The progressive farmer and southern farm gazette., May 21, 1910, Page 373, Image 9

About The progressive farmer and southern farm gazette. (Starkville, Miss.) 1910-1920

Image provided by: Mississippi Department of Archives and History

                
not only are these medicines worthless, but, worse
than this, they actually hinder recovery in their
own action besides the evil they do in preventing
the victim from trusting in the only things that
will really help him. I quote the exact words of
a Greensboro dispatch of March 17, 1910:
“In closing, Dr. Hutchinson, discussing the
relation of medicine to tuberculosis, declared
that no kind of medicine was good for it.
Medicine, he said, might relieve a cough or
remove a pain, but these symptoms were
really Nature’s means of throwing off a dis
ease and should be encouraged rather than
checked. He said that fresh air, good food,
and plenty of it, living and sleeping In the
open, were the sovereign remedies for the
disease. Patent medicines, by deadening the
‘fighting cells* incapacitate them for attacking
and destroying the tubercle bacilli.
“Dr. Livingston Farrand spoke briefly. He
is Secretary of the National Tuberculosis As
sociation. Several questions were asked the
two distinguished specialists, and every an
swer was to the effect that the less medicine
people took for most diseases, the better off
they would be.”
You profess to want me to make an examina
tion of all the medical advertising that you carry,
knowing full well that I am not an idle man, and
that it is not my business to spend my time as
private censor and detective trying to convince
men whose profit lies In not being convinced.
The ads. which I have given, however, are alone
enough to show the pitiable absurdity of your
statement that under the Pure Food and Drugs
Act “such a thing as a patent medicine fakir can
not exist." We have a Pure Food and Drugs Act,
therefore there are no fakirs; we have a law
against stealing, therefore there are no thieves.
One statement Is as reasonable as the other. And
the fakirs who exiBt and fatten upon the most
fearful scourge that mankind has to bear are but
the more vicious of the wholesale aggregation;
these consumption-treatment fakirs are but the
types of thousand and thousands of others who
pretend to cure the smaller disorders, such asj
stomach troubles, liver disorders, headaches, etc.,
ete.
In England an exhaustive authoritative exami
nation of the whole patent medicine business with
all Its foulness has Just been made and the re
sults published in a startling volume. The thing
smells to Heaven and has naturally amazed the
nation. It happens that as a reader of the Lon
don Spectator I have followed the echoes of this
remarkable exposure for several weeks—one of
the most notable facts being the number of fa
mous papers that have so far disgraced themselves
as to refuse to publish the advertisements of this
book exposing the patent medicine fraud because
of the damage to their medical advertisers whose
bloofl-money has bought them into silence. The
London Spectator is not one of these papers, how
ever, and it has not hesitated to publish the truth
In this matter as in others. The more England
has investigated, the more shameful has the whole
traffic appeared. There are reports of death after
death where the persons could have been saved by
early medical treatment, but depended Instead on
the worthless concoctions prepared by these con
scienceless frauds. Take these illustrations fur
nished by reputable correspondents:
‘The harm Is done by advertisements which
lead sufferers from serious maladies amenable
to scientific treatment to pin faith upon a
worthless cure. Cases of this kind are al
ways to be discovered in numbers among
hospital patients. It was one of such that
first opened my eyes to the main facts. This
was the case of a woman who presented her
self at a hospital suffering from cancer of
the breast. The disease had passed far be
yond the help of surgery. Asked why she
had not applied earlier, the woman stated
that she had relied throughout on a much
advertised heal-all ointment. This was mere
ly a preparation of colored lard exactly sim
ilar to compounds upon the advertising of
which thousands of pounds are still expend
ed. They sell mostly among the poor and
ignorant, and are responsible for much pre
ventable misery and death.”
And this one:
“Within the past few years in our local
cottage hospital, I. as visiting member of the
committee, have come across a number of
cases of gastric ulcer In young women, and
in most cases have elicited the fact that they
had been dosing themselves with one or other
of the most advertised indigestion cures, the
sole potent ingredient of which is aloes. i
One case ended fatally; the life might have
been saved by an early diagnosis and scien
tific treatment. I could fill pages of your
space with similar illustrations, and more
pages with reports of inquests fully est ish
ing my statements.”
J*
But you say that we once accepted patent medi
cine advertising in The Progressive Farmer and
Gazette. We did. J have no inclination to deny
the charge you hurl at me, but I send it back with
the statement that just as soon as the facts about
the whole miserable fraud -came to my knowledge
through exposures in magazines and other ways,
I stopped every line of the advertising regardless
of the loss—stopped business that you were send
ing us In spite of your protests—and I would do
it to-day if I had to grub stumps for a living. Can
you say as much?
It is with beautiful grace indeed that you taunt
us now for carrying these few ads. for you—you
who persuaded us to carry some of them against
our better Judgment until we learned the facts
and refused to become knowingly a party to a
i*auu uu cue yuuiiu. uut as tor returning tne iew
paltry dollars we had from you, here Is an ofTer
for you: If you will agree never to place another
line of patent medicine advertising, I will donate
to the Anti-Tuberclosis Society every penny of
the money that you paid us for patent medicine
advertising after I assumed control of the paper.
If you will not do this, then we feel that the
money can be used vastly better in spreading the
circulation of our paper for the exposure,.of these
fakirs than by returning It .to you to assist In
helping you to And new victims.
#
Moreover, It is my understanding jthmi ddie
United States Government, wearying of the mis
representation of the Pure Food and Drugs Act,
by means of which thousands of shams and frauds
have sought to delude the public, has officially
warned the people against such claims, and I am
already making efforts to get explicit information
on this point, fortunately without even having to
1 wait upon your delightfully sarcastic offer to fur
nish me the address of the United States Govern
ment. Meanwhile, I have only to say that If the
United States Government really professes that It
has put all fakirs out of business, and vet-lets
eucn fakirs as I hare mentioned go uncaught, then
It is as miserable a failure in promoting Justice
as your agency is in promoting religion.
Jl
The people will not be deceived much longer.
The day of the fakir Is almost over. Some of
them, as you suggest, have been such outrageous
frauds that even the United States Government
has taken a hand against them. Moreover, the
whole aggregation Is becoming so foul and ill
smelling that the religious press Is fast unyoking
Itself from partnership with them. But a little
while ago my estimate that "hundreds and hun
dreds” of them were guilty would certainly have
been literally true, and I believe It Is to-day, but
at any rate, I can rejoice that only fifty religious
papers in the South will run a line of such ad
vertising. Fifty is .fifty too many, and while I
am glad that there are not so many as I thought,
yet if only a do*en were In partnership with these
scoundrels, the fact would still be a disgrace to
the Church of God and to the intelligence nf
Southern church members. There are a few good
patent medicines, I may grant, but so are there a
few good and honest men in the penitentiary.
The proportion In one class is not larger than in
the other, and not until one is willing to trust a
striped-clothed convict with his money drawer,
should he be willing to trust the average patent
medicine with his health.. Your headache cures
have killed foolish men and women by ruining
the heart; your stomach remedies have Aggravated
diseases that would have yielded to Nature’s treat
ment; there Is your cancer specialist—one, for ex
ample, whose ad. you sent us several years ago
who was not even a licensed physician and urged
cancer victims to postpone surgical treatment and
trust to his worthless ointments; there are your
alcoholic medicines like Peruna that have made
drunkards^ of the unsuspecting, and many other
nostrums containing morphine that have fixed this
awful habit on those that have taken them; the
terrible affliction of blindness has also offered a
field for quacks to prey upon the Ignorant; while
so-called specialists have conducted “confidential
correspondence” and fleeced and bullied both men
ind women without mercy.
And upon each and every one of these points,
et me say, I can “specify,” and give you in
itances if you want them.
ji
And yet, this is not all. It might be bad
mough if the patent medicine victims were con
ined to the mature and the old. You may say
hat all such are old enough to know what to
ake, and yet, alas! they often feel as one said to
ne only this winter: "I saw It advertised In my
hurch paper, and I thought it ought to be all
ight.” It might be bad enough, I say, if the
luacks and fakirs victimised only the adults. If
hey were content merely to rob the grown-up per
on whose fault or misfortune—God pity him!—
s that he is Ignorant, and if they were content
nerely to take the last hard-earned savings of
iged men and women as they languish on their
leath-beds. This might be enough to make Chris
ian papers refuse alliance with them, but my tale
s not yet told. The list of crimes is not complete
mtil we recall that those who can not speak for
hemselves must also be sacrificed to this Moloch
if money-lust, that not even helpless lnfanthood
ind prattling babyhood can escape the clutches of
he fiends who make merchandise of human suf
'ering. Three hours after your letter came to me
here came a copy of the official warning of the
Jnlted States Department of Agriculture concern
ng another class of patent medicines that I
tiave not yet mentioned, this official statement de
claring that not only morphine but even cocaine
has been found in "soothing syrups" and other
concoctions offered for the cure of Infant diseases,
and that jnany a tiny coffin has repaid the trust
In mixtures advertised as "perfectly harmless."
Mrs. W. N. Hutt In an address before the Na
tional Farmers’ Congress In Raleigh last Novem
ber, quoted an eminent scientist as saying that
a million infants have been killed by these sooth
ing syrups, etc.. In the United States alone. Sup
pole he made this estimate twice as large as It
shbula.be:—I will, If you wish, let ft go as ten
ttmeatoo large,—and even then you would have
I hnlrared thousand baby graves, a hundred thou
sand empty cradles and hushed homes, the wallj
of a hundred thousand mothers mourning for1
) dead—you would have all this as fee' ier
Cain', and worse, that falls upon but one
branch of the miserable traffic you hate
unwisely defending, a traffic In many ways mere
damnable than the whiskey trade that pulls Sewn
the strong man In his itr«nvth
Is not the call to you and to every church paper
In America, “Come out from among them eed he
ye separate”?
Yours sincerely and respectfully,
CLARENCE POE,
For The Progressive Farmer and Gazette.
P. S. (Monday.)—The foregoing letter written
Saturday afternoon was left over till to-day In
order that some stenographer’s errors might be
corrected, and meanwhile, I have received the en
closed letter from Dr. H. W. Wiley, who speaks
for the United States Government In answer to
my Inquiry as to whether you were right In say
ing that “under the Pure Food and Drugs Act
such a thing as a patent medicine fakir can not
exist.” If I should follow the spirit of your let
ter I might use his reply to accuse you of absolute
falsehood, but I prefer rather to use it as proof
of how shamefully these patent medicine fakirs
have deceived and discredited you. And In that
case I appeal to your manhood and your sense of
iecency to seize this moment—as I am sure many
a church paper in the South Is going to seize it_
to repudiate the whole miserable aggregation who
xuxoiwu juu, once ana iorever. This will
prove your sincerity, this will vindicate yon, and,
an the other hand, yon will Judge and place your
self, once and for all. In the eyes of all thought
ful and honest people, If you seek to quibble,
rence, dodge, and draw attention from the *»■§»
Issue by specious attacks on unessential points.
For you, and for the church papers that hitherto
have not known the truth. It Is now as with an
cient Israel the age-old question of righteousness
on one side and the golden calf on the other, and
the issue is as definite as when Moses stood In
the gate of the camp and called for decision as to
who were on the side of Jehovah. C. P.
Better feeding of the cows next winter will
mean more milk and more money. Right now
Is the time to get ready to do that better feeding.
Remember Professor Michel’s trinity of feeds,
peavine hay, silage, and cottonseed meal. Now
Is the time to make sure of all three.