A case in point showing how little has been achieved by our medical men
who have gone among the people, torch in hand, to lead them to the
Promised Land of happiness and content and physical and mental health
has been well illustrated in a poem, recently published in THE LITTLE
REVIEW (Chicago), wherein the authoress, Mary Aldis, unwittingly indicts
the whole medical profession for still allowing the sale of a patent
medicine to reduce obesity. The strange title of the poem in homely and
unadorned “free verse” is “Ellie: The Tragic Tale of An Obese Girl.”
Mrs. Aldis—thus runs the poem—had a manicurist who was “a great big
lummox of a girl—a continent,” with “silly bulging cheeks and puffy
forehead,” and who one day said to the poetess, weeping and distraught:
“I’m so fat, so awful, awful fat! The boys won’t look at me.” She asked
Mrs. Aldis for help and Mrs. Aldis suggested, “A doctor’s vague advice
to bant and exercise,” and “Ellie and her woes passed from my mind.
Until, as summer dawned again, I heard that she was dead.” Mrs. Aldis
went to the funeral and saw Ellie lying in her coffin and was told by
Ellie’s mother, “She must a made it [the dress] by herself. It’s queer
it fitted perfectly, An’ her all thin like that.” Later in the evening
Mrs. Aldis received the following confidences from Ellie’s mother:
“’Twas the stuff she took that did it, I never knew till after she was
dead. The bottles in the woodshed, hundreds of ’em, All labelled
‘Caldwell’s Great Obesity Cure Warranted Safe and Rapid.’”
To sermonize here, we have Mrs. Aldis, who we know to be a highly
intelligent woman and one not only interested in the uplift of the drama
but also in the uplift of the common (?) people, merely saying to a
girl, who is wretchedly unhappy about her elephantine size: All that I
can give you is a doctor’s vague advice to bant and exercise. She might
have given her Vance Thompson’s epoch-making book “Eat and Grow Thin,”
or read chapters from it to the unhappy girl, thereby convincing her
that starvation is unnecessary and also a patent medicine. But with a
coldness that is most reprehensive, she gave “a doctor’s vague advice to
bant and exercise,” and evidently Ellie would none of this. She might
also have consulted the hundred and one doctors in Chicago or elsewhere
who specialize in the reduction of fat, and who could have given her for
“the continent” a diet chart or perhaps a pill to effect the desired
change. But she did not think this necessary; she did not feel it her
duty. But if we have only adverse criticism for Mrs. Aldis’ uncharitable
act, what direful words of commination should we not visit on the doctor
who gave the “vague advice.” In an age when the cult of slimness is
uppermost in everybody’s mind, is it possible that the doctor consulted
by Mrs. Aldis was so untrue to his mission as a public benefactor that
he gave only “vague advice,” or is Mrs. Aldis maligning the whole
medical profession and trying to show that by his “vague advice” the
doctor was really responsible for Ellie’s death by driving her into
taking “the bottles in the woodshed, hundreds of ’em. All labelled
‘Caldwell’s Great Obesity Cure Warranted Safe and Rapid.’”?
The lesson contained in the poetic lines of Mrs. Aldis’ little tragedy
is a bitter one for all those medical men who have made strenuous
efforts to let the public share their deep and vast knowledge without so
much as asking for the slightest compensation. It shows beyond a doubt
that not only are the Ellies of this world unwilling to imbibe science
in a popular form, but also the Aldises of a much higher intelligence.
It shows that the lure of patent medicine is a very strong one and that
a doctor’s “vague advice” cannot offset it. Strange, indeed, that a
doctor’s “vague advice” should be so inconsequential opposite so
patently fraudulent a preparation as “Caldwell’s Great Obesity Cure,”
but stranger still is what we are about to record—namely, the failure of
our medical propagandists to combat in an intelligent way that most
simple of all our metabolic disturbances—obesity!