Editorial August 7, 1902 Issue

Therapeutics Adrift

W. with contributions from W., H. S. H.

The one stable fact of the drug-remedy system is its conceded instability. In modern times especially, the changes have been so swift and sweeping that the "divinely appointed" remedies of one age, if not decade, have frequently been remanded to the garret as worthless, by the authorities of the next. This faulty premise in the divine provision argument, finds illustration in the following old and reliable prescriptions, sent us by a friend.

For the ills of a baby who is cutting his teeth our mothers were advised to "Take a live Mowle and put hym in a brasse pot and drowyne hymme, and hange hym on a thred to drye by ye fire; when ye wolde use it, lay it, with bladders of saffron, with a clothe to ye sore place."

Should a boy, the happy possessor of his first knife, cut himself, the bleeding of the wound may thus be stanched: "Write ye foure letters, A, O, G, L, with the bloode of ye wounde about ye wounde."

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