Note 10 — Chapter IV · QUACKERY.

A few facts will show the present enormous growth of this interest. Ten years ago, the revenue of the English government, from the sale of patent medicines, was only a little short of fifty thousand pounds sterling. The cost of advertising quack medicines in the United States, was estimated at that time at 200,000 dollars. But it is vastly more now. Dr. Stevens, in his recent address states, that the advertising outlay of some of the most notorious patent medicine proprietors, is reckoned by its fifty and hundred thousand dollars per annum. Quack advertisements occupy a large space in our newspapers. In the twenty columns of a country political paper published tri-weekly, I once counted eleven filled with such advertisements, while only nine were devoted to other advertisements, news, miscellaneous matters, editorials, &c.