Frank Billings, M.D.
Under the heading, "Some Chicago Institutions which Constantly Employ Liquozone," are cited Hull House, the Chicago Orphan Asylum, the Home for Incurables, the Evanston Hospital and the Old People's Home.
Letters to the institutions elicited the information that Hull House had never used the nostrum, and had protested against the statement; that the Orphan Asylum had experimented with it only for external applications, and with such dubious results that it was soon dropped; that it had been shut out of the Home for Incurables; that a few private patients in the Old People's Home had purchased it, but on no recommendation from the physicians; and that the Evanston Hospital knew nothing of Liquozone and had never used it.
Having a professional interest in the "overwhelming number of medical indorsements" claimed by Liquozone, a Chicago physician, Dr. W. H. Felton, went to the company's offices and asked to see the medical evidence. None was forthcoming; the lists, he was informed, were in the press and could not be shown. He then asked for the official book for physicians advertised by the firm, containing "a great deal of evidence from authorities whom all physicians respect." This also, they said, was "in the press." As a matter of fact, it has never come out of the press and never will; the special book project has been dropped.
One more claim and I am done with the "scientific evidence." In a pamphlet issued by the company and since withdrawn occurs this sprightly sketch:
"Liquozone is the discovery of Professor Pauli, the great German chemist, who worked for twenty years to learn how to liquefy oxygen. When Pauli first mentioned his purpose men laughed at him. The idea of liquefying gas—of circulating a liquid oxygen in the blood—seemed impossible. But Pauli was one of those men who set their whole hearts on a problem and follow it out either to success or to the grave. So Pauli followed out this problem though it took twenty years. He clung to it through discouragements which would have led any lesser man to abandon it. He worked on it despite poverty and ridicule," etc.
Liquozone Kills a Great German Scientist.
Alas for romance! The scathing blight of the legal mind descended on this touching story. The lawyer-directors would have none of "Professor Pauli, the great German chemist," and Liquozone destroyed him, as it had created him. Not totally destroyed, however, for from those rainbow wrappings, now dissipated, emerges the humble but genuine figure of our old acquaintance, Mr. Powley, the ex-piano man of Toronto. He is the prototype of the Teutonic savant. So much the Liquozone people now admit, with the defence that the change of Powley to Pauli was, at most, a harmless flight of fancy, "so long as we were not attempting to use a name famous in medicine or bacteriology in order to add prestige to the product." A plea which commends itself by its ingeniousness at least.