JF Ptak Science Books  Quick Post  (An entry in the category of Questionable Quidity)

The Popular Science Monthly (today known as Popular Science) was founded in 1872 and treated all manner of scientific/tech subjects for the general reader–most of the time very successfully, though sometimes not-so-much.  The issue at had for August 1877 had a number of interesting articles, but my attention was stolen away by a pair of ads in the back of the journal. Remember that there were few (if any) regulatory agencies for advertisements on scientific and medical subjects, which means that people were left to their own devices and internal customary ethics, which were sometimes abided and sometimes not.  What I found were two half-page ads for electrical cure-alls, battery-driven devices that were supposed to be a cure and a dependent for just about all things, from dandruff to neuralgia, or the twists or tremors, triple-reverse invisible exuda, marble mouth, inverted feet, and so on. These devices could fix anything because they fixed nothing.  The ads were striking, as you can see:

A few pages away the “galvano-caustic” entry by Dr. Jerome Kidder, who both tried to sell his stuff and protect himself from impostures in the same ad. It was the Kidder trademark of the electrical earth surrounded and beset by a field of electrical-something bits and bobs that attracted my attention:

There were other ads in the 1877 volume, though these were the only two of real Charlatanesque sub-virtues.