Democratic Sentinel, Volume 6, Number 2, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 10 February 1882 — Every Man “His Own Doctor.” [ARTICLE]

Every Man “His Own Doctor.”

Mauy a man who, if his horse or cow is sick, sends at once for the veterinary practitioner for ailments of his own that are on the face of them quite as serious and as much in need of professional treatment. He will take the advice of an ignorant neighbor as to what is “good for” an illness, when he Would laugh at the idea of going to the same person for counsel in any other business or concern whatever. In the days of our grandmothers, when the household materia medica consisted of “roofs and yarbs,” with a few simple drugs like epsom salts, this domestic or “lay” prescribing was less dangerous than in these latter days when concentrated and powerful agents have become so common and familiar. The household remedies of the olden time were rarely liable to do much harm, even if they did no good. The cure was generally in reality left to nature, though the “roots and yarbs” got the credit of it. But most of the drugs of our day are not of this inert or negative character, and the danger in their use by the ignorant is a real and serious danger. The most powerful medicines that unprofessional people of a former generation ventured to fool with bore about the same relation to those in vogue that gunpower does the nitro-glycerine; yet the latter are used even more recklessly than the former ever were. A little knowledge is not always a dangerous thing, but when it leads a man to think that he can “doctor” himself, in ailments of any serious nature, the old and often-abused proverb is indisputably true.— Journal of Chemistry.