Chicago v. Quacks

In Chicago, the Tribune, big newspaper, did valuable work last week, as it did 13 years ago. It investigated the medical quacks, impostors, charlatans, "specialists," "old Docs," "health institutes" of the city, flayed them all and sundry, laid bare their foul and intricate inner workings. Chicago for a period was almost clean of these pseudo-medics, some of whom were regularly licensed physicians with debased practices. Many had been deprived of their onetime licenses for malpractice. Many were merely pornerastic laymen with a smattering of technical terminology. Of recent years they have been filtering back, spread-eagling their "specialties" on flamboyant office signs, advertising especially in the foreign language and Negro newspapers, greatly daring even to insert their advertisements in such English-speaking sheets as would accept their copy.

To learn how extensive Chicago quack operations were, the Tribune editors picked out a husky reporter, one F . . . W . . ., 30 years old, 220 lb in weight, 6 ft. 1 in. in height; had him examined by such highly reputed physicians as Dr. Louis E. Schmidt and Dr. Eugene Laurence Hartigan. They tapped him, sounded him, made Wassermann tests, pronounced him "an exceptionally healthy young man." Not so the charlatans. His reports on their personalities, their diagnoses and their cures he made unabashedly, and the Tribune bravely dealt with seven of them last week:

Old Doc S. E. Embry is a stoop-shouldered, middle-aged practitioner with greying hair. Onetime, 1907-08, he was intimately connected with government prosecution for using the mails to defraud against "The Boston Medical Institute" and "The Belleview* Medical Institute" of Chicago. These were one and the same firm, using the same office suite but with entrances on different streets to divert suspicion, an oldtime quack stunt. Old Doc Embry uses the same method?"Dr. Embry" on the door of a squalid office for Negroes, "The Parker Health Institute" on a communicating office door for whites. His gyp game is to thrill and mystify the patient by the intimated cure-all powers of the Xray. His staff found the Tribune man very ill, but curable for $90, $20 down.

Old Doc. R. C. McCarthy, stocky, smooth faced, of medium height, heavy, spectacled and prematurely grey, sat looking at the patient, asked a few questions, declared he suffered from "prostatic trouble" curable by "electric treatment" for $100, $20 down. He operates the "House of Health," where in a demurely yet impressively equipped waiting room a buxom, black-eyed, black-haired demoiselle welcomes the "lobs." But they work for H. L. Giles and August E. Kroening, who syndicate their institutions with branches in Manhattan, Jersey City, Newark, N. J., Kansas City, Montreal and Detroit. They have been harried about the U.S. and Canada.

Old Doc John G. Gill, who is grey-haired, wears large round tortoiseshell glasses and constantly smokes a cigar, has long been able to find a "loss of manhood" in practically every visitor to his "People's Health Institute." "[My cure] is the same thing as gland transplantation." The reporter grabbed for his clothes. "You know what a ram is?a strong, virile, he-man sheep? Well, that's where this stuff comes from?from the ram. . . . He's red-blooded and full of fun. We inject, a little of that spirit into you and the first thing you know you're a new man. . . ." He could "cure" the strapping reporter for $150, $50 down.

Old Doc. W. M. Lawhon, dapper, trimly mustached and bearded, frankly admits his quackery when squeezed, but has always managed to blarney out of prosecution. He found the reporter's "manhood" seeping away through "prostathelcosis," which he certified to cure by means of "Y? 14," for $40, $6 down.

Old Doc L. D. Rogers is almost bald, about 65, flaccid, yet benevolent seeming. His cure-all is "autohemic therapy," which is supposed to wake up sluggards and to perk up hang-dogs. He mixes a bit of the patient's blood with some Chippewa water and squirts the solution back into the vein. Such ministrations the reporter managed to elude even against the reduced rate of $100 for 16 treatments and a red paper-covered book thrown in.

Old Doc H. S. Whitney is a fat, large man, quite bald, with a ferret-like face ornamented by tortoiseshell pince-nez. He finds "autotoxemia" in his patients, found it in the reporter too, who also gravely suffered from "neurarchy with a basis of autotoxin." The treatment was to be "R 12 plus injections; static electricity and medicine," for $46, $3 down.

On the way from that place the reporter peeked into a cubicle where he got an idea of the electrical treatment. Before a nice, shiny, intricate-seeming machine that crackled and droned, sat on raised chairs a handsome Negress and a young Negro. Over their heads and almost touching were steel loops connected to the machinery. As he passed they were silently sitting and thinking, looking wearily into space, as the high frequency current passed through their bodies.

These quacks and others usually manage to elude prosecution, scurrying to other, and as prosperous, haunts when the hue gets too shrill. The Illinois Board of Education and Registration, which should always be alert against such malpractices, was last week condemned by the Tribune for being lethargic and for ignoring data brought to its direct attention. Some civil suits have already been filed against quacks for the damage they have done to patients. The Tribune in an editorial urged popular information to counter ignorance and fear, which the charlatans exploit. It said: "Medicine has long hedged itself about with a barrier of sanctity, surrounded its rites with mystery, conducted its services in a lingo incomprehensible to the layman . . . but the forward-looking members [of the profession] see the advantage to the people they serve in getting into popular language the lessons modern medicine has to teach. . . ."

*A scoundrelly echoing of the name of Manhattan's esteemed Bellevue Hospital.