It has been elsewhere noted——the propensity of people in general for preferring medicine to advice. If the world were convinced that the writer possessed an unfailing remedy——a “medicine” that would cure every physical ailment and prevent disease, it would be demanded faster than it could be manufactured, though every gin-mill in the land were transformed into a laboratory for its production. No price would be deemed exorbitant, and, though the mixture were black as ink, and more nauseating than the vilest drug in our vile Materia Medica, it would still be gulped down as a child demolishes bon-bons, if it never failed in its efficacy.
We have only to look over the newspaper advertising columns to find scores of articles claiming to accomplish this, at the very reasonable price of 50 cents to $1.00 per bottle, “large bottles cheapest,” and very agreeable to the taste; and evidence abounds in the shape of letters purporting to have been written by such as have, although given up by the doctors, been withdrawn from the grave (regardless of the rights of the heirs and undertakers)——restored to the busy walks of life——“and no change of diet necessary.” Thousands upon thousands of otherwise sensible people are gulled into the belief that a few bottles of somebody’s pretended “discovery,” advertised in a yellow-covered almanac, will cure whatever ails them. There is something so fascinating about such literature that I would almost as soon place a package of Paris-green within reach of a baby as to put, say, a medical almanac, and more particularly a cookery-book with fancy dishes and medical lies alternating, in the hands of the average adult. There isn’t one in fifty proof against them. Let the most robust Congressman spend one half-hour reading one of these “messages”, with the endless variety of symptoms therein given, and the hundreds of letters of the blest——fabricated in the proprietor’s office, or, at best, written by his victims during a temporary suppression of the symptoms——and, comparing his own feelings with those described, the chances are that he would soon be pouring down the medicine——convinced that it hit his case exactly. Why is this possible? Why, indeed, do we have a drug-store on every other corner, with shelves packed with the infamous “regular” and irregular remedies, simple and compound? Simply because ninety-five in the hundred men, women, and children so treat themselves that they do have, from day to day, or week to week, various symptoms more or less severe, all indicative of derangement of the bodily functions. And because of this the medicine-makers know that he who is the keenest and boldest in prostituting the art of printing, will reap the richest harvest, by reason of the ignorance and disease-producing habits of the people.