Patent Medicines

We have received a circular from a committee of patent medicine manufacturers, asking our influence with the members of Congress from this State to induce them to vote against a tax on patent medicines.  They urge that if the tax contemplated be levied on such medicines, it will drive them out of existence.  After an experience of ten years’ dealing in patent medicines, we are convinced that if they were driven out of existence, mankind would be the gainer by the operation.  And after twenty years’ experience in advertising them, whe have not found their manufacturers to be not only the most meager, but the most uncertain pay of any class of advertisers.  With our “experience,” then, instead of urging our members to abate the tax levied on patent medicines, we say to them, in the language of Shakespeare,

“Lay on, Macduff,”

Leaving our profane readers to supply the ellipsis.

– Published in The Davenport Daily Gazette, Davenport, Iowa, Friday Morning, April 4, 1862, p. 2