Barbour County index. [volume] (Medicine Lodge, Kan.) 1880-current, 1888-02-01
NO. 36

as yet no assoc ate whatever, went to the
front door and nailed large tin sign in
a conspicuous position. The magical
promise of medical advice free had its
natural effect The door bell of
the old lady's boarding house
was pulled and jerked and tor
tured into condition of unre-
mitting activity. The girl whose duty it
was to open the door became an involun.
tary professional pedestrian and walked
against time between the kitchen and
front stoop making innumerable laps to
the hour. The handsome parlor was over
run with crowds of poor, sick and many
time hopelessly diseased people. As
many as three hundred people day rang
the bell, and the staff of fourteen hospital
surgeons, consisting however, of the polite
gentleman and one associate, who finally
appeared upon the scene, talked with all
of them. They were all kinds of chronic
invalids, but the invariable representation
of the Gilbertian staff of fourteen was that
each case would be cured in six months
if such medicine was taken as the English
physicians would furnish. OF course the
various miserable specimens of suffering
humanity declared that they would take
the medicine and when they were in
formed that the cost of il was so much
they paid for it then and there,
or If they had no money went
around among their friends and borrowed
it. In this way the alleged staff of four
teen sold hundreds OF bottles of their So
called medicine, collecting from the mis-
erably poor patients who came to see
them all the way from five dollars to fifty
doll ars each. Within a comparatively
brief period the collections of the polite
gentleman aggregated hundreds of dol
lars, all of which came out of tenement
houses and the poorest and most wretched
novels in the upper part of the city. As
he always told his patients that nothing
could be effected under six months
time, no awkward questions were asked
by the miserable people who were scrap
ing together few dollars from week to
week wherewith 10 pay him, and no COM
plants were made over the fact that no
favorable changes in their condition had
been accomplished. AT the end of a
month, long before the time had
elapsed for the medicine to work
its beneficial results, the polite gen.
tleman and his associate left, say
ing that they were imperatively called to
Montreal. They left hundreds of bottles
of their medicines behind them and scores
OF wretched victims, who crawled, crept
limped and dragged themselves for weeks
afterward to the house where the staff Of
hospital surgeons had held forth, asking
piteous and plaintive questions as to the
staff's whereabouts. Nearly every visitor
had some heartrending tale TO tell, and
at least half of them related how he or
she had borrowed the money wherewith
they satisfied the polite gentleman's de-
mands or had used the hard savings of
l,..o Dr. xx-;N 4,
of re- es establishment of health heartlessly
held out to them by the surgeons they
would have stolen the money if it had
been necessary.
Queer things turn up in big city,"
concluded the boarder, "and queer ways
of making a living, but the fashionable
boarding-houses certainly supply illustra-
tions as unique and interesting as can be
found anywhere"