ABSTRACT
I DON'T suppose there is a proprietary medicinemanufacturer of importance in any part of the world who has not, at one time or another, encouraged his imagination to play with the idea of the prosperous business he might build up, and the wealth he might accumulate, if he could, by some means, convince a reasonable number of Chinese of the efficiency of his remedies. The less the manufacturer knows about China, apart from the population figure, the less restricted are his day-dreams, and, as he usually knows nothing about the country, his fancy is in most cases free to wander into distant and prosperous fields. He knows from his own practical experience as a vendor of remedies that no one is going to eat an apple a day in order to avoid contracting debts to the doctor. So secure does the normally healthy person feel regarding
the continuance of his good health that he will not even eat a prune or a raisin a day. Everyone will buy remedies, but few will bother to take a prophylactic, even if it costs nothing. Everyone knows, or should know, that a glass of hot water before breakfast provides a fairly reliable guarantee against certain common ailments, but not one in a thousand will bother to drink the water. But the medicine man knows that when a man gets a bellyache, or a backache, or a headache, or any of the numerous aches this flesh is heir to, he almost invariably takes some medicine which will relieve his pain and make him feel like a normal human being again. When he computes the number of China's millions who must, according to the laws of average, be suffering from some kind ofan ache at any given moment and reflects on the efficacy with wllich his pills would cure them or give them
relie~ it is easy for him to conjure up rosy day-dreams in which a private yacht occupies the foreground and a country estate can be seen in the middle distance.
