The Great American Fraud: The Patent Medicine EvilAdams, Samuel Hopkins
Science
The Great American Fraud: The Patent Medicine Evil
Adams, Samuel Hopkins
Patent medicines; Quacks and quackery
Alas for romance! The scathing blight of the legal mind descended on
this touching story. The lawyer-directors would have none of "Professor
Pauli, the great German chemist," and Liquozone destroyed him, as it
had created him. Not totally destroyed, however, for from those rainbow
wrappings, now dissipated, emerges the humble but genuine figure of our
old acquaintance, Mr. Powley, the ex-piano man of Toronto. He is the
prototype of the Teutonic savant. So much the Liquozone people now
admit, with the defence that the change of Powley to Pauli was, at most,
a harmless flight of fancy, "so long as we were not attempting to use a
name famous in medicine or bacteriology in order to add prestige to the
product." A plea which commends itself by its ingeniousness at least.
Gone is "Professor Pauli," and with him much of his kingdom lies. In
fact, I believe there is no single definite intentional misstatement in
the new Liquozone propaganda. For some months there has been a cessation
of all advertising, and an overhauling of materials under the censorship
of the lawyer-directors, who were suddenly aroused to the real situation
by a storm of protest and criticism, and, rather late in the day, began
to "sit up and take notice." The company has recently sent me a copy of
the new booklet on which all their future advertising is to be based.
The most important of their fundamental misstatements to go by the board
is "Liquozone is liquid oxygen."
"Liquozone contains no free oxygen," declares the revision frankly. No
testimonials are to be printed. The faked and garbled letters are to
be dropped from the files. There is no claim of "overwhelming medical
indorsement." Nor is the statement {028}anywhere made that Liquozone
will cure any of the diseases in which it is recommended. Yet such is
the ingenuity with which the advertising manager has presented his case
that the new newspaper exploitation appeals to the same hopes and
fears, with the same implied promises, as the old. "I'm well because of
Liquozone," in huge type, is followed by the list of diseases "where it
applies." And the new list is more comprehensive than the old.
All Ills Look Alike to Liquozone.
[IMAGE ==>] {028}
Just as to Peruna all ills are catarrh, so to Liquozone every disease is
a germ disease. Every statement in the new prospectus of cure "has been
submitted to competent authorities, and is exactly true and correct.,"
declares the recently issued pamphlet, "Liquozone, and Tonic Germicide";
and the pamphlet goes on to ascribe, among other ills, asthma, gout,
neuralgia, dyspepsia, goiter and "most forms of kidney, liver and heart
troubles" to germs. I don't know just which of the eminent authorities
who have been working for the Liquozone Company fathers this remarkable
and epoch-making discovery. {029}
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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