Excerpt from The Chicago Medical Examiner, 1866, Vol. 7: A Monthly Journal, Devoted to the Educational, Scientific and Practical Interests of the Medical Profession There are three varieties of this class of advertisements, two of which are found in the columns of newspapers, and the other, in the form of handbills and pamphlets, is pasted along the streets, thrown into public conveyances, and left upon the doorsteps of private dwellings. They all possess, in a greater or less degree, three qualities, namely, false pretensions, obscen ity, and either direct or indirect encouragement to vice and crime. The false pretensions consist in, first, the most abominable lying 1n regard to the previous education, experience, and cm cial positions of the pretended doctors, for curing private dis cases; and, second, the positive and unqualified promise to cure permanently and Speedily, all the chronic and private diseases of the two sexes. Whoever opens a newspaper, and glances at these advertisements, and then remembers that not' one of these advertising pretenders has any actual medical education, or has ever studied medicine proper in their lives, and that they are not recognized as belonging to the medical profession by any respectable physician in the country, will have some idea of their impudently fraudulent character. And yet who can estimate the number of victims, of both sexes, who are annually caught, and their pockets emptied by these very pretensions. Their obscenity consists in the enumeration of every variety of disease arising from illicit sexual intercourse, and vicious sexual indulgences, with minute and vulgar descriptions of the sexual organs, sometimes illustrated by cuts. It is impossible to have these advertisements before the youth of both sexes, in the family newspapers, in handbills along the streets, in pam phlets and cards thrown into houses and yards, without making them more or less familiar with the most debasing vices and the most loathsome diseases; and that too, in such a way as to make the former appear only as youthful indiscretions. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.