rigin of
diseases, recent medical or physiological discoveries, and state and
national movements for promoting health. In fact, they have turned to
their own uses the very law that seeks to control them and the
exposures that seek to exterminate them. Whatever may be the merits of
Castoria, the "Don't Poison Baby" advertisement on the following page,
printed just after the accompanying "Babies Killed by Patent
Medicines," which appeared in a home journal, was surely a clever bit
of advertising. Upon an editorial in a daily paper on the relation of
eyeglasses to headache and indigestion, an optician based a promise of
immediate relief for these ailments if he himself were patronized. The
recent investigations of the Department of Agriculture, and of
Professors Chittenden and Fisher, in regard to foodstuffs, are proving
helpful to food quacks and advertisers of pills for constipation and
indigestion. Since the passage of the Pure Food Law one health food is
advertised in a column headed "Pure Food."

When the season for pneumonia comes around numerous medicines are "sure
cures" for grippe and pneumonia. "Rosy teachers look better in the
schoolroom than the sallow sort," is surely a good introduction to a
new food. Woman's vanity sells many a remedy advertised to counteract
the "vandal hand of disease, which robs her of her beauty, yellows and
muddies her complexion, lines her face, pales cheek and lip, dulls the
brilliancy of her eye, which it disfigures with dark circles, aging her
before her time." Who in your town is as good a friend to "owners of
bad breath" as the advertiser who tells them that they "whiff out odor
which makes those standing near them turn their heads away in
disgust"? The climax of effective educational advertising as well as of
consummate presumption and villainy is reached in the notice of an
alcoholic concoction that uses the headline, "Medical Supervision
Needed to Prevent the Spread of Consumption in the Schools." Thus
grafting itself on the successful results of the medical examination in
the Massachusetts schools, it enlists the aid of teachers, trades on
the fear of tuberculosis, even indorses the fresh-air treatment. So
convincing was this appeal that it was reprinted in the news columns
of a daily paper in New York as official advice to school children.

[Illustration: Don't Poison Baby.]

So clever are these methods of advertising and so successful are they
in reaching great number