Saccharated pepsin, which was formerly official, was required to digest 300 times its own weight of moist egg albumin, while the pepsin that is now official is required to digest ten times that amount, or 3,000 times its own weight. It is evident, therefore, that the tablets should contain sufficient pepsin to digest appreciable amounts of protein. No intelligent physician would prescribe these tablets simply for the pepsin they contain or are supposed to contain; if he wanted to give pepsin he would prescribe the drug in the simple form. Clinical experience has shown that in the majority of cases of so-called dyspepsia the stomach contents contain too much rather than too little hydrochloric acid, and wherever there is a sufficiency of acid there is usually no decrease in the secretion of pepsin. In many of such cases, too, digestion is normal, or even more active than normal, but even when it is imperfect there is seldom any lack of pepsin. Insufficient digestive power is most often due to a deficiency of hydrochloric acid and not to lack of pepsin in the stomach contents. In the tablets under consideration, however, hydrochloric acid is present--if at all--in the most ridiculously minute quantities; quantities that are so small as to preclude any therapeutic effect except that due to the psychic element. These tablets, with their six or more ingredients, are typical “shotgun prescriptions.” Such prescriptions catch the unthinking doctor as well as the self-drugging public, for, while clinical experience and physiologic experiments have demonstrated that the old ideas regarding the value of these digestives and ferments were erroneous, the public and many members of the medical profession still seem to be influenced by the old theories. In conclusion we must not lay all the blame on the manufacturing firms for supplying these absurd combinations; the physician who prescribes them should assume a large share of it. If the doctors did not use them the manufacturing concerns would soon stop putting them on the market. We hope, however, that those manufacturing concerns that like to be classed as reputable will cease to disgrace their catalogues with what they know to be therapeutic absurdities.]--(_From The Journal A. M. A., Aug. 20, 1910._) BURNHAM’S SOLUBLE IODIN[AP] W. A. Puckner and A. H. Clark [AP] See also report on Burnham’s Soluble Iodine, p. 110