ComicBooks.com Register / Loginit's free!

Life, 1913-05-08 · page 45 of 48

Life — May 8, 1913 — page 45: what you’re looking at

📖 Open the full issue in the page-flip reader →
Life — May 8, 1913 — page 45: Life, 1913-05-08

What you’re looking at

This page is primarily **advertising** with one substantial editorial letter. The main content is a letter to Life's editor criticizing medical practice. The writer argues that the notion of "disease-specific cures"—that a particular disease requires a particular medicine—is scientifically baseless superstition. He catalogs medical disasters: blindness from salvarsan injections, paralysis from diphtheria antitoxin, and degraded radium treatments for cancer. He attacks the medical profession for ignoring proven truths and promoting false specifics like cancer and typhoid treatments. The satire is implicit: modern medicine's confident claims about cures rest on abandoned logic. The surrounding **advertisements** reinforce this critique through irony. Ayling's chocolates, Kelly-Springfield tires, and especially Pears' Soap ("Matchless for the Complexion") all make absolute product-efficacy claims—the same "disease-specific idea" the letter condemns. The soap ad's language about "natural beauty" versus "manufactured" parallels the editorial's argument about authentic versus false medical remedies.

📄 Transcribed text from this page (OCR, searchable)

Machine-transcribed from the original scan — historical spelling and the odd misread are preserved.

SEE Y, “4 “Chocolates When you open a box of 4&4" you always get the tempting fragrance of candy newly made. It is this freshness plus <&ée quality that places the name of firs. No matter where you buy <&é7—every box con- tains a guarantee—insuring satisfaction. SALES AGENTS EVERYWHERE Il youdo not find one near you,write us Mc) Medical Specifics To the Editor of Live: The old idea that was less an idea,” by the way, than a combination of superstition and assumption, has not died. The idea that a given disease is cured by a given medicinal agent is a simple, straightforward proposition; but it isn't truc. Traditional medicine, de- spite its startling progress, is respon- sible for many like notions that continue to flourish in great luxury. They are not the outcome of thought, logic, nor even common sense, but they persist in occupying the most conspicuous places. Nothing can be more absurd from a sci- entific point of view than to separate theoretically the disease from the dis- cased, or to assemble laboratorially mice and men, as if the patient himself need not appear in the problem at all Because such attempts are regularly made, we have all grades of disaster from vacccination, deaths from anti- toxins, paralytics and nervous wrecks after cases of diphtheria that have been treated with anti-toxin, blind people from salvarsan injections and multitudes of the chronically discased from mercury, quinine, strychnine, arsenic, et al., ad quod damnum! And now old-age preventives, cancer treatment by numerous false specifics, typhoid —_vacecination, _tuberculosis “cures,” all show how little the science and art of medicine go together—how little the art keepsistep with its so-called science. Radium, that wonderful element, so loudly and precipitately advertised as specific for cancer, has been degraded in Europe because its applied specificity has proved to be worse than nil. Which shall be rescued from false gods—the public or the profession of medicine? Will no school of medical science promulgate the truths that have been proved as such from time to time by the really great minds of which the masses of mankind have never heard, and which have been ignored or spurned by dishonest thought and purpose on the part of those whose obvious duty it is to teach these truths? The honest medical man of science knows that the disease specific idea is false. Cures as such are so only by vir- tue of their safety, their applicability 4” Beauty, from the man’s i point of view, is certainly not a beauty that is made up of ‘artificialities. What a man admires is natural beauty — something sweet and wholesome and healthy—a_ pink and white complexion that suggests flowers and sunshine—not manufactured beauty. Pears’ Soap is pre-eminently the soap whose whole action and in- fluence is to enhance and preserve natural beauty. Pure in every particle, and composed solely of things that cleanse, and freshen, and beautify, it is acknowl- edged throughout the world | i y &4 es PLACE and their peculiar appropriateness to the ‘||| by skin specialists, doctors, anes NEW YORK | organism of the individual patient i _ . and celebrated beauties as ON een One | . ane % Matchless Kelly-Springfield |® sts Automobile Tires A tire that is made by hand meansa longer wearing tire. Longer wear means less |} expense. Kelly-Springfeld Tires have been made strictly by hand for 17 years KELLY-SPRINGFIELD TIRE COMPANY, 20 Vesey Street, New York Yadelpbla, Boston, St. Louls, Detroit. Clocionait, San Fraccisco, He. Atlanta, Akroa. O., Buftalo, Bering Tire & Rubber Co., Houston. Texas. Ee comicbooks.com