Throwing Physic To The Dogs

Evening Star, Issue 24007, 4 October 1941, Page 3

Throwing Physic To The Dogs

Free medicine is one of the subjects on which 1 do not speak with authority, though i once took an aspro. 1 think it was an aspro, but it may have been an aspirin. Fitted by education to distinguish between Epstein and Einstein, and even between Jacobins and Jacobites, I confess that the nuances that separate aspro from aspirin are beyond me. That may be because ot the confusion induced by the wellknown conundrum, “ What is the best cure for a ’eadache?” (a couple of “ liaspirates ”). The aspro (or priu) that I took was guaranteed under the Food and Drugs Act;'it was free in that it was the gift of a compassionate friend. The results were disappointing. I had expected, after the impact of a drug on my unaccustomed tissues, to enjoy all the sensations of tin opium eater, and to feel myself journeying through caverns measureless to man down to a sunless sea. Nothing happened, except that I eliminated one of the paths that might have led me to the everlasting bonfire; and I devoted the rest of the bottle to the revival of wilting tulips. The tulips responded. Whether, by floral standards, the use of little tablets in vases is considered immoral, is one of the things I should really like to know. Though drugs, after this one experience, fail to attract mo, 1 coufess to a fondness for druggists’ windows. In the principal shopping centres the win-dow-dressers have been seduced by trifles like toothpaste and cameras; bub yesterday I saw in a back street a real chemist’s window. It contained only two great bulging bottles, one of cerulean blue and the other of a vicious shade of burnt sienna. A subtle poison and its antidote, as used for a thousand and one nights in Arabia, I feel sure, in spite of your superior protests about coloured water. My heart warmed to this chemist, for I felt him to he of the most ancient and_ honourable order of apothecaries. Fain would I have expressed my feelings by the purchase of at least a toothbrush; but it was Sunday. My generous impulse was frustrated, hut it was a satisfaction to know that this peerless chemist, thanks to the intervention of the Government, was assured of a steady sale for Ins goods. What the reactions of a man in the old-fashioned tradition, to a system that encouraged wholesale and indiscriminate dosing, was another matter. I thought of Dothehoys Hall _ and Mrs Squeers with her daily ministrations of brimstone and treacle. Would such heathen rites now become universal? I imagined the sadistic glee of the whole Squeers family when they realised that they could get brimstone and treacle for nothing. I remembered a little boy I had known who had a passion for emulsion. I can see his brothers and sisters, after vvhooping cough, waiting in misery for their doses. I can see the unctuous mass coiling, morning and evening, > from the greenish bottle and slinking into the waiting spoon. I can feel the premonitory shudder that shook tho frame of the little girl waiting to swallow the oily mess. I can see her brother clamouring to lick the spoon. I can hear him wishing

Written by PANACHE , for the ‘ Evening Star *

that everybody in the family had had whooping cough, that there might he more spoons to lick. Are such perversions to be encouraged? That is horrible enough, hut there is still castor oil. Do you hear the children weeping, 0 my brothers, Ere the sorrows come with years? To see the plant in the "Winter Gardens, to realise how vigorous it is, how broad and hairy and baboon-like are its leaves, is to realise how vain is the hope that it may be smitten with a disease or die out like the musk rose. It is not so much that castor oil offends the nose or the palate as that it constitutes an affront against the whole being. Camouflage it as you will, secrete it between layers of orange juice, follow it by the largest chocolate, and all you have succeeded in doing is to engender a prejudice against oranges and chocolates. Make it a dragon that is on the path between the sufferer and a most desirable prize (before ns now on the mantelpiece), and yet castor oil remains a permanent shudder fixed in the hack of the throat. Tho years themselves cannot lighten the Was this, perhaps, the whale’s sensation when it realised l it had swallowed Jonah? Such are some of the physical effects of medicine. Now I ask you to imagine the mental effect on the mind of the child who learns that his parents have obtained gratuitously the instruments designed for his torture. That mummy went without a new hat to buy bottles of tonic for her little one may be a convincing argument that it hurts her worse than it hurts him. But that such potions issue three times a day after meals from a constantly flowing nonstop State tap may make the most innocent child ultimately suspicious of the goodwill of the Government. There is another snag. One thing that made medicine slightly more palatable was tho anticipation of selling the bottle back to the chemist. Three more meals, three more doses, and the convalescent could count on being richer by a penny. But will bottles that contained free medicine he saleable? What will he the ultimate result of this scattering of rhubarb and senna in the homes of the sovereign people no one can foretell, though it is to he deplored that Samuel Butler is not here to have a shot at a prophecy. What I resent is that no legislation has been passed to provide equivalent relief for such as are. not medicine-minded. On some constitutions flowers act where bismuth mixtures fail, and classics have worked wonders where sedatives were impotent. So I should like to see coupons that can be used at the florists’ and the booksellers’ as well as at the chemists’. Until a benevolent Government sees its way to pamper us along broader lines I am embittered by the thought that there is nothing at the chemists’ I really want, save the bulging jar of cerulean blue. And I fear that there is no more chance of that being prescribed for me than there is of my being able to purchase the beautiful wax gentleman in the tailor’s window or the little lard pig with the holly wreath round its neck that is the centre of the butcher’s Christmas display.