We are willing to supply you with sufficient medicine for eight days’ treatment free of all charge. This will enable you to determine whether the treatment is acting successfully, for at the end of the fourth day an obvious and perceptible effect should be experienced. We impose no condition; we rely on your candour, honesty, and gratitude that at the end of the eight days’ treatment, if you are convinced of the value of the Teetolia Treatment, you will forward to us the ordinary fee—£1 1s.—for same, but if you have derived no benefit from the treatment at the end of the same period, then you are under no obligation whatever to pay us one single penny.
The letters were on headed paper, at the top of which was printed, “All communications strictly confidential,” and “Consultations with Physician by appointment.” The first letter concluded as follows:
Please therefore fill in and return without delay the special statement sheet and upon our receiving it the Physician will go carefully into the case and will prescribe special medicine, which will reach you with expert advice in the course of two or three days in a perfectly plain sealed package.
The “expert advice,” in a letter purporting to be from “The Medical Superintendent,” sent with the medicine, contained these passages:
I want, if possible, the patient to use his own endeavours to try and keep off alcohol during the first few days of treatment; if this cannot be done, then the treatment must be commenced when the patient is not drinking, in order to give the medicine a better hold on the system. The dislike for alcohol, which we claim, does not come on all at once.
The eight days’ treatment is enough to show you that it will do good, but not sufficient in this case to effect a permanent cure. I would advise the patient to continue for at least a month to six weeks.
This is somewhat widely at variance with the statements quoted above. “You continue to take your daily modicum of alcohol” and “you will be a free man within a week.”
The one guinea “treatment” consisted of 2⅙ fluid ounces of a liquid of the nature of a vegetable fluid extract.
The directions were:
Half a teaspoonful to be taken in a little water every four hours during the day at 10, 2, 6, and 10 o’c.