“So she had been; raw alcohol, flavored with a little caramel and doctored up with a few drugs. Toward the close of her Peruna career, her stomach became pretty sensitive. Also, as she wasn’t accustomed to strong liquor, her kidneys were affected somewhat. In her daily paper she read a clarion call from Dr. Kilmer of the Swamp Root swindle (the real Dr. Kilmer quit Swamp Root to become a cancer quack, by the way), which seemed to her to diagnose her case exactly. So she ‘tanked up’ some more on that brand of intoxicant. Since she was constantly drugging herself, the natural resistance of her body was weakened, and she got a bad cold. The cough scared her almost to death; or rather, the consumption cure advertisements which she took to reading did; and she spent a few dollars on the fake factory which turns out Dr. King’s New Discovery. This proving worthless, she switched to Piso’s Cure and added the hasheesh habit to alcoholism. By this time she had acquired a fine, typical case of patent-medicine dyspepsia. That idea never occurred to her, though. She next tried Dr. Miles’s Anti-Pain Pills (more acetanilid), and finally decided—having read some advertising literature on the subject—that she had cancer. And the reason she was leaving you, Mrs. Clyde, was that she had decided to go to a scoundrelly quack named Johnson who conducts a cancer institute in Kansas City, where he fleeces unfortunates out of their money on the pretense that he can cure cancer without the use of the knife.” “Can’t you stop her?” asked Mrs. Clyde anxiously. “Oh, I’ve stopped her! You’ll find the remains of her patent medicines in the ash-barrel. I flatter myself I’ve fixed _her_ case.” Grandma Sharpless gazed at him solemnly. “‘Any doctor who claims to cure is a quack.’ Quotation from Dr. Strong,” she said. “Nearly had me there,” admitted he. “Fortunately I didn’t use the word ‘cure.’ It wasn’t a case of cure. It was a case of correcting a stupid, disastrous little blunder in mathematics.” “Mathematics, eh?” repeated Mr. Clyde. “Have you reached the point where you treat disease by algebra, and triangulate a patient for an operation?” “Not quite that. But poor Maggie suffered all her troubles solely through an error in figuring by an incompetent man. A year ago she had trouble with her eyes. Instead of going to a good oculist she went to one of these stores which offer examinations free, and take it out in the price of the glasses. The examination is worth just what free things usually are worth—or less. They sold her a pair of glasses for two dollars. The glasses were figured out some fifty degrees wrong, for her error of vision, which was very slight, anyway. The nervous strain caused by the effort of the eyes to accommodate themselves to the false glasses and, later, the accumulated mass of drugs with which she’s been insulting her insides, are all that’s the matter with Maggie.”