salved by the large profits of the business. The great majority of the gulls who "write to Mrs. Pinkham" suppose themselves to be addressing Lydia E. Pinkham, and their letters are not even answered by the present proprietor of the name, but by a corps of hurried clerks and typewriters.
You get the same results when you write to Dr. Hartman, of Peruna, for personal guidance. Dr. Hartman himself told me that he took no active part now in the conduct of the Peruna Company. If he sees the letters addressed to him at all, it is by chance. "Dr. Kilmer," of Swamp-Root fame, wants you to write to him about your kidneys. There is no Dr. Kilmer in the Swamp-Root concern, and has not been for many years. Dr. T.A. Slocum, who writes you so earnestly and piously about taking care of your consumption in time, is a myth. The whole "personal medical advice" business is managed by rote, and the letter you get "special to your ease" has been printed and signed before your inquiry ever reached the shark who gets your money.
An increasingly common pitfall is the letter in the newspapers from some sufferer who has been saved from disease and wants you to write and get the prescription free. A conspicuous instance of this is "A Notre Dame Lady's Appeal" to sufferers from rheumatism and also from female trouble. "Mrs. Summers," of Notre Dame, Ill., whose picture in the papers represents a fat Sister of Charity, with the wan, uneasy expression of one who feels that her dinner isn't digesting properly, may be a real lady, but I suspect she wears a full beard and talks in a bass voice, because my letter of inquiry to her was answered by the patent-medicine firm of Vanderhoof & Co., who inclosed some sample tablets and wanted to sell me more. There are many others of this class. It is safe to assume that every advertising altruist who pretends to give out free prescriptions is really a quack medicine firm in disguise.
One instance of bad faith to which the nostrum patron renders himself liable: It is asserted that these letters of inquiry to the patent-medicine field are regarded as private. "All correspondence held strictly private and sacredly confidential," advertises Dr. R.V. Pierce, of the Golden Medical Discovery, etc. A Chicago firm of letter brokers offers to send me 50,000 Dr. Pierce order blanks at $2 a thousand for thirty days; or I can get terms on Ozomulsion, Theodore Noel (Vitæ-Ore, Dr. Steven's Nervous Debility Cure, Cactus Cure, women's regulators, etc.
With advertisements in the medical journals the public is concerned only indirectly, it is true, but none the less vitally. Only doctors read these exploitations, but if they accept certain of them and treat their patients on the strength of the mendacious statements it is at the peril of the patients. Take, for instance, the Antikamnia advertising which appears in most of the high-class medical journals, and which includes the following statements:
- "Do not depress the heart.
- Do not produce the habit.
- Are accurate - safe - sure."
These three lines, reproduced as they occur in the medical journals, contain five distinct and separate lies - a triumph of condensed mendacity unequaled, so far as I know, in the "cure all" class. For an instructive parallel here are two claims made by Duffy's Malt Whiskey, one taken from a medical journal, and hence "ethical," the other transcribed from a daily paper, and therefore to be condemned by all medical men.
Puzzle: Which is the ethical and which the unethical advertisement?
