Fashionable Flavours for Medicines

New Zealand Graphic, Volume XXXV, Issue 2, 15 July 1905, Page 60

Fashionable Flavours for Medicines

Being a man of excellent wisdom, the doctor seldom makes remarks about hi> patients, but that day he was so mad he couldn’t help himself. “That woman,” said he, “is a dashed fool.” “What has she done?” asked a listener. “She has insisted upon my flavouring th»? medicine for which 1 just wrote out a prescription with Swiss lilac, because that is her favourite perfume.” “Did you do it?” asked the listener. “Yes, 1 had to. ‘L won’t take the stuff if you don’t,’ said she. ‘You won’t take it if 1 do,’ 1 said. ‘You won’t be able to. Lt will be so nasty you can’t swallow it.’ “But that argument never feazed the woman. ‘lt is lilacs or nothing,’ she said. ‘l’d rather die than be inconsistent.’ "So 1 gave her lilacs. “It is queer, anyway,” proceeded the doctor, “about the flavouring of medicine. 1 don’t know whether you know it or not, but styles in flavouring extracts used by druggists change with the seasons, the same as hats and coats and dinner table decorations. Last spring the majority of prescriptions compounded tasted like sweet peas. Before that peppermint was the favourite, now it is lavender. Peppermint, by the way, has its innings most frequently as a popular essence. There are a good many people who don’t like peppermint, but there are more who do, and it comes into favour about three times as often as any other essence. For one thing, it mixes with other ingredients more harmoniously than other extracts, and there are some doctors who are old fashioned enough to stick to it year in and year out. no matter what their more up-to-date brethren may be using for a time. Fortunately. the flavour of a prescription has nothing to do with its efficacy, so if a doctor feels like it he can make a fool of himself, as I did just now, and satisfy the whim of a fashionable patient by flavouring her tonics with an essence that matches lu?r perfumes without en-dang-ring her life. However, freak flavours are not calculated to make a disagreeable drug more pleasant to the taste, and after a few experiments of that kind most doctors, at the request of the patients themselves, go back to lavender and sweet peas and the ever reliable peppermint.”