Twenty Years a Detective in the Wickedest City in the WorldWooldridge, Clifton R. (Clifton Rodman)
History
Twenty Years a Detective in the Wickedest City in the World
Wooldridge, Clifton R. (Clifton Rodman)
Crime -- Illinois -- Chicago; Police -- Illinois -- Chicago
Women more frequently than men are the victims of unscrupulous
doctors. People do not often question the skill or the opinion of the
fashionable physician; they take for granted the truth of all he may
say, forgetting for the time that he has a pecuniary interest in the
work that may possibly result in the death of the patient.
UNNECESSARY OPERATIONS.
How many people die from wholly unnecessary operations? Only the
hospital records and the immediate friends of the patient can tell.
These words are written to put people on their guard. Dishonest
doctors are everywhere, especially in big cities. Chicago is full
of them. They may be strictly ethical and affect to despise the
advertiser. They do so, however, only from a business standpoint. They
hate opposition, and somehow the advertising doctor manages to get a
goodly share of the business, and is oftentimes the superior in skill
in his particular line or specialty to his ethical brother.
There are good doctors and bad ones, just as there are good and bad
men in every walk and business of life.
In my experience as a detective I have met with both kinds. In these
pages I will deal with the advertising doctor only. I will do, and
have done, what I can to drive the dishonest ones out of the business.
The eye doctor, professing to cure blindness or other diseases of the
eye without the knife, is one of the most dangerous and dishonest men
in the medical profession. Chicago has its full quota of this form of
quackery. There are two men in this city--Dr. M---- and Dr. O----, who
are national advertisers.
Both have been exposed in a recent New York weekly paper at the
instigation of the American Medical Association. It is noteworthy,
however, that this same paper accepted a full-page advertisement from
Dr. O---- only a few months before the expose, thus deluding thousands
of its readers. The price paid for one page and one issue was fifteen
hundred dollars. This sum, paid to but one paper, will give the reader
some idea of the vast expense to which the quack is put to place his
name before the public in his effort to rob the blind. This same Dr.
O---- pays out annually sixty thousand dollars for advertising alone.
He employs twenty typewriters--mostly girls. The correspondence is
handled entirely by the clerks, the doctor rarely ever seeing a letter.
He employs but one assistant, a young man fresh from college. No
personal interviews with patients are asked for or desired. It is a
mail order business almost exclusively. Occasionally a patient comes
to the city to see this great oculist.
Dr. O---- himself is hardly ever in evidence. He spends most of his
time in summer resorts and European capitals.
The only medicine used is a solution of boric acid in water. The same
can be bought at any drug store for a few cents. His charges are ten
dollars per month.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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