Part 28

Chicago has its quota of doctors who "cure" the morphine habit, but always in the way that "Dr." C---- did. Most of them are "fiends" themselves who eke out a living selling the drug to other victims in the form of a "cure." If by any chance you have contracted the habit steer clear of all so-called cures. The remedy is worse than the disease.

THE CANCER CURE.

One can hardly pick up a paper or magazine that does not carry the advertisement of Dr. B----, of Indianapolis, Ind., with branch institutes at Kansas City and other places. Dr. B----'s remedy is an oil for which he claims wonderful properties.

In reply to an inquiry the doctor sends out a little book, filled with testimonials from grateful patients, dependent preachers and his fellow church members. The book tells you that the doctor has even built a church all by himself and maintains it at his own expense, even paying the salary of the pastor out of his own pocket.

It will be noticed that all successful quacks appeal to the religious element of the community. A man who is really religious is honest; having no tinge of dishonesty himself, he suspects none in others. He therefore falls easily into the net of the charlatan.

The quack knows this, hence his use of the religious press in which to exploit the virtues of his medicines.

Does Dr. B---- cure cancer? Yes. There are seven varieties of cancer; two malignant, which all physicians agree are incurable, and five non-malignant, of which the wart and wen are good examples. Dr. B---- cures the non-malignant varieties only, and you can do the same yourself by the application of a few drops of glacial acetic acid to the growth once a day.

This is the whole secret of the so-called cures wrought by these men. Dr. B---- never cured a genuine malignant cancer in his life, and never will until a specific is discovered that will combat it. He has grown very rich, is known as a public-spirited gentleman and to say aught against him in his native town is to bring down on one's head the wrath of the business community. Why?

PATIENTS FROM EVERYWHERE.

Dr. B---- has patients coming from all parts of the country. They bring and spend money at his sanitariums. It is "business," and I am only sorry to say that what is known as business is too often larceny. If you have a growth you do not understand, trust it to your family physician, if he is an honest man, rather than to one of the many cancer sharks that infest the country.

THE RUPTURE CURE.

This, when offered by mail, as it is in almost every magazine that accepts medical advertisements, is also a glaring fraud upon a most helpless class of people. While it is true that a well fitted truss will retain and often cure a rupture, yet the quacks who advertise the rupture cure propose to cure you by mail, then by application of a wonderful oil which they sell at ten dollars per bottle, they propose to close up the opening through which the rupture descends and effect a permanent cure. A few years back the surgical treatment of rupture was not always a success, hence people so afflicted had reason to avoid operations.

Today the cure of rupture is not attended by any danger. Surgery has made many advances in the past few years. People who are ruptured should avoid any other means of cure than the operations.

There are not less than twenty-five advertising specialists in Chicago who profess to cure rupture without operation.

They only succeed in separating you from your money. My advice is not to go near them, lest you regret it.

FEMALE DISEASES.

It is well known among the readers of the daily press that all the advertisements of a medical nature addressed to women are meant to cover the nefarious business of the abortionist.

The commissioner of health in a recent interview stated that not less than fifty thousand abortions are committed yearly in Chicago. It is well to state that only a small number of these are performed by the advertising abortionists. Most of them are the work of regular physicians.

Indeed, in no other way could this immense destruction of infant life take place. I know of physicians here in Chicago who have and do no other business. I have in mind one palatial residence on Michigan avenue patronized exclusively by the rich. It is presided over by a strictly ethical physician. This man's fee is from one thousand to five thousand dollars.

The poor content themselves with less pretentious places and prices. I know of physicians on the north side and the west side who do this work for five and ten dollars. They have as many as ten and twelve cases a day.

Up to a few weeks ago all of the Chicago papers contained a list of advertisements under the classification of medical, about as follows:

"Maternity Hospital--Ladies taken care of before and after confinement."

"Mrs. Dr. B----, licensed midwife, takes ladies for confinement, etc."

"Dr. Anna B---- Elegant home for ladies expecting confinement, etc."

The above are only samples of a long list of advertisements of similar tenor which appeared daily in the Chicago press for twenty-five years. These advertisements attracted the attention of people in the country. They were not designed to attract city people. People residing here seldom patronize them on account of the high prices usually charged. They know cheaper doctors. Girl from the smaller towns and the farms are the ones sought.

The girl applying for relief at any of these places was usually told that abortions were unlawful and dangerous to life. She was strongly advised to stay in the hospital, which offered perfect seclusion, until the full period when the child would be naturally born and without danger to either of them. This advice was generally accepted and the price agreed upon paid. This was always all the girl had with her, and the promise of more. The amount ranged from one hundred to five hundred dollars.

The money paid over, the girl was shown to a pleasant room, and invited to make herself at home. There were always other girls there, usually under assumed names. They kept coming and going every few days. None remained longer than ten days.

After the girl had been there a couple of days the madam announced that the doctor would call on her that day and make an examination, so as to approximate the time of baby's arrival.

With a very small instrument the abortion was produced while making the examination, the patient knowing nothing of it. This is done so deftly that labor pains do not come on for sometimes two days afterwards.

In ten days the patient is ready to leave the hospital. The fee having been paid, both parties are usually satisfied, and the girl, if she is wise, makes her misfortune a stepping stone to something better.

If the amount paid has been too small to satisfy hospital funds, an effort is made to collect more, but usually not from the girl.

The madam gets the patient's confidence and discovers, if she can, the man responsible for the girl's condition. A bill is then sent him for several hundred dollars. Should he ignore it or refuse to pay, he is politely told that the account will be placed in the hands of a lawyer in the town where he resides and the matter can be adjusted by a "jury of his fellow citizens."

Imagine the consternation of some business man or church deacon in a small community over the receipt of such a letter.

If guilty, and they are as a general thing, they take the next train for Chicago and pay the bill. Parties running these establishments are money makers. I know of one on West Adams street whose owner has made a fortune of two hundred and fifty thousand dollars, all accumulated in twenty years.

THE ELECTRIC BELT FRAUD.

This is another one of the many humbugs that seem to have fastened themselves on the country. Chicago is the center for this as well as every other fake of a medical character.

These belts are of the cheapest construction and are made at a cost of twelve and one-half cents each. They sell for anything, up to three hundred and even five hundred dollars. There may be virtue in electricity, properly applied, but there certainly is none in the belt.

Dr. McL---- is located in Chicago, and has branch offices in almost every state in the union. He takes pages in the daily press to tell of the virtues of his belt. It cures everything from lumbago to corns. He usually pictures a man in a half-stooping position, holding his back with one hand, while with the other he is getting a belt from a sympathizing doctor.

Dr. McL---- has made big money duping his fellow men. Recently he opened an office in the City of Mexico. There the government protects people somewhat from their own folly.

A Mexican bought a belt, guaranteed to cure his disease: it failed. The doctor was promptly arrested for obtaining money under false pretenses. He was sent to jail, where he remained sixteen months.

The offices were closed and have not since been reopened. The best evidence that electric belts are a useless article is to be found in the fact that physicians neither use nor prescribe them. They are an adjunct to quackery.

THE VARICOCELE CURE.

To begin with, varicocele is a surgical disease and is only cured by an operation. Yet the daily papers teem with advertisements offering cures by drugs, appliances and external washes.

It is needless to say that all of these are fakers. Chicago has more than twenty specialists who profess to cure varicocele. Only two of them fulfill their promises. The rest take your money and render you no service.

Nearly every paper advertises these men, such headlines as "Cured in Five Days," "Cured Without Pain."

"Five-day varicocele cure" meets the eye of the reader on nearly every page. It is true that varicocele can be cured in five days; it can and is cured in one treatment, but always by surgical means. The headlines above are simply baits for the afflicted.

The main idea of the so-called specialist is to get the victim into his office. Here he will tell him that he has two methods of cure. One is an operation, which necessitates the patient going to a hospital, remaining there for five days in order to effect the cure. The other is a suspensory and a liniment which, applied daily, will do just as well, but it requires three or four months to get the cure.

The patient wishes, of course, to avoid an operation. He is always told there is some danger from the chloroform. He usually takes the "slow cure," parting at the same time with a good, fat fee, usually a good deal more than he would have had to pay a reputable man for an operation. At the end of the period fixed for the cure the patient finds himself no better and finally in disgust places himself in the hands of a man who does operate and is promptly cured.

Among the many men engaged in the cure of varicocele is Dr. Mark K----, of Cincinnati and Denver. This man's advertisements adorn every page of papers that will take them. His fee is $2.00; his remedy a suspensory and a wash. Both are utterly useless. After you have paid your money your name or original letter is sold to someone in the same business.

In a little while you are surprised to receive mail from all parts of the country--all wanting you to purchase a varicocele cure. This applies to vacuum pumps, the superior system, the Parisian system and other fakes of a like nature. They are all frauds. In the past few years I have raided their places many times, seized their literature, which is always obscene and indecent, and arrested the proprietors. The game, however, still goes on.

THE "NERVOUS DEBILITY SPECIALIST."

"Lost Manhood Restored" is probably the greatest of all medical grafts. These men succeed simply because of the total ignorance of the people on matters pertaining to the sexual system.

If sexual physiology was a part of the studies in the public schools for pupils at the age of fourteen there would be no cases of nervous debility, and the "lost manhood" physician would have to seek other fields for the display of his talents.

One of the saddest of all the habits that young men drop into at some period of their lives is the secret vice. Until quite lately prudery has prevented its proper discussion and about the only literature on the subject was to be found in that issued by advertising doctors who treat the effects.

One thing is certain--no one ever acquired the habit by reading one of these "scare" or quack books. John Stuart Mill, in speaking of this vice, says: "The diseases of society can be no more checked or healed without publicly speaking of them than can those of the body." To ignore or deny the prevalence of the evil is sometimes honest ignorance, but is more often hypocrisy.

A little scientific discussion on this subject is not out of place here. It will put young men on their guard against themselves, and cut off in some degree the income of that class of doctors who live on their credulity.

So far as I have been able to trace its origin it has always been with us. According to Ovid, Horace and Aristophanes, it was a curse in ancient Greece and Rome. Even Hippocrates, the father of medicine 380 years before Christ, considered it a subject worthy of his pen. Of modern writers the greatest was Tissot, in 1760, who issued a classic on this subject whose object was to stay, if possible, the abuses and vices which threatened the ruin of the French people. Lurid as the little book distributed by specialists usually is, the effects of this vice depicted by Tissot puts them all into the shade. If not exactly scientific, it at least exerted a large moral influence which was beneficial in the then state of public and private morals.

In the discussion of secret sin let us make it plain that the evil effects are not immediate, as is often thought and frequently taught by school teachers and writers. The brain is not palsied at once. Dementia, palsy and sudden death are not likely to occur. The erroneous idea that it does, accounts in a great measure for the terror, the bashfulness and the love of solitude exhibited by this class of sufferers.

It is enough for the purpose of this article that in the course of physical decay, gray hair, baldness and enfeebled gait, weakness of the muscular and nervous system, in fact, a general lowering of the tone of the bodily health, appear. Life has been lived out with abandon, its energies have been overdrawn and its wheels have run down like the mainspring of a clock whose regulator has been lost.

The sporty and fast life led by reckless youth is making him pay the penalty. And what is the penalty? Look at the daily papers, see the brazen medical advertisements, "Manhood Restored" staring at you from every page. These advertisements are costly. They run up into the thousands of dollars a month. One man, a doctor of Chicago, formerly paid the daily press eight thousand dollars a month for advertising; his "Lost Manhood, Varicocele and Hydrocele Cured" appeared in almost every paper in this city.

And the people who needed the treatment paid the bills. So powerful was this man's influence that he was enabled to stave off undesirable legislation at Springfield. In this he was aided by the newspapers, who did not wish to lose this princely revenue from quack doctors.

This doctor is still in business, but on a small scale compared to former times. Competition and the advent of more mendacious liars have reduced his income to more modest proportions than it once was.

A MONUMENTAL SWINDLE.

MEN who need treatment or advice concerning their health or any weakness or private disease should, before taking any treatment whatever, go to Dr. S. for consultation, examination and advice; free.

DR. S.--Longest Established, Most Successful and Reliable Specialist in Diseases of Men, as Medical Diplomas, Licenses and Newspaper Records Show.

Dr. S. first came to Chicago about the time of the World's Fair. His home office was supposed to be in Philadelphia. While Philadelphia has the reputation of being slow, yet the methods of Dr. S. were decidedly swift, so much so that he almost took the breath away from the Chicago specialists.

He was the first to charge for medicine in addition to his fees. It is a well-known fact that a man having been under the treatment of Dr. S. for a week or a month never seeks the aid of another one.

He has been cured? Not on your life. He has been robbed. I have known this "Doctor" to charge as much as one hundred dollars for two small bottles of dope. This is in addition to a fee of twenty-five to five hundred dollars. He always operates a "drug store" in connection with his office.

The patient, having undergone an examination and having been thoroughly frightened, is told what the fee will be. This being paid, he is given a prescription and sent to the "drug store."

This is so written that no other drug store can fill it. In a short time he is handed two or three small bottles, and on asking "how much" is told a sum varying from ten to one hundred and fifty dollars. Surprised and indignant, he hastens back to the "Doctor" and complains. He is told that the medicines are cheap at that price; that they are expensive drugs and very necessary in his case.

If the patient has the money he pays it, resolving that he will have no more to do with Dr. S. If he lives in the country he is surprised the following week by getting notice from the express company that a C. O. D. package awaits him at the office.

It is the second week's supply of medicine. Charges from twenty-five to ninety-eight dollars. He at once writes to the "Doctor" and says he doesn't want the stuff.

The first supply has done him no good. It's too expensive and he can't afford to continue it.

The "Doctor" writes back and says that he must pay for it. It will require three months to effect a cure, and the whole treatment has been prepared. If he does not take it the office will be subject to a loss of many hundreds of dollars. They also threaten him with a suit for the recovery of the amount.

BLACKMAIL AN ADJUNCT.

The poor victim, almost frightened to death at the prospect of exposure, usually compromises and pays all the money he can raise, taking the three months' "treatment" which he is assured has been specially prepared for his case.

It is not an uncommon thing for Dr. S. to get several thousand dollars out of one patient. Men have been known to mortgage their farms to get out of the clutches of these cormorants. They never let go until the last dollar has been extracted from the poor patient. After his experience with Dr. S. he wants no more. He thinks that they are all alike and carefully avoids them in the future.

Dr. S. himself is not in Chicago. He is said to live in Philadelphia. He operates offices in this city and several other places. Three men comprise the office staff--one man who "takes" the case, another a physician, usually a dummy engaged at a salary of fifteen to twenty dollars a week, and a druggist.

The main guy of every medical quack office is the "case taker." He is always a "confidence man" skilled in the business. He plays upon the fears and credulity of his victims. He pictures the most dreadful fate awaiting the unfortunate patient. If a case of private disease, he knows that the patient will rot on his feet and become a charnel house of infection.

If a "Lost Manhood" case, he pictures the horrors of impotency, a trusting girl deceived, a divorce, together with the scandals that precede and follow.

The old Reliable B---- Doctors Cure Men--Men only.

NO PAY UNTIL CURED. $5 FEE FOR CURE, $5. NEWLY CONTRACTED SPECIAL DISEASES.

Consultation and Examination Free Whether You Take Treatment or not. Come to Expert Specialists.

We cure Varicocele, Nervous Debility, Urethral Troubles, Blood Poison, Private Diseases, Phimosis, Piles, Skin Diseases, Rupture and other Wasting Diseases of Men.

Call or send for free question list. Hours--Daily. 9 to 8; Sundays, 10 to 2. J. B. McG----, M. D., Medical Director.

B---- MEDICAL INSTITUTE. Chicago, Ill.

The above advertisement appears right along in the Chicago dailies. If Dr. S---- is the "Prince of swindlers" the B---- Medical Institute is a good second.

It is owned and run by a Bohemian, who changed his name from an almost unpronounceable one to that of Hansen. He employs cheap doctors--mostly dope fiends--men who could not get employment elsewhere. His pay is about fifteen dollars per week. This man also runs a "dental" Institute where equally cheap dentists are employed. Both institutes rob the unsuspecting.

Hansen was sued by a former patient and nearly four hundred dollars recovered, quite recently. The man was absolutely free from any disease, but was frightened into paying that amount to get rid of an imaginary one.

He is a common, cheap, medical swindler.

These are Positive Facts.

MEN $10. CURES YOU. "DON'T PAY MORE."

Under scientific treatment all diseases peculiar to men are thoroughly cured.

Nervous Debility, Blood Poisoning, Lost Vitality, Prostatic, Bladder and Kidney Troubles, Varicocele, Hydrocele, Contracted Diseases, Urethral Obstruction, Male Weakness.

Dr. C----'s Medical Offices are the most reliable and permanently established specialists in Chicago. See them before commencing treatment elsewhere. Advice, consultation and examination FREE.

Dr. C---- MEDICAL OFFICES,

Hours: 8 a. m. to 8 p. m. Sunday, 10 to 3 only.

Chicago, Ill.

SWINDLER A "DOPE" FIEND.

The above advertisement is that of Dr. C----. C---- himself is out of the game. He is a dope fiend. A few months ago he narrowly escaped the penitentiary for taking $225 from a sixteen-year-old child. He was fined $200 in the Municipal Court, paid it and quit the business.

Previously, however, he had sold the use of his name to Dick Williams, owner of several of the so-called medical offices along State street. Williams changes his doctors every few days, so that a patient hardly ever sees the same man twice. Each man makes an effort to "re-fee" the patient--that is, they try to extract more money in the way of fees, claiming that the other "doctor" did not grasp the severity of the case. It is not unusual for a patient to pay half a dozen fees in the same office before he drops onto the fact that he is being systematically robbed.

The main object of advertising cheap is to get the people into the office and started on the treatment. Money is demanded at every visit and new "diseases" discovered as long as the credulity of the patient lasts.

CONSULT DR. R----

A graduate and Regular Licensed Physician. Dr. R---- is qualified through twenty-one years of practical experience to give you the best medical advice and treatment in

ALL DISEASES AND WEAKNESSES PECULIAR TO MEN.

The oldest established and most reliable specialist, who sees and treats patients personally. Dr. R----'s Home Treatment Cures Weak Men. If you have Varicocele, Hydrocele, Weakness, Drains, Lost Vigor, Losses, Blood Poison, Kidney, Bladder or Any Chronic Nervous, Private or Urinary Disease, consult the reliable specialist, who will cure you quickly, permanently and cheaply.

CONSULTATION FREE AND STRICTLY CONFIDENTIAL, as the doctor never makes a professional charge unless you desire him to treat your case until cured. Remember, you see Dr. R---- personally. If you cannot call, write a description of your case and he will send you symptom blank and book, "VITAL FACTS FOR MEN," FREE.

Dr. R---- is no better and no worse than others who have similar advertisements. They all practice the same game.