The Menace, an Exposition of Quackery Nostrum Exploitation and Reminiscences of a Country Doctor Page: 14
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The Menace
too deeply under the blighting influence of the "patent
medicine" and similar frauds ever to print the truth about
them.
But the number of newspapers, whose silence cannot be
bought, increases yearly, and their power is slowly but
surely making itself felt. In the meantime, it is the phy-
sicians duty to the public to give it the enlightenment it
needs for its own protection against "consumption cure"
swindlers and other frauds equally vicious. Only physic-
ians know the enormous harm done by these ignorant, un-
scrupulous scoundrels. Those who conduct campaigns of
public enlightenment on the subject of tuberculosis know
how difficult it is to eradicate from the public mind the old,
pernicious idea, that drugs will cure consumption.
Those who are selling fraudulent "consumption cures,"
and there are no "consumption cures" of the drug type that
are not fraudulent, undo, by their infamous claims, in a few
minutes the good that it has taken weeks and possibly
months to attain. It is the universal experience of visiting
nurses, and others who come in daily contact with con-
sumptives that just as soon as the victim begins to rely on
some widely advertised "cure" he immediately becomes
careless of the safety of others, and relaxes those efforts
which are necessary if he hopes to overcome the disease.
It is but human that such should be the case. The ten-
dency is to follow the line of least resistance. If consump-
tion can be cured by taking some dope out of a bottle every
three or four hours, why should the sufferer subject him-
self to the minor inconveniences of the more or less strict
regime laid down by the physician? Of all mean business
in the world, there are few, if any, more contemptible, more
heartless or more commercially vicious, than that carried
on by the man who enriches himself at the expense of the
poor unfortunate consumptive.
Of all tainted money, none is quite so dirty as the blood
toll collected by the consumptive cure faker. There is a
ghastly sameness in the description of the various con-
sumptive cure frauds, exploited in nearly every case by
men who are as lacking in professional training as the com-
monest digger or grasshopper-eating Indian of Arizona, or14
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Dixon, Chas. D. (Charles D.). The Menace, an Exposition of Quackery Nostrum Exploitation and Reminiscences of a Country Doctor, book, 1914; San Antonio, Texas. (https://texashistory.unt.edu/ark:/67531/metapth143569/m1/24/: accessed April 25, 2024), University of North Texas Libraries, The Portal to Texas History, https://texashistory.unt.edu; crediting University of Texas Health Science Center Libraries.