A Treatise on the Ideal Treatment of Nervous Diseases and Exhaustion in Men by Absorption

New York: Marston Remedy Company, 1905. Revised Edition.

16mo (6 3/8 x 4 1/2 inches; 162 x 113 mm), 32 pages, in stapled wrappers (soft cover).

Pamphlet from a company offering "medicated" suppositories and contraptions that purportedly treat men's sexual, nervous, and urinary disorders.

One "treatment" involves cocoa butter. "The suppository now glides into the rectum with the most perfect ease by means of a little pressure from the finger, and, which is often important, this method of rectal treatment leaves no traces to excite the curiosity of servants or others." (page 10).

While most of the "treatments" involve suppositories of one kind or another, the company also offers devices to relieve men's suffering (illustrations helpfully included). There's "Dr. Curling's Varicocele Truss," which supposedly treats pain in the scrotum. This, we're told, is preferable to surgery. "Several surgeons have been assassinated by patients whom they have thus made hoplessly (sic) impotent." (page 23).

There's also Marston's Urethral Tapers, pencil-like devices that "soothe, heal, and, at the same time, destroy all germ life. They medicate the entire canal, never stain the clothing, and are rapid in action." So convenient you can carry them in your pocket. (page 27).

Marston Remedy Company was a defendant in a number of court cases. "Marston Remedy Company was owned by H.D. Van Leuven of New York. The company's advertising methods proved so outrageously fraudulent -- even for the period -- that in September 1906 the Postmaster-General denied the company the use of the U.S. mails." (An Annotated Catalogue of the Edward C. Atwater Collection of American Popular Medicine and Health Reform, Vol. III, Supplement A-Z, page 479.)

OCLC shows a single institutional holding of this pamphlet, at the University of Rochester, home of the Atwater Collection (the Atwater copy appears to have been published earlier than our copy). Yale has a copy under the same title but by a different publisher and with double the page count of our copy or the Atwater copy. RARE.

CONDITION: Light soiling to wrappers and heavy toning to pages. Very Good overall.