In cases of indiscretion, the quack treatment is always with mercury—notwithstanding denials. Sometimes serious mercurial poisoning results, and not unfrequently, through the charlatan's ignorance of proper treatment in complicated diseases, irreparable injury ensues.
The quack advertisements and pamphlets are the source of incalculable evils to youths between the ages of seventeen and thirty. They are impelled by fear to visit the quack's den, where they are "played" as long as practicable. Sometimes exciting drugs, like cantharides, are given in the medicine, and thus intensify the evil. The quack, of course, ascribes the result to the patient's alarming condition, who is growing worse, in spite of his medicines, and who can only be cured by more powerful and costly drugs. Sometimes a seemingly candid but equally misleading offer of "no cure no pay" is offered. In this case the patient is usually required to sign a statement of his condition, in which his symptoms and his previous bad habits are fully set forth. It is stipulated that the "doctor" is to be paid a certain round sum when a cure is effected, and while the case is under treatment the patient pays for the medicines. If no pay is asked for the "stuff," the quack is seldom or ever a loser. Such a document few persons, with characters to lose, would care to run the risk of publishing, and hence they generally acknowledge themselves cured, or pay the doctor handsomely to redeem the document.
While wading through this dark morass of deception and fraud, the "anatomical museums" must not be overlooked. These Priapean establishments, in which is an exhibition of wax models of different organs and parts of the human body, are too vile for description. "Lectures" are delivered with the design of furnishing patients to the quack practitioners in whose interest the place is run. Thousands—we might have said millions—of copies of disgusting little books on "Marriage," or the "Philosophy of Marriage," or some cognate obscenity are distributed gratis, and it is no unusual sight to see a score of nervous, hollow-eyed patients waiting for treatment.
We have endeavored to speak plainly and to the point in dealing with quacks and quackery, because it is a topic of sovereign importance and urgency. Hundreds upon hundreds of our population are plundered and poisoned by these medical pests of society, and if we have not made it plain that it is dangerous to have anything to do with the advertising doctors of New York or any other place, we have failed in our purpose. Their advertisements, their pamphlets, and their rascally little books, penetrate the remotest corners of the land. Curiosity leads the farmer's son or the apprentice to send for some advertised book to satisfy a craving for information, or to pander to an already diseased imagination, and the bad seed is sown. He is surprised, startled, and finally alarmed; and he writes. He is told in the reply that "I seek my remedies in far-off climes; some in the distant prairie, some in the ever-blooming balsam; in the southern climes, where eternal summer reigns, and on the top of the snow-clad Himalayas." Accompanying the reply is a recipe calling for articles having no existence, or for decoctions from plants unknown to botanists. But in whatever form the response comes, the result is uniform. Plunder, always plunder, in the first place; sometimes this is supplemented by murder; whole families are destroyed, insanity is engendered, and the victims of these vile knaves are driven headlong to destruction and an early grave.
It has always been the dearest wish of a quack doctor to possess a diploma of some sort, no matter where or how dishonestly procured. Sometimes it was forged; sometimes second-hand; but however or wherever procured it was framed and conspicuously displayed in the "consulting" room. By the recent and entirely wholesome amendment of the law, however, those beguiling documents are no longer available. It is now imperative that the certificate of every physician must be filed with the County Clerk. Until this provision is observed, no doctor—no matter how eminent or well-qualified—can practice in New York. Many a quack, flourishing like a green bay-tree, was summarily brought to the "end of his tether," by this most wise legislative enactment.
We would be derelict to the duty we owe to the public did we not here, and in this connection, state our emphatic opinion that the editors and proprietors of newspapers, as a rule, have hitherto looked too leniently on this subject of quackery and its baleful announcements. Happily some of our journals will not publish such advertisements, and no editor can excuse himself by saying that he is ignorant of the character of such announcements. It must be known to every man of experience that such advertisements are unfit for the perusal of young men or women, and it is surprising that the heads of families should permit newspapers containing those advertisements to enter their houses. As a well-known English author some-time since wrote:
"It is pregnant with matter for grave reflection, and this not only in reference to patients themselves, but also in regard to the reprehensible conduct of parents who so recklessly admit into their family circle newspapers which insert the obscene advertisements of the quacks. As I have said before, these advertisements are traps for their sons and an offense to the modesty of their daughters. Well assured am I that many cases of unaccountable suicide in youths and young men, which cause so much surprise and misery in families, are due to these unfortunates having become the dupes of quacks."
This is a very terrible picture of the evil wrought through the abuse of the advertising columns of the press, but experience has shown us that it is not by any means overdrawn. The responsibility of the health and comfort—even of the lives—of many of the rising generation thus rests with the newspapers. How careful, then, ought publishers to be that the columns of their journals should in nowise assist in disseminating that which pollutes the minds of the young, renders them unfit to fulfill the duties of society, or to enjoy its pleasures, and, in short, makes their whole life a burden and a misery.