As A Chinaman Saw Us: Passages from His Letters to a Friend at Home
General
As A Chinaman Saw Us: Passages from His Letters to a Friend at Home
United States -- Description and travel; United States -- Social life and customs
Next come the musical curists, who listen to thrills of sound, a big
organ being the doctor. Then there is the psychometric doctor, who cures
by spirits. The spirit doctor cures in the same way. The palmist
professes to point out how to avoid the ills of life. Magnetic healers
have hundreds of victims in every city. Their advertisements in the
journals of all sorts are of countless kinds. Some cure at short hand,
some miles distant from the patient. They are equaled in numbers by the
hypnotists, or hypnotic doctors, who profess to throw their patients
into a trance and cure them by suggestion. I heard of one cure in which
the guileless American is made to lie in an open grave; this is called
"the return to nature." Again, patients are cured by being buried in hot
mud or in hot sand. I have seen a salt-water cure, where patients were
made to remain in the ocean ten hours a day. The plain water cure has
thousands of followers, with hospitals and infirmaries, where the
patient is bathed, soaked, filled, washed, and plunged in water and
charged a high amount.
Then there is the vegetarian cure, no meat being eaten; and there are
the meat eaters, who use no vegetables. There are over fifty thousand
_masseurs_ and osteopaths in the country, who cure by baths and
rubbing. You may have a bath of milk, water, electricity, or alcohol, or
a bath of any description under the sun, which is guaranteed to cure any
and all ailments. Perhaps the most extraordinary curists are the color
doctors. They have rooms filled with blue and other colors, in whose
rays the patient victim or the victim patient sits, "like Patience on a
monument." I could not begin to give you an enumeration of the various
kinds of electric cures; they are legion. But the most amazing class
comprises the patent-medicine men, who are usually not doctors at all,
but buy from some one a "cure" and then advertise it, spending in one
instance which I investigated one million dollars a year. Every
advantageous wall, stone, or cliff in America will be posted. You see
the name at every turn, and the gullible Americans bite, chew, and
swallow.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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