The Patent-Medicine Evil
By L. A. S.
Further Testimony About Liquozone
THE advertisements put out by the Liquozone Company are prolific in testimonials, which on investigation are found in every instance, as Mr. Adams sets forth at some length in Collier’s, to be garbled or faked. Of the pretended indorsements from physicians, Mr. Adams says:— “Having a professional interest in the ‘overwhelming number of medical indorsements’ claimed by liquozone, a Chicago physician, Dr. W. H. Pelton, went to the company’s offices and asked to see the medical evidence. None was forthcoming; the lists, he was informed, were in the press, and could not be shown. He then asked for the official book for physicians advertised by the firm, containing ‘a great deal of evidence from authorities whom all physicians respect.’ This also, they said, was ‘in the press.’ As a matter of fact, it has never come out of the press, and never will; the special book project has been dropped.” An investigation of the “scientific evidence” surrounding the “discovery” of liquozone develops an interesting tale. “In a pamphlet issued by the company and since withdrawn,” says Mr. Adams, “occurs this sprightly sketch:— ‘Liquozone is the discovery of Professor Pauli, the great German chemist, who worked for twenty years to learn how to liquefy oxygen. When Pauli first mentioned his purpose, men laughed at him. The idea of liquefying a gas—of circulating liquid oxygen in the blood—seemed impossible. But Pauli was one of those men who set their whole hearts on a problem, and follow it out either to success or to the grave. So Pauli followed out this problem though it took twenty years. He clung to it through discouragements which would have led any lesser man to abandon it. He worked on it despite poverty and ridicule,’ etc. Liquozone Kills a Great German Scientist
“Alas for romance! The scathing blight of the legal mind descended upon this touching story. The lawyer-directors would have none of ‘Professor Pauli, the great German chemist,’ and liquozone destroyed him, as it had created him. Not totally destroyed, however, for from those rainbow wrappings, now dissipated, emerges the humble but genuine figure of our old acquaintance, Mr. Powley, the ex-piano man of Toronto. He is the prototype of the Teutonic savant. So much the liquozone people now admit, with the defense that the change of Powley to Pauli was, at most, a harmless flight of fancy.” Finding that they were raising a storm which they were unprepared to meet, the company revised their advertising system, so that, as now conducted, all direct intentional misstatements about their product are carefully eliminated, but the same impression is conveyed to the reader’s mind as formerly regarding the wonderful curative virtues of liquozone and overwhelming evidence in its support. Mr. Adams states that he recently received from the company a copy of a new booklet on which all their future advertising is to be based. He finds that “the most important of their fundamental misstatements to go by the board, is, ‘Liquozone is liquid oxygen.’ ‘Liquozone contains no free oxygen,’ declares the revision frankly. No testimonials are to be printed. The faked and garbled letters are to be dropped from the files. There is no claim of ‘overwhelming medical indorsement.’ Nor is the statement anywhere made that liquozone will cure any of the diseases in which it is recommended. Yet such is the ingenuity with which the advertising manager has presented his case that the new newspaper exploitation appeals to the same hopes and fears, with the same implied promises, as the old. ‘I’m well because of liquozone,’ in huge type, is followed by the list of diseases ‘where it applies.’ And the new list is more comprehensive than the old.”