If you measure 36 inches around the hips, he gives you a 36-inch truss-- which, in everything except size, would be exactly like the truss he'd sell at the same price, to a man with a rupture only _half_ as bad as yours, or to a man with a rupture _twice_ as bad as yours. A drug-store sells trusses in exactly the same way that the old-fashioned shoe store sold shoes. It was solely a matter of how much the customer wanted to _pay_, and the _style_ the customer _wanted_-- _not_ what the customer _needed_. Thousands of people have been "all crippled up" because their shoes were too _short_, or too _narrow_, or the _wrong shape_. The old-fashioned shoe clerk knew his _stock_, but he didn't know enough about the customer's _feet_ to know when the customer was _properly fitted_. Just as thousands of people have trouble with their glasses because they were fitted by an _optician_-- "over the counter,"-- instead of having an _oculist prescribe_ for them. And, partly because improperly fitted at drug-stores, and partly because drug-store trusses are usually mere makeshifts, thousands of people are to-day wearing trusses which are doing immense _harm_ instead of good-- trusses which cause the rupture to grow constantly worse. Even if there is any druggist in the country who _does_ happen to know much about rupture and about fitting trusses, he'd have to be a mighty bright man to be able to fit you at all properly with the kind of trusses sold in the average drug-store. Practically all the drug-store trusses are simply some form of the old belt or springs and leg-strap truss-- though sold under hundreds of different names as "improvements." They are usually cheaply constructed-- turned out by machinery in immense quantities. And they are always ready-made "stock" trusses. Each kind made in only one model or style, and the pads in only a few different shapes and sizes. Making mighty scant provision for the wide variation between the ruptures of different people; making mighty little allowance for the fact that what will do for one man won't do at all for another. [Sidenote: Each Man Requires Something Different] Your rupture, when out, may be the size of a hen's egg; your neighbor may have a protrusion almost as big as his head; and a lot of other men with protrusions ranging all the way from one extreme to the other. To say nothing of big differences in other ways besides size. Each of you should have a size and shape of holding pad especially adapted to the needs of your case-- each should have a truss put together especially for you. Else there can be no such thing as continuous, comfortable holding of the rupture. So you see the absurdity of trying to get a comfortably fitting truss at a drug-store, or of expecting to get one that will do much good.