Writers! Are your short stories sick? Are you looking for a cure to all of your writing afflictions? Seek no further, for two doctors have the prescription for your many fiction ills.

Plucked from the pages of the April 1929 issue of Scribner’s magazine are advertisements from two doctors who are willing to show you the way to healthy prose.

First up is Dr. Esenwein, who hopes that you’ll enroll in his correspondence course in the writing and marketing of short stories. I’d never heard of Esenwein, and had no idea of the validity of his claim to be able to train his students to the point where they’d amass the talents to earn $5,000 (in 1929 dollars) in their spare time, so I figured I’d better check his credentials. A quick online search reveals Dr. Esenwein to be J. Berg Esenwein, the editor of Lippincott’s magazine and the author of the 1908 textbook Writing the Short-Story: A Practical Handbook on the Rise, Structure, Writing and Sale of the Modern Short-Story. I see that Dr. Esenwein operated out of Burlington, Massachusetts, so we now know the real reason why ReaderCon has chosen that city as its home!

If Dr. Esenwein’s elixirs don’t seem enough good medicine to cure your writing ailments, then you’d best consult Dr. Eliot’s Five-Foot Shelf of Books, which is supposedly the equivalent of an education at Harvard or Yale.

And why should we believe that pronouncement? Well, because H. C. Witwer, “popular short story writer” with “current stories in Collier’s and in Cosmopolitan Magazine,” tells us so.

And who is H. C. Witwer? Why should we trust him? Another online search uncovers an article in the July 25, 1920 edition of the New York Times reviewing two of Witwer’s short-story collections, There’s No Place Like Home and Kid Scanlan. We are told that:

Of all the followers of Ring W. Lardner, concoctors of colloquial slang and slapstick humor, there is no finer exemplar than H. C. Witwer. Witwer writes with a steady, unabated dash; his humor is so obvious that one wonders wanly long after why it induced a smile; when he is pathetic, which is very seldom, it is pathos of the good old ten, twent’, thirt’ variety.

So gather round, yarn spinners, fabricators, and tall-tale tellers! If you’re tired of being the wrong kind of pathetic writer, and hoping to someday be the right kind of pathetic writer, make an appointment to see one of the good doctors today!