The "Specialist," the "Optician," the "Doctors' College"; All Frauds.
Blackmail Helps Medical Scamps--Poor Girls Victims of "Doctor" Thieves.
The history of quacks and quackery includes some of the most glaring
frauds ever perpetrated on a credulous people. In all ages of the
world's history down to the present day, these humbugs have cut an
important figure in their day and generation. They are numerous in
almost every line of business, serving God when it pays them to do it,
and assisting the devil when their interests demand it. In these pages
I propose to deal with medical quacks only.
The advent of every discovery in medicine, slight though it may be,
has brought to the front a ring of pretenders in the healing art.
These fellows catch the multitude. The poor, the ignorant and the
credulous are their followers. It has been so in every age of the
world's history. The man or woman with broken health will catch at
every straw that offers hope of recovery, and so they drift from one
quack to another, until ruined in fortune and oftentimes made worse
in their physical ills, they at last pass to the silent home where
the pain and joy the cunning and simplicity of the world are alike of
insignificance.
The desire to live lurks in the heart of nearly every human being.
And no matter how wretched they may be, how poor in pocket, broken in
spirit, whether suffering from real or imaginary ills, thirsting for
relief, they have gone from quack to quack, giving of their meager
savings for some vaunted elixir which in all probability only hastens
their journey to the grave.
One reason why quackery flourishes is the fact that medicine is not
a science. Ask any honest physician and he will tell you the same. A
drug that will help one person will have no effect on another. There
are in the realm of medicine no such things as "cures." People who are
sick recover, but they would do so whether they took "dope" or not.
All disease is self-limited. The doctor who talks of curing smallpox,
measles, typhoid fever, is a fool. Natures cures, not the doctor.
People get well of these complaints, and many others who take no
medicines and employ no physicians.