Quacks and 'Symptoms'

New Zealand Tablet, 8 July 1909, Page 7

Quacks and ' Symptoms'

' Doubtless the pleasure is as great Of being cheated as to cheat.' A point would seem ' to be given to Butler's metrical dictum by the eagerness and the springing hope with which people place themselves in the hands of quacksalvers, who (as Voltaire remarked) pour drugs, of which they know nothing, into bodies, of which they know less. Owing to the pressure of the law in New South Wales, numbers of those parasites have left that country for the country's good. And numbers of them, we are told, have settled down in Auckland — there, no doubt, to see more of your ' innards ' by a glance at a hair cut from your head ' the first thing in the morning' than would be revealed by an X-ray apparatus working with a twenty-inch spark. We have been favored, by a client of one of those modern' Paracelsuses in the Northern capital, with a sheet of tho sort of 'literature' that they cunningly circulate for th 3 purpose of working their victims into a wholesome state of alarm. The ' literature ' referred to is a sheet of questions fairly bristling with ' symptoms.' The mere perusal of one of these printed sheets is enough to give nervous people ' symptoms.' An eminent scientist who ' passed out' some years ago used to say that the reading of a quack-head's ' symptom ' pamphlet left him racked with doubt as to whether he was suffering from softening of tho brain, or enlargement of the liver, or valvular disease of the heart. But he contrived to outlive them all, and died at last of mere unrom antic influenza. Rousseau long ago' gave an all-round warning against the reading of medical books and ' symptom ' stuff by lay folk. ' I could not read the description of a malady,' he said, ' without "thinking it mine, and had I not already been indisposed, s I am certain I should have become so from this study. Finding in every disease symptoms similar to mine, I fancied I had them all, and at length gained one more troublesome than any I had yet suffered, which I .had thought myself delivered from; this was a violent inclination to seek a cure, which it is very difficult to suppress when once a person begins reading physical books.' Now, this is just the result anticipated by the wily quack. The average man that gets ' symptoms,' gets with them ' a violent inclination to seek a cure.' And to whom should he go but to the confident charlatan whom 'no disease can bafHe ' ? Goethe has well said that 'he who studies his body too much becomes diseased — his ' mm J becomes mad.' These simple people should (as we ha\e before remarked) be regarded as in statu pupillari m

merely minors of a larger growth — and we trust that provision will be found in our laws to make our country bo torrid for those undesired visitors from the Mother State, that they will flit 'ad altri lidi, altre terre ' — seek for themselves fresh fields and pastures new.