The Menace, an Exposition of Quackery Nostrum Exploitation and Reminiscences of a Country Doctor Page: 16
128 p. : ill., ports. ; 24 cm.View a full description of this book.
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The Menace
THE FRENCH LABORATORY.
The proprietor of this fake institute, who posed as a
physician of the old school, but who in reality was an old
sawed-off pusillanimous fraud, posing as an old Confede-
rate soldier. We doubt that he ever came closer to that
terrible conflict, than that such a disgrace to the human
race and a scavenger on an honorable community, unluckily
for the world, and for numbers of poor unfortunate con-
sumptives, arrived in this mundane sphere, sometime pre-
vious to 1860. He claimed to have discovered a wonderful
"cure" for consumption, catarrh, and all diseases of the
respiratory tract. This was in the form of an inhaler,
made of tin, or alluminum, in which he placed pieces of dry
weeds and chips upon which he would pour a small quantity
of creosote and alcohol, then striking a match to it, ask his
rummies to extract therefrom the elixir of life.
The poor unfortunate consumptive would inhale and ex-
hale the stuff, and you could see in the sparkle of his eye,
that here at last he thought he had arrived at the fount,
from which by handing over to this old fraud, his seventy-
five dollars, he was getting or extracting from the herbs
represented to have come from the isle of Madagascar, but
in reality came from his back yard and woodpile, the "life
giving fumes" that in a short while, would enable him to
return to his little home, where he could recuperate his lost
resources, and start life new with the loving wife and baby,
who were expecting papa home sound and well, but in real-
ity hastening his dissolution, when the dear little wife and
child would be deprived of husband and papa, and the
cursed ignorant scoundrel enriched by the blood money he
had taken as toll from the unfortunate consumptive. He
ran an advertisement in the daily papers as follows: "If
the U. S. Government will send twelve hundred consump-
tives to the French Laboratory, we will guarantee to cure
them." We wrote him a letter requesting him to record his
license, and informing him before he could treat people it
would be necessary to comply with this law. We received
the following letter: "Bexar County Medical Society,16
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Dixon, Chas. D. (Charles D.). The Menace, an Exposition of Quackery Nostrum Exploitation and Reminiscences of a Country Doctor, book, 1914; San Antonio, Texas. (https://texashistory.unt.edu/ark:/67531/metapth143569/m1/26/: accessed April 30, 2024), University of North Texas Libraries, The Portal to Texas History, https://texashistory.unt.edu; crediting University of Texas Health Science Center Libraries.