The Health Master

by Samuel Hopkins Adams

A shout of acclaim greeted this suggestion. Bairdstown’s Suffering Womanhood and Bored Manhood was getting more out of a free admission than it had ever had in its life before. Ponderously the obese Mayor hoisted his weight up the steps and shook hands with the reluctant lecturer. He then invited Dr. Strong to come to the platform.

“This is my meeting!” protested the Great Gray Benefactor. “I hired this hall and paid good money for it.”

“You said it was our meeting as much as yours!” roared an insurgent from the crowd, and a chorus of substantiation followed.

“Ten minutes will be all that I want,” announced Dr. Strong as he took a chair next the Mayor.

“That’s fair!” shrilled the Chairman. “On the Professor’s own invitation.” In a tone lowered to the alarmed quack’s ear, he added: “Of course, you can back out if you want to. But I’d advise you to do it quick if you’re going to do it at all. This is a queer-tempered town.”

So significant was his tone that the other judged advance to be safer than retreat. Therefore, summoning all his assurance, he sought, in an impassioned speech, to win back his hearers. He was a natural orator, and, when he reached his peroration, he had a large part of his audience with him again. In the flush of renewed confidence he made a grave tactical error, just when he should have closed.

“Let this hireling of the Doctors’ Trust, the trust that would strangle all honest competition, answer these if he can!” he shouted, shaking the page of testimonials before his adversary’s face. “Let him confute the evidence of these good and honorable women who have appeared here to-night; women who have no selfish aims to subserve. Let him impugn the motives of the reverend clergyman and of the honored statesman who sit here with me. Let him do this, or let him shrink from this hall in the shame and dishonor which he seeks to heap upon one whose sole ambition it is to relieve suffering and banish pain and death.”

There was hearty applause as the speaker sat down and Dr. Strong arose to face a gathering now turned for the most part hostile. He wasted no time in introduction or argument. “Mr. Chairman,” said he, “Professor Gray rests his case on his testimonials. With Mr. Clyde I have investigated a number of them, and will give you my results. Here are half a dozen testimonials to the value of one of his nostrums, the Benefaction Pills, from women who have been cured, so they state, of diseases ranging from eczema through indigestion to consumption. All, please note, by the same wonderful medicine. And here,” he drew a small box from his pocket, “is a sample of the medicine. I have just had it analyzed. What do you suppose they are? Sugar! Just plain sugar and nothing else.” Professor Gray leaped to his feet. “You don’t deny the cures!” he thundered.

“I don’t deny that these people are well to-day. And I don’t deny that the testimonials from them are genuine, as documents. But your sugar pills had no more to do with the cure than so much moonshine. Listen, you people! Here is the core and secret of quackery:

“All diseases tend to cure themselves, through the natural resistance of the body. But for that we should all be dead. This man, or some other of his kind, comes along with his promises and pills, and when the patient recovers from the disease in the natural course of events, he claims the credit. Meantime, he is selling sugar at about one hundred dollars per pound.”