The Bitters Cure | AdventAI

The Seventh-day Adventist Publishing Association · Battle Creek, Mich. · Jan 3, 1865

The Bitters Cure.

It is almost impossible to look into the religious or secular papers of the day, without observing lengthy advertisements of somebody's Bitters. A country daily that I have just read, contains a standing advertisement of this kind, two columns in length, filled with certificates of the cure of everything, from corns to pulmonary consumption. One remarkable cure unpublished, because the victim died too soon, was that of a man afflicted many years with gravel, and who, after using ten bottles of Swindle's Bitters, went about declaring himself entirely well; but on discontinuing its use, delirium tremens supervened, and, believing himself beset with ten thousand devils, he fled from his home shrieking with terror, and when the paroxysm subsided, sank into a comatose condition from which he never revived. Startling as this occurrence was to the community, but few perhaps, traced the effects back to the alcoholic ingredients of the bitters, as the actual cause of the sudden death. Thousands of bottles are annually drank by the willing dupes of those who are amassing fortunes out of the sale of it. The demand for these pernicious preparations would rapidly diminish, if those who make them, were as honest as the farrier who, after dosing a horse to death, presented a bill for $10 to the owner "for doctoring his horse till he died." —Herald of Health.