Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 67.djvu/457

Rh till Cured,' 'Send for Sample Bottle. Free.' How the charlatan manages never to lose out would make a realistic novel in itself. Suffice it to indicate his crafty reliance on creating 'the habit'; one bottle with its high content of alcohol will inevitably 'tone you up' or admixed opiates may be the 'irresistible pain-killer' to which you will want to turn again. Quacks are among the largest customers of wineries and distilleries. Recent analyses (by the Massachusetts State Board of Inquiry) have developed the possibility that the druggist's show-case may hold more alcohol than the cellar of the saloon opposite, and many a temperance advocate, quite unknowingly, has drawn inspiration for his lecture from that after-dinner glass of nerve tonic or stomach bitters.

With such instruments at his disposal, restrained by no Hippocratian oath or sacred reputation, left free to run riot, by criminally lax laws, deliberately dead-lettered, the genus Quack swarms out over the land. Its species are unnumbered, being marked by every device deceitful ingenuity can conceive. Psycho-therapeutics and knowledge of human nature constitute the quack's entire outfit; all he really needs is moral atrophy and the instincts of a cheap drummer. Such is the baleful etiology of medical quackery.

If confirmation of this diagnosis is desired, it may be sought in the recent spread of quackery and its especial vogue in America. Paradoxical as it sounds, the growth of education, while compelling the quack to improve his methods, has greatly extended his field. Formerly, he seldom worked farther than his voice or circular might carry; now, every literate is a potential victim. His wares are displayed in almost every piece of print that strikes your eye; for the publisher and 'the press' he has subsidized and suborned. So-called family magazines (messes of popular fiction and indecent advertisements) are distributed gratis at the instance and backing of the quack, for whom they are so much purchased propaganda. To the same end he sustains the whole modern plethora of magazines and newspapers. Without his lucrative patronage periodicals, representing the real excess of supply over demand, would end their artificial existence, and so, wherever there is a struggling paper, manhood slumbers and the editor accepts the proffered bribe. How else explain the significant truth that the sectarian press ranks among the worst offenders? The 'yellies' too, depend as much upon the quack as upon scandal; and the most prosperous of them all affords the grossest example. The editorial columns of a certain evening journal will, no doubt, to-night, blare its owner's championship of the people, while almost every page invites the trust-ground toiler to hand up his savings to swindling men specialists and venders of alcoholic cure-alls. In fact, with a few notable exceptions, such as The Outlook, Life and The New York