure of patent-medicine evils
must be as constant as efforts to sell the medicines.

Overexposure is ineffective. It is the evils of patent medicines that
do harm, not their name and not their patents. The medical profession
has in vain protested against proprietary medicines. Ethical barriers
cannot be erected by resolution. Calling things unethical does not make
them unethical. The mere patenting of medicines for profit does not
make the medicine injurious any more than the mere mixing of unpatented
drugs makes a physician safe. Physicians who would not themselves
patent a drug will use certain patented drugs whose ingredients are
known to be safe and uniform. True exposure of patent-medicine evils
will enable the average physician and the average layman to distinguish
the dangerous from the