452 POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. 



Evening Post,, the whole press unblushingly sprinkles its columns with 

 the charlatan's cards. Nearly every New York daily on January 24 

 reported, at lengths inversely proportional to its abetment of quackery, 

 the expose of Dr. Henry Kane's Eadium-Cure swindle ; in the January 

 22 issue of one of the most reputable of them, I find a conspicuous 

 advertisement of this same discomfited wonder-worker. Shameless 

 self-interest never could have played so slavishly into the quack's hands 

 until the growth of education made publishing a fiercely competitive 

 business. 



At the same time, not only has the growth of education placed a 

 megaphone to the empiric's lips, but it has sensitized the public to his 

 call. There is a wider interest in hygiene and therapeutics; people 

 think more about their health and more readily take alarm. ' Health 

 journals ' enjoy large circulations ; too often nothing more than elab- 

 orate handbills of the editor's particular book, ' system/ or hygienic 

 contrivance, and, at best, running wild with ' hints to health ' and 

 philippics against the doctors, these magazines only succeed in leaving 

 their readers the shuttlecock of every battledore in quackdom. Sim- 

 ilarly, the broadcast discussion of medical problems, in response to the 

 interests of an educated public, creates a kind of diathesis to imaginary 

 disease. Then, vaguely bound up, perhaps, in widespread education is 

 the modern stress of life, hysteria, high nervous tension and suscepti- 

 bility to fads. 



As a final (undetached) cause we must recognize the passion for 

 untrammeled personal freedom, so characteristic of latter days, espe- 

 cially in England and America. It is that attitude which one writer 

 savagely describes as ' jealously safeguarding to every citizen the sacred 

 right of going to the devil in his own way.' Fearing to dispense undue 

 privileges and unjust fetters, framers and executors of the law, notably 

 in the United States, have virtually thrown open the delicate art of 

 healing to almost any person too crack-brained or dishonest to earn an 

 honorable living. Not only does quackery thus recruit directly, but 

 wild-eat schools are permitted to dump upon an overcrowded profession 

 graduates sadly lacking in capacity and training. Most of these must 

 end up as charlatans, in much the same way as the manufacturer, shut 

 out from the restricted trade in the genuine article, caters to the public 

 taste with cheap and tinsel imitations; or, at best, such half-baked 

 doctors impair the efficiency of their brotherhood and shake confidence 

 in it. It is not bare accident that America is at once the 'home of 

 quackery ' and the ' home of the free.' 



These, therefore — growth of education and the modern spirit of 

 liberty — are the specific forces behind the recent spread of quackery; 

 and America stands as arch-victim, just because they have been at their 

 strongest here. 



