How many people die from wholly unnecessary operations? Only the
hospital records and the immediate friends of the patient can tell.
These words are written to put people on their guard. Dishonest
doctors are everywhere, especially in big cities. Chicago is full
of them. They may be strictly ethical and affect to despise the
advertiser. They do so, however, only from a business standpoint. They
hate opposition, and somehow the advertising doctor manages to get a
goodly share of the business, and is oftentimes the superior in skill
in his particular line or specialty to his ethical brother.
There are good doctors and bad ones, just as there are good and bad
men in every walk and business of life.
In my experience as a detective I have met with both kinds. In these
pages I will deal with the advertising doctor only. I will do, and
have done, what I can to drive the dishonest ones out of the business.
The eye doctor, professing to cure blindness or other diseases of the
eye without the knife, is one of the most dangerous and dishonest men
in the medical profession. Chicago has its full quota of this form of
quackery. There are two men in this city--Dr. M---- and Dr. O----, who
are national advertisers.
Both have been exposed in a recent New York weekly paper at the
instigation of the American Medical Association. It is noteworthy,
however, that this same paper accepted a full-page advertisement from
Dr. O---- only a few months before the expose, thus deluding thousands
of its readers. The price paid for one page and one issue was fifteen
hundred dollars. This sum, paid to but one paper, will give the reader
some idea of the vast expense to which the quack is put to place his
name before the public in his effort to rob the blind. This same Dr.
O---- pays out annually sixty thousand dollars for advertising alone.
He employs twenty typewriters--mostly girls. The correspondence is
handled entirely by the clerks, the doctor rarely ever seeing a letter.
He employs but one assistant, a young man fresh from college. No
personal interviews with patients are asked for or desired. It is a
mail order business almost exclusively. Occasionally a patient comes
to the city to see this great oculist.
Dr. O---- himself is hardly ever in evidence. He spends most of his
time in summer resorts and European capitals.
The only medicine used is a solution of boric acid in water. The same
can be bought at any drug store for a few cents. His charges are ten
dollars per month.
This man's mail is enormous. I have known him to take in twenty
thousand dollars a month. One of the catchy lines in his advertisement
says he cures crossed eyes without the use of the knife. This is true,
but he uses scissors instead. Cross-eye can only be straightened by
severing the muscles of the eye. All physicians know this, but the
people do not; hence the success of this robber of the blind.
Dr. O---- is a devout church member. He is one of the largest
contributors to the Christian Church, to which he belongs. Nearly all
church papers carry his advertisements, though they must know him to
be a fraud of the first water.