The second premise of advertisements in the backs of magazines is that your embarrassing deformities can be corrected, easily and painlessly, by the expenditure of a very reasonable sum of money. These days the money is likely to bring you a pill of some sort, perhaps a homeopathic cure for ugliness made from a 13C dilution of toad. But in the 1920s, the treatments might be much more aggressive, taking their inspiration from the Spanish Inquisition, with the cleverly American twist of making the victims specify and pay for their own tortures.
As he was harvesting illustrations from a 1924 magazine, it occurred to Dr. Boli that these advertisements might make an amusing guessing game. Here is the game: Can you guess what hideous deformity each of these appliances is intended to correct? The answers given by the advertisements themselves will be published in this space tomorrow, but Dr. Boli is certain some of his readers can give better answers than the original advertisers themselves came up with.
