Another fraud exposed by _New Idea_ was a "cure" for the peculiar ills of women. The cure is put up in the form of little oblong blocks about a half inch in length. "A circular accompanies them, and is well calculated to produce alarm in the young. It is another sample of the demoralizing documents which unscrupulous quacks are continually circulating among the laity, in order to create alarm, and profit by this alarm." After giving a description of the diseases peculiar to the sex it is stated that all of these are curable by using eight dollars worth of this wonderful medicine. _New Idea_ continues:-- "The _cure_ consists, according to our examination, of nothing but flour, made into a paste and allowed to harden in the form of small oblong blocks. Evidently the quack relied upon the faith-cure principle, and his auxiliary treatment, as set forth in the rules of living given in the circular." While these inert preparations are of the nature of frauds, they will not injure the health, nor make drunkards, or opium fiends, as the disguised preparations of whisky and morphine are likely to do. That the use of patent medicines has made many drunkards is a fact well attested. The American Association for the Study of Inebriety appointed a committee several years ago to investigate the various nostrums advertised especially for the benefit of alcohol and opium inebriates. The report of this committee, prepared by Dr. N. Roe Bradner, late of the Pennsylvania Hospital for the Insane, in speaking of the marvelous cures advertised in connection with the use of these mixtures, calls them "volumes of gilded falsehood, designed for an innocent, unsuspecting public," and adds:-- "The use of such nostrums would do more toward confirming than eradicating the habit, if it existed, and would invite and create addiction to an almost hopeless fatality, where the habit had not previously existed. Insanity, palsy, idiocy, and many forms of physical, moral and mental ruin have followed the sale of these nostrums throughout our land." Dr. E. A. Craighill, President of the Virginia State Pharmaceutical Association, is quoted in the July (1897) _Journal of Inebriety_, as saying:-- "In my experience I have known of men filling drunkards' graves who learned to drink taking some advertised bitters as legitimate medicine. It would be hard to estimate the number of young brains ruined, and the maturer opium wrecks from nostrums of this nature. I could write a volume on the mischief that is being done every day to body, mind and soul, all over the land, by the thousands of miserable frauds that are being poured down the throats of not only ignorant people, but, alas, intelligent ones, too." A lady informed the writer recently that her brother had taken forty bottles of one of these preparations, and had become a drunkard through it.