THE PATENT MEDICINE EVIL—Continued
Patent Medicine Firms and Quacks Dispose of the Confidential Letters Sent to Them—Patent Medicine Concerns and Letter Brokers—The Patent Medicine Conspiracy Against the Freedom of the Press—How The Patent Medicine Trust Crushes Honest Effort.
HOW QUACKS DISPOSE OF THE CONFIDENTIAL LETTERS SENT TO THEM
When you write for information—which is usually the first step—in reply to an advertisement of this character, you receive in reply a letter, which addresses you in an intimate way, as, "Dear or Esteemed Friend." It informs you that "we are devoting our lives in the interest of suffering humanity," and requests you to waste no time in writing a full account of your symptoms and sickness; that such information will be sacredly regarded as confidential and filed away from the prying eyes of everyone except the "doctor" who reads it.
Every art is used to give the writer the impression that she is doing business with responsible and reputable people; that what she writes about her health, her affairs, and her person, are to be read by an experienced medical adviser and by no other. The truth, as we have shown, is that she writes her secrets to a man, who is not even a physician, who in turn passes the letter over to be answered by an office clerk.
When the fake doctor, or the patent medicine man, has exhausted his "jollying" tactics, his lies, and his promises, and he can no longer induce the victim to send more money, he sells the victim's letters to another quack in the same business. These harpies, knowing what ails the individual, begin sending her their specious and insinuating literature. The woman reads, becomes interested, and, having bitten before, concludes to try once again, and so the story goes—one after another trying to drain the life-blood of an ailing, irresponsible foolish woman.
The selling of letters has become a business, so much so that there are regularly established medical letter brokers from whom you can buy these letters by the thousands. In a single medical letter broker's office in New York City there are upwards of seven million of these confidential letters for sale to the highest bidders. This incidentally gives one a slight idea of the tremendous business this is, and of the hundreds of thousands of dupes and victims there have been.
The following extracts are taken from a well-known woman's journal, which at various times has been interested in this subject, and are of special interest in this connection:
One of the most disgusting and disgraceful features of the patent medicine business is the marketing of letters sent by patients to patent medicine firms. Correspondence is solicited by these firms under the seal of sacred confidence. When the concern is unable to do further business with a patient it disposes of the patient's correspondence to a letter broker, who, in turn, disposes of it to other patent medicine concerns at the rate of half a cent for each letter.
One of these brokers assured the writer that he could give me "choice lots" of "medical female letters." ... Let me now give you, from the printed lists of these letter brokers, some idea of the way in which these "sacred confidential" letters are hawked about the country. Here are a few samples, all that are really printable: