TAPEWORMS AND GALLSTONES.

There is another trump card the traveling medical grafter plays, which wins about as well as the guaranteed rheumatism cure, namely, the tapeworm fraud. Last summer I heard a plug-hatted faker delivering a lecture to a street crowd, in which he said that every mother’s son or daughter of them who didn’t have the rosy cheek, the sparkling eye and buoyancy of youth might be sure that a tapeworm of monstrous size was, “like a worm in the bud,” feeding on their “damask cheeks.” To prove his assertion and lend terror to his tale, he held aloft a glass jar containing one of the monsters that had been driven from its feast on the vitals of its victim by his never-failing remedy. The person, “saved from a living death,” stood at the “doctor’s” side to corroborate the story, while his voluptuous wife was kept busy handing out the magical remedy and “pursing the ducats” given in return.

How about the worm exhibited? How this one was secured I do not know; but intelligent people ought to know that cases of tapeworm are not so common that eight people out of every ten have one, as this grafter positively asserted.

An acquaintance once traveled with one of these tapeworm specialists to furnish the song and dance performances that are so attractive to the class of people who furnish the ready victims for grafters. This is how the game was worked. The “specialist” would pick out an emaciated, credulous individual from his crowd, and tell him that he bore the unmistakable marks of being the prey of a terrible tapeworm. If he couldn’t sell him a bottle of his worm eradicator, he would give him a bottle, telling him to take it according to directions and report to him at his hotel or tent the next day. The man would report that no dead or dying worm had been sighted. This was when Dr. Grafter got in his expert work. The man was told that if he had taken the medicine as directed the worm was dead beyond a doubt, but sometimes the “fangs” were fastened so firmly to the walls of the intestines, in their death agony, that they would not come away until he had injected a certain preparation that always “produced the goods.”

The man was taken into a darkened room for privacy (?), the injection given, and the defunct worm always came away. At least a worm was always found in the evacuated material, and how was the deluded one to know that it was in the vessel or matter injected? Of course, the patient felt wondrous relief, and was glad to stand up that night and testify that Dr. Grafter was an angel of mercy sent to deliver him from the awful fate of living where “the worm dieth not and the fire is not quenched.”

I was told recently of a new tapeworm graft that makes the old one look crude and unscientific. This one actually brings a tapeworm from the intestines in every case, whether the person had one before the magic remedy was given or not. The graft is to have a near-worm manufactured of delicate rubber and compressed into a capsule. The patient swallows the capsule supposed to contain the worm destroyer. The rubber worm is not digested, and a strong physic soon produces it, to the great relief of the “patient” and the greater glory and profit of the shyster. What a wonderful age of invention and scientific discoveries!

Another journal tells of a new gallstone cure that never fails to cause the stones to be passed even if they are big as walnuts. The graft in this is that the medicine consists of paraffine dissolved in colored oil. The paraffine does not digest, but collects in colored balls, which are passed by handfuls and are excellent imitations of the real things.

How about tapeworms, gallstones and Osteopathy, do you ask?

We heard about tapeworms and gallstones when we were in Osteopathic college.

The one thing that was ground into us early and thoroughly was that Osteopathy was a complete system. No matter what any other system had done, we were to remember that Osteopathy could do that thing more surely and more scientifically.Students soon learned that they were never to ask, “Can we treat this?” That indicated skepticism, which was intolerable in the atmosphere of optimistic faith that surrounded the freshman and sophomore classes especially. The question was to be put, “How do we treat this?” In the treatment of worms the question was, “How do we treat worms?” That was easy. Had not nature made a machine, perfect in all its parts, self-oiling, “autotherapeutic,” and all that? And would nature allow it to choke up or slip a cog just because a little thing like a worm got tangled in its gearing? Not much. Nature knew that worms would intrude, and had provided her own vermifuge. The cause of worms is insufficient bile, and behold, all the Osteopath had to do when he wished to serve notice on the aforesaid worms to vacate the premises was to touch the button controlling the stop-cock to the bile-duct, and they left. It was so simple and easy we wondered how the world could have been so long finding it out.

Osteopathy was complete. That was the proposition on which we were to stand. If anything had to be removed, or brought back, or put in place, all that was necessary was to open the floodgates, release the pent-up forces of nature, and the thing was done!

What a happy condition, to have perfect faith! I remember a report came to our school of an Osteopathic physician who read a paper before a convention of his brethren, in which he recorded marvelous cures performed in cases of tuberculosis. The paper was startling, even revolutionary, yet it was not too much for our faith. We were almost indignant at some who ventured to suggest that curing consumption by manipulation might be claiming too much. These wonderful cures were performed in a town which I afterward visited. I could find no one who knew of a single case that had been cured. There were those who knew of cases of tuberculosis he had treated, that had gone as most other bad cases of that disease go.

There was another world-startling case. It is one of the main cases, from all that I can learn, upon which all the bold claims of Osteopathy as an insanity cure are based. I remember an article under scare headlines big enough for a bloody murder, flared out in the local paper. It was yet more wonderfully heralded in the papers at the county seat. The metropolitan dailies caught up the echo, which reverberated through Canada and was finally heard across the seas! Osteopathic journals took it up and made much of it. Those in school read it with eager satisfaction, and plunged into their studies with fiercer enthusiasm. Many who had been “almost persuaded” were induced by it to “cross the Rubicon,” and take up the study of this wonderful new science that could take a raving maniac, condemned to a mad house by medical men, and with a few scientific twists of the neck cause raging insanity to give place to gentle sleep that should wake in sanity and health.

Was it any wonder that students flocked to schools that professed to teach how common plodding mortals could work such miracles? Was it strange that anxious friends brought dear ones, over whom the black cloud of insanity cast its shadows, hundreds of miles to be treated by this man? Or to the Osteopathic colleges, from which, in all cases of which I ever knew, they returned sadly disappointed?

The report of that wonderful cure caused many intelligent laymen (and even Dr. Pratt) to indulge a hope that insanity might be only a disturbance of the blood supply to the brain caused by pressure from distorted “neck bones,” or other lesions, and that Osteopaths were to empty our overcrowded madhouses. Where is that hope now? What was its foundation? I was told by an intimate friend of this great Osteopath that all these startling reports we had supposed were published as news the papers were glad to get because of their important truths, were but shrewd advertising. I afterward talked with the man, and his friends who were at the bedside when the miracle was performed, and while they believed that there had been good done by the treatment, it was all so tame and commonplace at home compared with its fame abroad that I have wondered ever since if anything much was really done after all.