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A Little Latin

A Little Latin image
Parent Issue
Day
23
Month
December
Year
1880
Copyright
Public Domain
OCR Text

An effort is being made to induce doctors tostop writing their prescriptions in Latiu and use United States language, So rtany inoffensive sick people have been killed by druggists putting up lobelia and other dangerous drugs in place of souie mild and gentle purgative, wkich the .systeinrequires, on a Latín prescription of an M. l) physician, that a society at the East threatens to take the law into their own hands and put a stop to it. As a usual tbing, the physiciau who graduates with high honors at some high-toned morgue, does not know any more about the coumion English branches than is good for him, and his handwriting is the nierest goose tracks- a sortof delerium tremens on paper. Now, when you come to put such writing as that into Latin, to be read by a sleepy prescription clerk who luis been routed out of bed at midnight in his shirt sleeves, there can only be one result. The patiënt will be worse next day. A sleepy drug clerk is only human ; and wiien he strikes one of those ingredients in the prescription where it tells him to put up three saw-teetn of podophyllum, and the word looks more like pennyroyal than it does like podophylhim, and more like peppermint than either of them, he is Hable to trust a good deal to luck and put in that which is the least injurious. No drug clerk cares to lose a good position by not being able to read a stroke of lightniog; and the result is heputs up something, and then charges enough more to niake up for what he doesn't know. ïhere are forty-eight million of people in this country, whose lives, to a greater or less extent. rest on prescription clerks; and the eastern society whohave ttung their banner to the breeze and sounded the death of the dead lan'iiages, will be mbalmed in the hearts of a grateful posterity. They are doing a noble work. Dead languages are well enough for dead people; but they are eminently out of place in this Agioi animated things. Of course the lopping off of the excrescence will bring doctors down to a level with ordinary mortals, and they will have to take their chances.-

Article

Subjects
Old News
Ann Arbor Democrat