Health Care Update: 1910
This week the news was filled with stories about the passage of the health care reform bill of 2010, and it occurred to me that it might be an opportune time to look back at what was happening in health care one hundred years ago. Here’s what a glance through the New York Times during 1910 reveals:
In 1910 there were no drugs as powerful as sulfa drugs or antibiotics, but the government and the medical profession were beginning to wrestle with regulation of the medicines that existed. The 1906 Pure Food and Drug Act outlawed the sale of poisonous patent medicines and pushed for the correct labeling of all medicines, but an article on February 2, 1910 discusses testimony of Dr. Henry Kraemer, a member of the Committee on Revision of the United States Pharmacopoeia, that reveals that administrators were still hard at work trying to identify, label, and deem acceptable the medicines that existed. Dr. Kraemer points out that seventy percent of the drugs being used were “vegetable drugs” (herbal drugs) and that there needed to be standards for them. “It is not reasonable to suppose or believe that a good fluid extract or tincture can be made from a poor drug any more than to suppose that a good malt can be prepared from a poor quality of barley grains or a good extract of beef from a poor quality of meat…”
