Part 2

Cochran & Riley, Jackson, Tenn., have opened their second store in that city. This is known as the City Drug Store, and is said to be a very handsome store. In fact, one of the handsomest in the State. The new store has a metal ceiling and the fixtures are of mahogany. A very large mirror, 78 × 90 inches, occupies a position in front of the prescription case. In the centre of the store is a very handsome fountain, having 50 feet of serving space. This is the only fountain in Jackson that is located in the centre of a store.

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The Powe Drug Company, Laurens, S. C., has opened a store in the building formerly occupied by the Dodson, Edwards Co. The store is in charge of D. J. H. Powe, assisted by Mr. James Hill, formerly of Cheraw.

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The Boyd Drug Company, Watertown, Tenn., has made an assignment to F. A. Young, cashier of the Bank of Watertown.

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R. S. McClaren, for many years with the prescription department of the Nance Drug Store, Jackson, Tenn., is now with the manufacturing department of the Tri-Tone Drug Company. Mr. J. T. Cross, of Memphis, succeeds him.

The Druggist’s Duty Concerning Coal Tar Derivatives

By F. M. SIGGINS

_Proceedings of Pennsylvania Pharmaceutical Association._

I am not a physician, I am even ignorant of the simplest forms of disease which many druggists are familiar with, and my excuse for the ignorance is, that I have studiously avoided that line of study, that I might have less incentive for the so-called art of counter prescribing.

But if I am weak in the knowledge of disease, I hope I have not spent thirty years behind the drug counter without using my faculties of observation, and in as short a time as possible, I wish to register my emphatic objection to the further open sale and use of the coal tar derivatives, and I follow with my reasons.

My first notice of their danger was brought to me 25 years ago, in the early days of Acetanilid, by a physician, who gave large doses, and was enthusiastic over the results, and saw no harm in its use. A few months later I noticed that the doses had been cut down 65 per cent., and I enquired the cause. “Well,” says he, “I nearly killed half a dozen of my best friends, and I thought it time to stop.”

As the years rolled on, scarcely a month passed by, but what some incident occurred that told me we have admitted into common use the most dangerous drugs ever placed upon the pages of our text books. I have taken 2½ grain doses of acetphenetidin with salol at various times for colds and rheumatism, and thought for years that it did me no harm, but now I am reluctantly compelled to acknowledge the contrary. For after two or three days’ use, with a dosage of 2½ grains three or four times a day I find myself almost completely benumbed and heart action very weak. And as I recall it I have always had these symptoms, though less pronounced, and yet it has taken years, with all my knowledge of the drug, to tumble to its viciousness. A physician very near to me, commenced using the same drug in small doses and in a short time could take as high as one dram, but he has quit. Here are the two extremes in dosage.

Another physician gave a colored woman the well-known mixture of soda acetanilid and caffeine and in a short time she was consuming one ounce every two weeks. The physician and woman are both dead.

Still another M. D. who dispensed about 1000 3½ grain acetanilid tablets per month, died with a bad heart. I do not know how many of them he took himself, but I have always had my convictions, and I am reasonably certain that he died without blaming the acetanilid for his condition. Our sales for one year covering our retail trade and a wholesale account of about 100 physicians totals 100,000 tablets containing some one of the coal tar products. The patent headache and pain remedies, estimated in ten cent packages, total 4000 and the cold cures 700 boxes, while the bulk goods, covering acetanilid, acetphenetidin, hexamethylene, sulfonal, trional, veronal, reaches 15 pounds. The profit on these goods should run about $400, but the public is welcome to our part of it, if they will let coal tar alone, either voluntarily or by compulsion. Now then, with these figures before us, and with the facts plainly evident to druggist or physician who uses any powers of discernment, what chance have the common people against the wiles of the impertinent manufacturer who repeatedly advertises, “Perfectly Harmless.”

I must now give you the cases which aroused in me the antagonism to the open sale of all remedies which contain any coal tar derivative, no matter how strongly fortified with correctives.

A close friend of mine had a young son come down with a cold, the physician prescribed twenty powders, two grains each of acetphenetidin. Some time after this, the box came back for a refill. I said to Jones, “Does the Doctor want you to have these again?” He replied that he did. This happened several times in the course of a few years, and the boy became old enough to come to the store himself on errands, and I could not help noticing how white and pale he was, and finally it dawned on me what ailed that boy. I went to Jones and said to him, “While it is none of my business, I want to tell you with all the force possible, to quit killing that boy.” “Well,” he says, “I told my wife what you said, and she replied, That she guessed the Doctor knew as much as I did about it, so he had dropped it, but now I believe you are right, and those powders stop right here.” The boy today is a fine strapping rosy-cheeked youth. A young man of this town, a perfect giant in strength, who could pick up my 175 pounds and throw me over his head, became addicted to the use of one of our popular effervescent preparations for headache. Some time after he commenced using it, I began to warn him against the frequent dosage, till he almost quit coming to our counter, not relishing my “preaching,” as he styled it. I saw him, however, at all the other stores in town, and knew that he was using it regularly. Several years passed, and some prescriptions containing heart remedies were ordered sent to this man, later a nurse was called. I asked the physician “What ails Brown?” “Heart trouble,” says he, I told him what I knew, and he thanked me, not knowing the cause.

In a few days this perfect specimen of physical manhood died,--died in the prime of life, and with a strength that not one man in 10,000 ever attains, died because we men, druggists, doctors, and scientists have been so slow to recognize the slow, sneaking, insidious character of these vicious remedies. No one can make me believe, when I pick up the morning paper and read the same old story day after day, “that Jones dropped dead in Texas, Smith in Maine and Black in California,” that Coal Tar was not at the bottom of 90 per cent. of them.

For my part I am in this fight to stay, I have decreased our sales all of one-half, by my own warnings against their use.

But how much avail am I to the ignorant young rounder, who comes out of a night’s debauch with a big head, and who still half drunk wanders from drug store to drug store and asks for his effervescent? No one guilty because the busy clerk or proprietor did not know that he had had another just 5 minutes previous. With all this knowledge before me I have been guilty of openly pushing the sale by the distribution of literature lauding these remedies, but no more for me.

And I ask my brother druggists not to put out any advertising which may contain on one of its pages a recommendation for a coal tar remedy. I also hope to soon see upon the statutes of every State a law similar to the one concerning Cocaine of our own State.

For I maintain that Opium or Cocaine are not one-half so deadly as Coal Tar, for while they openly show what they can do, the other works silently till the end is near. For our part, we have quit putting up a remedy of our own, and I have in mind the adoption of a label, to go on the outside of all packages sold, to read something like this:

“All remedies containing acetanilid, acetphenetidin or like product of coal tar are dangerous, and should be used with caution, in extreme cases only, and never habitually.” Considering the effect on myself, on the people I have sold to, the evidence of many physicians who have found out the pernicious effects and have felt themselves compelled to abandon or modify its use, I venture the opinion that, while it is bad medicine for any one for regular use, on those who are extremely susceptible to it, it soon vitiates the blood, and deprives them of their full powers of resistance, when sudden shock or disease o’er takes them.

Gentlemen, if by the reading of this paper, I have converted one person to my point of view I shall feel amply rewarded for the hours spent in its preparation.

PAT’S INDIGNATION.

Patrick, lately over, was working in the yards of a railroad. One day he happened to be in the yard office when the force was out. The telephone rang vigorously several times, and he at last decided it ought to be answered. He walked over to the instrument, took down the receiver, and put his mouth to the transmitter, just as he had seen others do.

“Hillo!” he called.

“Hello!” answered the voice at the other end of the line. “Is this eight-six-one-five-nine?”

“Aw, g’wan! Phwat d’ ye t’ink I am? A box car?”--_Exchange._

The Future of Pharmacy in Relation to the Modern Development of Medicine

By WILLIAM G. TOPLIS

_Proceedings of Pennsylvania Pharmaceutical Association._

The year Eighteen Hundred and Eighty-one is destined to become known in medical and pharmaceutical history as the beginning of the most revolutionary epoch in all of the experience of those branches of endeavor.

That year brought forth a discovery whose importance is not yet generally recognized. Not alone is it concerned with medicine and pharmacy, but it has performed a most important service in engineering projects of world-wide importance. It may be truthfully said that this discovery and those it led up to, made possible the building of the Panama Canal.

It was a most important factor in bringing victory to Japan and defeat to Russia.

It is banishing pestilence from its breeding places everywhere, and no department of life, either animal or vegetable, is beyond its influence. It has placed the practice of medicine upon a scientific basis, and inaugurated the era of preventive medicine. The day of curative measures, with which we are most familiar, is passing. In most of the cities and large communities of the world, Public Hygiene has become a very important department of government. Observe our own city of Philadelphia; we have there the largest water purification plant in existence. Its effect, in that city is to reduce the number of typhoid fever cases 80 per cent. of the former total, and perhaps 100 per cent. of the water borne typhoid, peculiar to the Philadelphia water supply. A case of typhoid fever commonly runs three months. In money it is worth from fifty to one hundred dollars to the attending physician, perhaps half of that to the druggist.

A similar change has taken place concerning diphtheria. Anti-toxin and treatment are supplied to the patient at the expense of the communities in by far the greater number of cases.

Smallpox is practically unknown, for similar reasons.

Bacterins as prophylactic measures against typhoid, and a number of other diseases, are coming into increased usefulness.

Chemo Therapy. The latest advance has done astounding things. With one treatment of 606, Salvarsan, specific disease disappears to return no more. At least it seems so at this early date.

Much is promised from the same source in the eradication of cancer.

Leprosy, incurable, from remote antiquity, seems about to succumb to the new enlightenment.

The extermination of tuberculosis is within hailing distance. And so on through the whole catalogue of ills that plagued the people, unrestrained, less than 30 years ago.

The transcendental discovery of Dr. Koch, that has made possible all of these wonders, and many others beside, and others yet to come, is the simple fact that microscopic organisms grow in pure culture, upon a piece of boiled potato. This is the corner-stone upon which has been built the whole science of modern Bacteriology. With these facts confronting us and others of like nature to follow, we naturally turn to inquire what effect these changes are likely to exert upon the practice of pharmacy.

Every pharmacist has observed the greatly increased development of the commercial side of the drug business as compared with its scientific side, which rather seems to be accorded a secondary place in the conduct of its affairs, regardless of the fact that this feature is the one that gives it character, and the only one that distinguishes it from ordinary merchandising.

Thirty years ago the physicians whom we knew were high-minded, dignified gentlemen, who held the ethics of their profession in such esteem that they scorned to violate them. We could not imagine any of those, passing out a handful of tablets to an office patient for a fifty-cent fee. And yet the man of today who practices medicine under such conditions is to be condemned no more than his predecessors are to be condemned, because each of them is a product of the conditions of his day. Truly the change is to be deplored and the remedy is not yet ready. Thus we have a dreary spectacle, the most noble calling on God’s green foot-stool, degraded, through its commercial side, into a mad competition for existence. There are some other causes, beside those noted, that contribute to the same effect, such as increased numbers of individuals practicing both medicine and pharmacy. The later causes, however, are self-limiting and not necessarily fatal to the calling as a business proposition, whereas, with preventive measures well established, it is plain to all that both the practice of medicine and pharmacy as now conducted, will come to their end.

This does not mean that both doctors and druggists will disappear completely, but it certainly means that a new order of things is upon the threshold.

This is the year Nineteen-Hundred and Thirteen.

Between the years 1922 and 1932 we may expect to have established a National Board of Health, with a chief officer in the cabinet and an organization similar to that of the Army, in which every physician and every pharmacist will be an officer of the United States Government. Those physicians, under the new order, who remain in the office awaiting the call of the sick will be comparatively few in number. The remainder will be out in the broad domain of practical Hygiene. Every factory, farm, field, forest, stream, mines, and what not, will then come under the watchful eye of this new Army which, with all of the wisdom of science, will guard the health of the country, if anything, more zealously than it is guarded against foreign foes. Every occupational disease will be banished, every case of communicable disease will be promptly isolated.

The men who are to perform this service will be the doctors and druggists of today who survive at that time, together with those who shall be hereafter graduated in those professions; not that all of these men are at present fitted for this work, but their training and experience make them the most available.

They will, however, be subjected to periodic examinations that shall determine their advance and pay, and each one will gravitate into the place that best suits his capacity.

The pay of these men will be suitable to the dignity of their calling, certainly not less than that of a lieutenant in the United States Army.

Under this new order the people will receive their medicine and medical treatment upon the same plan that they now receive their public school education.

To the incredulous, it may be said that the people of Philadelphia alone spend annually fifteen millions of dollars for medical treatment and medicine. Under the new system the cost would be less than half of that sum, and the people will receive better attention than at present.

Schools of medicine and pharmacy will be government institutions, as are West Point and Annapolis, and their various laboratories will be the main centres from which the operations of this Hygienic Army shall be directed.

To the incredulous, again, it may be said, these conditions are coming, not because they are being sought, nor even desired, but they will be thrust upon us through the force of economic necessity.

UNITED DRUG COMPANY CONTROLS GUTH PRODUCTS.

The United Drug Company, of Boston, has acquired control of the Guth Chocolate Company. The Guth Company makes several confectionery brands. It is stated that the United Drug Company now controls the Liggett and Daggett candy companies and these will be combined with the Guth Company into the United Candy Company.

The United Drug Company will shortly open in the new Grand Central station in New York what is advertised to be the largest drug store in the world, the fixtures alone costing between $75,000 and $80,000. The United Drug Company operates about fifty-five drug stores and sells goods in about 5500 stores throughout the country.

As indicating the growth of this company’s business, it is stated that nearly one million square feet of space is now utilized for manufacturing purposes.--_Printers’ Ink._

New Stores and Their Owners

Dr. J. B. Freeman, of Bridgeport, Ala., has opened a drug store in Springfield, Tenn.

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Mr. L. L. Floyd, Plainville, Ga., will build an up-to-date two-story brick building for a drug store, which will be opened soon.

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Mr. Will Childdress is opening a new drug store in Monette, Ark. He will occupy the Simon Building.

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Mr. C. N. Barnett has opened a drug store in Clarkston, Ga. This has been a long-needed institution in Clarkston. The soda fountain is an attraction for the young people of the town, too.

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A new drug store is being opened in Rockwell, N. C., by Mr. H. W. Barnhardt.

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Drs. Lipscomb and Hockenhull have installed a drug store in the Bank Corner, Cumming, Ga. The owners will run the drug store in connection with their practice. A waiting room, consultation room and a laboratory will occupy one-half of the building, while the remainder will be given up to the drug store.

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It is announced by A. R. Keen, the manager of the Georgian Terrace, Atlanta’s handsome hotel for tourists, that a prescription drug store will be opened in the large room in the north corner of the hotel. The store will be opened this summer, and will be the first drug store in Atlanta to be located inside a hotel.

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The new store of Griffith & Wellons, Marietta, Ga., has been opened and is doing a rushing business. The opening day was a very important occasion for the store, a large crowd being attracted by the music and decorations.

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Frank A. Delgado has opened a new store at Fourth and Main streets, Jacksonville, Fla. Among the up-to-date fixtures of the new store is a very modern soda fountain.

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It is announced that Tarrytown, Ga., is to have a new drug store, which will be conducted by Dr. Culpeper.

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Sam E. Welfare has opened a new drug store at Winston-Salem, N. C.

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The E. D. F. Pharmacy, Blackville, S. C., has been commissioned. Capital, $3000. Petitioners are C. A. Epps, J. G. DeLorme and J. M. Fleming.

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A voluntary petition in bankruptcy has been filed by Sol. Fiegelson, doing business as the Ineeda Pharmacy, 2001 Jackson street, Houston, Tex.

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O. L. Bailey, of Ocean Springs, Miss., and R. H. Lewis, Jr., of Gulfport, Miss., have purchased the Ocean Springs drug store, which will be managed by Mr. Lewis. Extensive improvements will be made.

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Mr. John B. Blalock, formerly of Marion, Ala., has entered the drug business in Sheffield, Ala.

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Robert M. Green & Sons, of Philadelphia, have opened a show room in Atlanta, which is in charge of Mr. J. L. Shipp. There are very many handsome Green fountains in the South, among them being the fountains in the following named stores: T. H. Howard, Augusta, Ga.; Jerry George, Savannah, Ga., and the Journal Building Fountain, Atlanta, Ga.

THE DIXIE DRUGGIST

A MONTHLY PUBLICATION COVERING THE DRUG TRADE OF THE SOUTHERN STATES.

Blackwelder-Riddle Building Hickory, N. C.

Subscriptions $1.00 a year Foreign Countries 2.00 ” Single Copies 15 cents

Subscriptions payable in advance

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The Dixie Druggist is issued on the 15th of the month. News items and notices intended for any special issue should reach us not later than the first of the month.

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Advertising Rates will be supplied on application to the Advertising Manager. Cuts and copy intended for any issue must be in our office on the first of the month for which they are intended.

Vol. 1 May, 1913 No. 2

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A THOUGHT FOR MAY.

All nature is but art, unknown to thee; All chance direction, which thou canst not see; All discord, harmony not understood; All partial evil, universal good; And spite of pride, in erring reason’s spite, One truth is clear, whatever is, is right. --_Pope._

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WINDOW DISPLAYS.

A great many druggists put too little stress upon the importance of the window display. It is a very frequent thing to see good window space going to waste. Too often the clerk is left to “put in anything” and puts it in just “any old way.” This should not be.

If your window is worth the time and talents of an expert window decorator, such as are sent out by the national advertisers, is it not worth the time--spare time, let us say--of your clerk? It is a mighty poor window that a national advertiser will not jump at the chance to decorate for you. The chances are that nearly every retail druggist in the South has one very good window. Take advantage of it. Make a carefully-planned window display and you will be agreeably surprised at the interest it will attract. That is what your store needs.

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Subscriptions to THE DIXIE DRUGGIST are coming in every day. Have you sent in yours? Our next number may have a single article that will be worth more than a year’s subscription to you. You don’t want to miss these good things.

BALTIMORE DRUG EXCHANGE