Life, 1917-03-15 · page 16 of 42
Life — March 15, 1917 — page 16: what you’re looking at
What you’re looking at
This page contains three fake "advertisements" mocking absurd products and services: 1. **Adonis Beard-Waving Company**: Satirizes male grooming vanity by suggesting facial hair can replace proper clothing—a jab at unnecessary cosmetic concerns. 2. **Maligno Embalmed Beans**: A grotesque product name that appears to mock both questionable food preservation methods and possibly fraudulent patent medicines of the era (note the reference to the "Pure Food and Drug Act"). 3. **Puffemup Pneumatic Baby Buster**: The cruel humor targets both homely infants and absurd mechanical gadgets, likely mocking both eugenics-adjacent attitudes toward appearance and the era's faith in technological "solutions" to human problems. The page's articles—on reforming children and physician attitudes toward animals—continue the satirical theme: critiquing society's misguided institutional approaches and medical ethics. The overall message lampoons early 20th-century attitudes toward progress, beauty standards, and expert authority.
📄 Transcribed text from this page (OCR, searchable)
Machine-transcribed from the original scan — historical spelling and the odd misread are preserved.
LIFE Advertisements You Have Never Seen Do You Love HomELy Babies? SAVE LAUNDRY MALIGNO tke ADONIS~ BEARD-WAVING COMPANY Can Train Your Beard ToTake The Place @ OF AShirt And Vest How Not to Reform Children HE very nature of reform schools and institutions for children makes them work against the child. That is why we so seldom hear of children who come out of re-. form schools “ making good.” The idea of trying to reform a child by any particular process is fundamentally wrong in itself. This reforming idea on the part of our society as a whole towards certain individuals in it who do not conform to type is one of the greatest defects in our civilization. We are about in the same period of our racial existence that crude, primitive, uncultured parents are who think that beating and cuffing their children are the only remedies. There is a simple and logica! sense in which everything that a child does is right. He is finding out for himself in the only way he can learn what is best for him and what is not. He is not at all familiar with the rules of the game as we have come to learn them, He has no fear of conse- quences; knows nothing about them, If he happens to be in the country he can, in his strolls, pick an apple off the ground and eat it with impunity. If-he strolls in the city and takes an apple from an apple-stand he is hailed as a thief. Children in reality are only ignorant. When a child EMBALMED BEANS. ‘ (Gouened Unk ePo idAndDrgsAt) ed rely Upon. "We Remove Tre Bs mA ~ PUFFEMUP The Pneumatic Baby Buster for Sale At Most Garages. ~ is so dull that he ca:not see the difference bétween right and wrong, no reforming institution is going to make him any better. It can only make him worse in the nature of things. He needs the contact with superior people. He needs everlasting patience to open up his mind. The insti- tution only closes him up tighter. Dogs and Doctors 'HE average attitude of the average physician towards brute creatures is interestingly revealed in a reputed syllogism laid down by a prominent vivisectionist at a recent meeting of medicos. According to the news report, this physician argued: “The dog doesn’t know he’s alive, and so doesn’t know when he dies: hence the dog is the happiest creature on earth.” This explains a great deal in the psychology of our modern medicine men. But if what the distinguished scientist in question said is true, it may be argued further: The dog doesn’t know he’s alive, and hence can feel no ‘pain. Then why should vivisectionists use anesthetics? Or—do they? Tra up a cook in the way she should go, and when she is trained she will depart from you. comicbooks.com