ly candid but equally
misleading offer of "no cure no pay" is offered. In this case the
patient is usually required to sign a statement of his condition, in
which his symptoms and his previous bad habits are fully set forth. It
is stipulated that the "doctor" is to be paid a certain round sum when a
cure is effected, and while the case is under treatment the patient pays
for the medicines. If no pay is asked for the "stuff," the quack is
seldom or ever a loser. Such a document few persons, with characters to
lose, would care to run the risk of publishing, and hence they generally
acknowledge themselves cured, or pay the doctor handsomely to redeem the
document.

While wading through this dark morass of deception and fraud, the
"anatomical museums" must not be overlooked. These Priapean
establishments, in which is an exhibition of wax models of different
organs and parts of the human body, are too vile for description.
"Lectures" are delivered with the design of furnishing patients to the
quack practitioners in whose interest the place is run. Thousands--we
might have said millions--of copies of disgusting little books on
"Marriage," or the "Philosophy of Marriage," or some cognate obscenity
are distributed gratis, and it is no unusual sight to see a score of
nervous, hollow-eyed patients waiting for treatment.

We have endeavored to speak plainly and to the point in dealing with
quacks and quackery, because it is a topic of sovereign importance and
urgency. Hundreds upon hundreds of our population are plundered and
poisoned by these medical pests of society, and if we have not made it
plain that it is dangerous to have anything to do with the advertising
doctors of New York or any other place, we have failed in our purpose.
Their advertisements, their pamphlets, and their rascally little books,
penetrate the remotest corners of the land. Curiosity leads the farmer's
son or the apprentice to send for some advertised book to satisfy a
craving for information, or to pander to an already diseased
imagination, and the bad seed is sown. He is surprised, startled, and
finally alarmed; and he writes. He is told in the reply that "I seek my
remedies in far-off climes; some in the distant prairie, some in the
ever-blooming balsam; in the southern climes, where eternal summer
reigns, and on the top of the snow-clad Himalayas." Accompanying the
reply is a recipe calling for articles having no existence, or for
decoctions from pla