More power of suggestion…

In his Ever the Winds of Chance, the poet Carl Sandburg (1878-1967) wrote:

One day I dropped in for a talk with J. Austin Larson, Magnetic Healer, who advertised in the local papers that he had the magnetism that would cure diseases and make cripples walk. He was a short, thin man with pink skin, a sandy Van Dyke beard, and foxy elusive face and eyes. Out of our talk he asked me if I would try my hand at writing some ads for him. I told him I didn't know enough about the cures he claimed to make, and what I wrote I wanted to be straight. He said, "You don't have to sign your name to what you write. You sign my name. It's me you're promoting. And if you don't want my money for that kind of work I can easy enough find somebody else." This hooked me. He paid me good money for writing lies about his wonderful magnetic hands and mind. I consulted with him two or three hours a week, stuck at it for three weeks, and then told him it wasn't my line. The dirtiest thing I did for him was to give him an idea that he worked out. In a wide hall on a long wall he had his name J. Austin Larson spelled out with canes and crutches of cripples who, so he told it, had thrown them away after he healed them and made them able to walk. If or when I should meet St. Peter at the Gate, I wouldn't be surprised if he said, "What about your work for J. Auston Larson back in Anno Domini 1901? Do you think you belong up here -- or down there?

J. Auston Larson was a Magnetic Healer, or at least acted like one, according to https://ehbritten.blogspot.com/2014/09/pinboard-larson-healing-1905.html?view=classic

Ida Mingle  (1884 – 1948) was an American New Thought writer, teacher, faith healer, and leader and was the private secretary to Charles Fillmore, the founder of Unity.

The ads for patent medicines listed in the 1898 Peterborough Examiner, Peterborough, Ontario, Canada, in those un-regulated days, included:

Ajax Tablets,
Burdock Blood Bitters ,
Carter’s Little Liver Pills,
Cook’s Cotton Root Compound,
Dr. Ayer’s Cherry Pectoral Plaster,
Dr. Caton’s Tansy Pills,
Dr. Chase’s Kidney-Liver Pills,
Dr. Fowler’s Extract of Wild Strawberry,
Dr. Low’s Worm Syrup,
Dr. Pierce’s Pleasant Pellets,
Dr. Wood’s Norway Pine Syrup,
Fletcher’s Castoria,
Hagyard’s Pectoral Balsam,
Hood’s Sarsaparilla,
Hoffman’s Headache Powders,
Indapo (the Great Hindoo Remedy),
Ko-Da (The Great Mexican Blood Tonic),
Laxa-Liver Pills,
Laxative Bromo-Quinine Tablets ,
Madill’s Pulmonic Cough Syrup,
Milburn’s Heart and Nerve Pills,
Mrs. G. Vinette’s Hair Preparation,
Putnam’s Painless Corn Extractor,
Scott’s Emulsion,
Swayne’s Ointment,
Wood’s Phosphodine (The Great English Remedy)

https://peterboriana.wordpress.com/2014/05/17/nine-out-of-ten-doctors/

E. Virgil Neal -- started his career as an occult mail-order scammer, but who went legit, moved to Europe and stayed there

Ewing Virgil Neal (1868 –1949) was an American stage hypnotist (as Xenophon LaMotte Sage), author, fraudster, and a wealthy manufacturer of patent medicines and cosmetics. He spent much time in Paris and the French Riviera, and built the Château d'Azur in the hills above Nice.
In 1904, he travelled to Europe and used tea sweepings to make caffeine. He then went into business with physician Herbert Arthur Parkyn and fellow hypnotist Elmer Sidney Prather, "running a complex network of fraudulent mail-order schemes". He also sold wrinkle eradicators, weight reducers, bust developers, hair restorers, and in 1906 "Nuxated Iron"

What is “Nuxated Iron” you ask? It was sold as a performing enhancing iron supplement in the early 20th century, endorsed by a number of prominent athletic celebrities of that particular era, including Dempsey, Ty Cobb, “Shoeless” Joe Jackson, and of course Pope Benedict XV.

“Nuxated Iron” pills, as endorsed by Dempsey, were, obviously, iron supplements. As for the “nuxated” part of it, that refers to nux vomica, a deadly substance better known as strychnine (i.e. rat poison).

Fortunately, the stuff being hawked…actually contained very little strychnine, and not much iron either. It was comparatively useless as a performance-enhancing drug, but would not kill you unless you took a lot of it.

https://ehbritten.blogspot.com/2016/05/the-mail-order-occult-ring-saga-episode_24.html?view=classic

https://peterboriana.wordpress.com/2015/08/27/nuxated-iron/