patients may have been temporarily benefited, but in a large majority of cases no essential good has been done, and often the very reverse has happened. Brandreth's pills have occasionally been serviceable as a cathartic, but in many instances the dose has been repeated until a habit has been established which required their continual employment, so that hundreds of individuals have been doomed to perpetual constipation, with all its incidental miseries, by the injudicious use of these pills. If the article is some pretended Balsam of Wild Cherry, Cherry Pectoral, or other cough preparation, containing opium and antimony in disguise, as nearly all nostrums of that class do, the patient is often essentially injured, and perhaps hastened to his final exit, whilst a momentary narcotism induces him to suppose he is being cured; and the general effect of all such preparations is to create a habit that makes their continual repetition necessary.
The public good does not require the sale of a single nostrum. Leaving the cost out of the account, the mischief which these things produce far exceeds all the benefit that can be derived
