Ignorance and credulous hope make the market for most proprietary remedies. Intelligent people are not given largely to the use of the glaringly advertised cure-alls, such as Liquozone or Peruna. Nostrums there are, however, which reach the thinking classes as well as the readily gulled. Depending, as they do, for their success on the lure of some subtle drug concealed under a trademark name, or some opiate not readily obtainable under its own label, these are the most dangerous of all quack medicines, not only in their immediate effect, but because they create enslaving appetites, sometimes obscure and difficult of treatment, most often tragically obvious. Of these concealed drugs the headache powders are the most widely used, and of the headache powders Orangeine is the most conspicuous. Orangeine prints its formula. It is, therefore, its proprietors claim, not a secret remedy. But to all intents and purposes it is secret, because to the uninformed public the vitally important word "acetanilid" in the formula means little or nothing. Worse than its secrecy is its policy of careful and dangerous deception. Orangeine, like practically all the headache powders, is simply a mixture of acetanilid with less potent drugs. Of course, there is no orange in it, except the orange hue of the boxes and wrappers which is its advertising symbol. But this is an unimportant deception. The wickedness of the fraud lies in this: that whereas the nostrum, by virtue of its acetanilid content, thins the blood, depresses the heart and finally undermines the whole system, it claims _to strengthen the heart and to produce better blood_. Thus far in the patent medicine field I have not encountered so direct and specific an inversion of the true facts. Recent years have added to the mortality records of our cities a surprising and alarming number of sudden deaths from heart failure. In the year 1902 New York City alone reported a death rate from this cause of 1.34 per thousand of population; that is about six times as great as the typhoid fever death record. It was about that time that the headache powders were being widely advertised, and there is every reason to believe that the increased mortality, which is still in evidence, is due largely to the secret weakening of the heart by acetanilid. Occasionally a death occurs so definitely traceable to this poison that there is no room for doubt, as in the following report by Dr. J. L. Miller, of Chicago, in the _Journal of the American Medical Association_, on the death of Mrs. Frances Robson: