"The Peruna Drug Manufacturing Company,
"Per Carr."
And here is an account of another typical method of collecting this sort of material, the writer being a young New Orleans man, who answered an advertisement in a local paper, offering profitable special work to a news paper man with spare time:
"I found the advertiser to be a woman, the coarseness of whose features was only equaled by the vulgarity of her manners and speech, and whose self-assertiveness was in proportion to her bulk. She proposed that I set about securing testimonials to the excellent qualities of Peruna, which she pronounced 'Pay-Runa,' for which I was to receive a fee of $5 to $10, according to the prominence of 'the guy' from whom I obtained it. This I declined flatly. She then inquired whether or not I was a member of any social organizations or clubs in the city, and receiving a positive answer she offered me $3 for a testimonial, including the statement that Pay-Runa had been used by the members of the Southern Athletic Club with good effects, and raised it to $5 before I left.
"Upon my asking her what her business was before she undertook the Pay-Runa work, she became very angry. Now, when a female is both very large and very angry, the best thing for a small, thin young man to do is to leave her to her thoughts and the expression thereof. I did it."
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No Questions Desired.
Testimonials obtained in this way are, in a sense, genuine; that is, the nostrum firm has documentary evidence that they were given; but it is hardly necessary to state that they are not honest. Often the handling of the material is very careless, as in the case of Doan's Kidney Pills, which ran an advertisement in a Southern city embodying a letter from a resident of that city who had been dead nearly a year. Cause of death, kidney disease.