What you're looking at

This is a full-page advertisement from the 15 September 1907 issue of New Ideas magazine, for the Thacher Magnetic Shield Co. of Chicago. The photograph shows a woman from behind, wearing what the caption says "contains over four hundred powerful" magnets. The text around her does the rest of the selling: "more than 75 per cent. of all so-called incurable diseases can be cured with our powerful MAGNETIC SHIELDS."

The ad then lists what it means: paralysis, Bright's disease, diabetes, consumption (tuberculosis), locomotor ataxia, rheumatism, neuralgia, insanity, dyspepsia, nervous prostration, tumor, obesity, and "a hundred-and-one other diseases that are called incurable." The theory is a single sentence, set in capitals: "MAGNETISM never has failed, it never will fail, and it never can fail to increase the circulation." Underneath are letters from customers, under the headline "SUCH EVIDENCE IS INDISPUTABLE."

The man behind it, C. J. Thacher, had been selling magnetic garments by mail since at least the 1880s; one catalogue offered a complete outfit with more than 700 magnets. In 1906 Samuel Hopkins Adams went to see him at 161 State Street, Chicago, for Collier's series The Great American Fraud, and found "a big, gaunt old man" wearing "a magnetic cap, a magnetic waistcoat, magnetic insoles," his legs "swathed like a mummy's in magnetic wrappings." Thacher told him: "Insanity! Simple as daylight!" The magazine captioned his portrait "King of the Magnetic Quacks." The ad still ran a year later, and no federal law stopped it: the 1906 Pure Food and Drug Act covered foods and drugs, and the FDA only got authority over medical devices in 1938.

That gap is what you are looking at. A company could print, in a magazine, "We want to cure every living person who is not well," and close with "Do not give up hope—no matter if you have been told your trouble could not be cured." Every quote in the carousel is on the page in slide 9.