“Can’t afford a doctor!” exclaimed Dr. Strong. “Why, don’t you know that nostrum-taking is the most expensive form of treatment? Did you ever happen to see A. B. Frost’s powerful cartoon called ‘Her Last Dollar’? A woman, thin, bent, and ravaged with disease, is buying, across the counter of a country store, a bottle of some kind of ‘sure cure,’ from the merchant, who serves her with a smile, half-pitying, half-cynical, while her two ragged children, with hunger and hope in their pinched faces, gaze wistfully at the food in the glass cases. There’s the whole tragedy of a wasted life in that picture. ‘Her Last Dollar!’ That’s what the patent medicine is after. A doctor at least _tries_ to cure. But the patent medicine shark’s policy is to keep the sufferer buying as long as there is a dollar left to buy with. Why, a nostrum that advertises heavily has got to sell six bottles or seven to each victim before the cost of catching that victim is defrayed. After that, the profits. Since you’ve brought up the matter of expense, I’ll give you an instance from your own household, Clyde.” “Here! What’s this?” cried Mr. Clyde, sitting up straight. “More patent dosing?” “One of the servants,—Maggie, the nurse. I’ve got her whole medical history and she’s a prime example of the Dupe’s Progress. She’s run the gamut of fake cures.” “Something must have been the matter with her to start her off, though,” said Mr. Clyde. “That’s the joke—or would be if it weren’t pathetic. She started out by having headaches. Not knowing any better, she took headache-powders.” “One for you, Myra,” remarked Mr. Clyde to his wife, in an aside. “Bad heart action and difficulty in breathing—the natural result—scared her into the belief that she had heart trouble. Impetus was given to this notion by an advertisement which she found in a weekly, a religious weekly (God save the mark!), advising her not to drop dead of heart disease. To avoid this awful fate, which was illustrated by a sprightly sketch of a man falling flat on the sidewalk, she was earnestly implored to try Kinsman’s heart remedy. She did so, and, of course, got worse, since the ‘remedy’ was merely a swindle. About this time Maggie’s stomach began to ‘act up,’ partly from the medicines, partly from the original trouble which caused her headaches.” “You haven’t told us what that was, Strong,” remarked Mr. Clyde. “Later. Maggie now developed catarrh of the stomach, superinduced by reading one of old Dr. Hartman’s Peruna ads. She took seven bottles of Peruna, and it cheered her up quite a bit—temporarily and alcoholically.” “Then it was _that_ that I smelled on her breath. And I accused her of drinking,” said Mrs. Clyde remorsefully.