Part 27

Mr. Clyde’s chin abruptly assumed a prominence which he seldom permitted it. “Well, that settles that,” he observed; and it was entirely unnecessary for any one present to ask any amplification of the remark. Mrs. Clyde looked at her mother for sympathy—and didn’t get any.

“Whenever I see a woman come into the shop,” continued the druggist, “with a whitey-blue complexion and little gray’ flabby wrinkles under her eyes, I know without asking what she wants. She’s a headache-powder fiend.”

“That queer look they have is from deterioration of the blood,” said Dr. Strong. “The acetanilid or acetphenetidin or whatever the coal-tar derivative may be, seems to kill the red corpuscles. In extreme cases of this I’ve seen blood the color of muddy water.”

“It certainly makes a fright of a woman. ‘Orangeine’ gets a lot of ‘em. You’ ve seen its advertisements in the street-cars. The owner of Orangeine, a Chicago man, got the habit himself: used fairly to live on the stuff, until pop! went his heart. He’s a living, or, rather a dead illustration of what his own dope will do.”

“But what are you to do for a splitting headache?” queried Mrs. Clyde, turning to Dr. Strong.

“I don’t know, unless I know what causes it,” said Dr. Strong. “Headache isn’t a disease. It’s a symptom, a danger signal. It’s the body’s way of crying for help. Drugs don’t cure a headache. They simply interrupt it.”

“What with the headache-powders breeding the drug habit, and the consumption cures and cough medicines making dope fiends, and the malt whiskey cures and Perunas furnishing quiet joy to the temperance trade, I sometimes wonder what we’re coming to,” remarked Mr. Gormley.

Mr. Clyde rubbed his chin thoughtfully. “But poor people who can’t afford a doctor have no recourse but to patent medicines,” said he.

“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.

“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.”

“That is, the glasses caused the headaches, and the patent medicines the stomach derangement,” said Mr. Clyde.

“And the general break up, though the glasses may have started both before the nostrums ever got in their evil work. Nowadays, the wise doctor, having an obscure stomach trouble to deal with, in the absence of other explanation, looks to the eyes. Eyestrain has a most potent and far-reaching influence on digestion. I know of one case of chronic dyspepsia, of a year’s standing, completely cured by a change of eyeglasses.”

“As a financial proposition,” said Mr. Gormley, “your nurse must have come out at the wrong end of the horn.”