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Reprinted in part from Stone, D. B., Peter Mere Latham, Arch. Intern. Med. 110:516, 1962.
A couple of years ago, I read The Quiet Art, a charming anthology compiled by Robert Coope. Coope included several quotations from Peter Mere Latham. They made me curious about Latham, partly because they woke me up, partly because I had never heard of him before or did not recall his name. One of the quotations in The Quiet Art concerned false remedies: "Only let the most worthless nostrum get backed by the credit of some good name, and it will never cease to pass current for something in the world, and will never be altogether got rid of from our materia medica. Thus, upon the whole, it is sad to think how much the practice of medicine is blindly engaged in a busy, noisy workshop of impossibilities." Latham interested me and I tried to