What are the motives which impel persons to buy and use patent medicines? The history of medicine offers a partial explanation. In somewhat remote times we find that the medicines in use by regular physicians were of the most vile, nauseating, and powerful nature. We read of "purging gently" with a teaspoonful of calomel. Then during the wonderful progress of scientific medicine, beginning a little more than a half century ago, the most illustrious and useful workers were so busily engaged in finding the causes of disease and the changes wrought in the various organs, in observing the noticeable symptoms and in classifying and diagnosticating them, that treatment was given but scant attention. This was nowhere more noticeable than in Germany, the birthplace, home, and world-center of scientific medicine, to which all the medical profession flocked. Patients became simply material which could be watched and studied. This was an exemplary spirit, but did not suit the patients who wanted to be treated and cured. This fact, together with the peculiar wording of the laws regulating the practice of medicine, which allow anyone with the exception of graduates to treat patients, but not to prescribe or operate upon them, accounts for the number of quacks in Germany. Dr. Jacobi states that "there is one quack doctor to every two regular physicians in Saxony and Bavaria."[12] Another cause for the use of patent medicines is mysticism. Ignorance is the mother of credulity. It is reported[13] that Cato, the elder, recommended cabbages as a panacea for all sorts of ills, that he treated dislocations of the limbs by incantations, and ordered the Greek physicians out of Rome. The ignorant are greatly influenced by things that they cannot understand. Therefore, as the mass of people are utterly ignorant of the changes in structure and function of the body caused by disease, and also the limitations of medicines in their power of healing such alterations, their belief in the mysterious power said to attach to patent medicines is not surprising. When testimonials of the efficacy of patent medicines purporting to come from respectable divines, merchants, and statesmen are offered, the proof of their power seems incontestable. Economy and convenience are added incentives to the employment of patent medicines. This method of saving the doctor's fee is engendered by those physicians who themselves write prescriptions for nostrums. "Why not, indeed, eliminate this middleman (the doctor) and buy the nostrums direct?" So say the unthinking. But what doctor worthy of the name would prescribe a medicine the composition of which he was ignorant? Yet it is frequently done. As Dr. Cabot has so aptly put it, what would be thought of a banker or financial adviser who recommended his client to buy a security simply on the recommendation of the exploiter of the security? Yet that is exactly the position of a doctor who recommends a nostrum.