Beware, Sulphanilamide!

An Island Resident's Experience

SELF - TREATMENT with sulfa-drugs (described by a recent writer in “PIM”), as if these were “Aspro tablets,” has recalled to'my mind my own first experience of these panaceas. They do work—no doubt of that. But there are times when the remedy seems worse than the disease, and much less bear able.

A tin of (alleged) pork-pie put me on the sick-list in ’42. The symptoms were unpleasant, and in the end I sent for “Doc” (our local NMP). He dosed me with an unnamed tablet. Regrettably, I also neglected to mention that I had had an egg for breakfast.

For a while, the anonymous medication relieved, soothed, and even strengthened.

But within an hour I was sure that heaven’s gates were opening for me. By then I was in a totally collapsed state, and felt, beside and above the pain, as if every bone in my body had turned to jelly. It took much will-power to get through that stage, and three months to fully recover.

Eggs (which contain sulphur) and sulphanilamide don’t mix. If they meet, the result is a poisoning, worse than the original disease. But how many Terri torians know that?

Sulfa-drugs are indeed wonder-drugs— in a doctor’s hands. Let those self dosers pause, however, and remember that a glass gizzard never works as well

as the old one they ruin!-

E.G.