Evening Post, the whole press unblushingly sprinkles its columns with the charlatan's cards. Nearly every New York daily on January 24 reported, at lengths inversely proportional to its abetment of quackery, the exposé of Dr. Henry Kane's Radium-Cure swindle; in the January 22 issue of one of the most reputable of them, I find a conspicuous advertisement of this same discomfited wonder-worker. Shameless self-interest never could have played so slavishly into the quack's hands until the growth of education made publishing a fiercely competitive business.
At the same time, not only has the growth of education placed a megaphone to the empiric's lips, but it has sensitized the public to his call. There is a wider interest in hygiene and therapeutics; people think more about their health and more readily take alarm. 'Health journals' enjoy large circulations; too often nothing more than elaborate handbills of the editor's particular book, 'system' or hygienic contrivance, and, at best, running wild with 'hints to health' and philippics against the doctors, these magazines only succeed in leaving their readers the shuttlecock of every battledore in quackdom. Similarly, the broadcast discussion of medical problems, in response to the interests of an educated public, creates a kind of diathesis to imaginary disease. Then, vaguely bound up, perhaps, in widespread education is the modern stress of life, hysteria, high nervous tension and susceptibility to fads.
As a final (undetached) cause we must recognize the passion for untrammeled personal freedom, so characteristic of latter days, especially in England and America. It is that attitude which one writer savagely describes as 'jealously safeguarding to every citizen the sacred right of going to the devil in his own way.' Fearing to dispense undue privileges and unjust fetters, framers and executors of the law, notably in the United States, have virtually thrown open the delicate art of healing to almost any person too crack-brained or dishonest to earn an honorable living. Not only does quackery thus recruit directly, but wild-eat schools are permitted to dump upon an overcrowded profession graduates sadly lacking in capacity and training. Most of these must end up as charlatans, in much the same way as the manufacturer, shut out from the restricted trade in the genuine article, caters to the public taste with cheap and tinsel imitations; or, at best, such half-baked doctors impair the efficiency of their brotherhood and shake confidence in it. It is not bare accident that America is at once the 'home of quackery' and the 'home of the free.'
These, therefore—growth of education and the modern spirit of liberty—are the specific forces behind the recent spread of quackery; and America stands as arch-victim, just because they have been at their strongest here.
