Since the formulas were completed, however, clinical reports have been numerous enough--almost too numerous, if we are to believe them. Anedemin has been on the market for less than three years; the circulars emphasize that testimonials and endorsements are not solicited. Nevertheless, we are told that it is “endorsed by over fifty thousand clinicians throughout the United States.” Since the total number of physicians in the United States and Canada is only about 128,000, this means that nearly every second physician has endorsed Anedemin. The Anasarcin Company solicits endorsements and they seem to do the larger business. Hence the majority of physicians of the United States must have written an endorsement of either Anedemin or Anasarcin, or both. Or is this statement another “invention”? It is a little peculiar that nearly all the endorsements come from small towns in sparsely settled districts; practically none from the centers of population. Does this mean that dropsy is more common in the rural communities than in the cities? THE INVENTORS OF ANASARCIN AND ANEDEMIN Even the newspapers, when they tax our credulity with pretended scientific “discoveries,” feel the moral obligation of justifying themselves by telling us something of the personality and experience of the discoverers. We may ask, therefore, who are these expert pharmaceutic and synthetic chemists, these manufacturers of active principles, these skilled clinicians of wide experience, who have “intelligently built up the formula by wide application”? What are we told of these men who ask us to believe, on their mere assurance, in miracles and feats of magic; who tell us that they have converted neutral principles into alkaloids, that they have effected definite chemical compounds between these neutral principles, that they have discovered principles that do not exist, that they have changed the actions of these principles to suit their wishes, that, in short, they have reversed the laws of Nature?