There has been no greater shame in our profession than the influence these men and their houses have exercised, and incidentally the indorsements and recommendations that thoughtless men have furnished them. The blame is all ours, and we cannot shun it. We pride ourselves on our scientific attainments; that we take nothing for granted; and, now that the age of empiricism has passed, we accept nothing that does not bear the stamp of scientific approval. And yet, before the campaign of the American Medical Association and the revelations of Collier's and the Ladies' Home Journal, we accepted our treatment from the hands of the manufacturing houses, and dosed our patients with nostrums about which we knew nothing except the statements of those whose sole purpose it was to sell. There are few of us who have been many years in practice to whom a blush of shame does not come at the recollection of our gullibility and our guilty innocence. Can any man deem it ethical to give even to a good dog something about which he was totally ignorant? And yet this is just what we were doing. A short time ago a particularly shrewd detail man was discussing this very point with me, and claiming that, as the formula was now required by law to be printed in each bottle and package, this most formidable objection could not now hold good. Handing me a bottle of his patent cure-all, he glibly called my attention to the six or seven ingredients, with the amount of each contained in the fluid ounce. Among other potent quantities I can recall 1-48 gr. of morphia and 1-240 gr. of strychnia. The dose was a teaspoonful three times a day. Any man can imagine the more than homeopathic effect of 1-48 gr. of morphia divided into eight doses. These well-known and well-tried drugs were not, however, the life of the nostrum, and presently we came to the twenty minims to the fluid ounce of the fluid extract of the drug from which the remedy derived its name. Something I had never heard of. Something unlisted in the U. S. P. Something discovered and owned and controlled by this house alone. As my ignorance became more apparent his eloquence increased, and I have no doubt that a few years ago, before my moral conscience had become aroused to the therapeutic sin of prescribing something whose botanical family, whose chemical formula, and even whose physiological effects were totally unknown to me, I would gladly have accepted a sample and would have tried it on some poor soul too poor to pay for a prescription. It is nothing short of a shame to think of what we have done in this line. The sin has been one of carelessness and laziness rather than of ignorance. Here we had ready to hand some remedy, beautiful to the eye, palatable to the tongue; then why take the time and trouble to bother about constructing a formula of our own when someone else of equal experience had constructed one for us? I am ready to thank God that most of these nostrums are as harmless as they are