thousands of untrained and unqualified physicians and quacks from the state during the first year after it was passed. Popular opposition to this measure was strong, and outraged citizens complained that a law requiring doctors to obtain a license to practice medicine was "an opening wedge for socialized medicine" in the state. Mrs. Dr. Keck refused to stop treating her patients in Illinois and quickly emerged as one of the most formidable opponents to the state's legal reform effort. As she pushed back against the new governmental regulations, Mrs. Dr. Keck became locked in a highly publicized, adversarial relationship with the secretary of the new Illinois State Board of Health, Dr. John H. Rauch M.D., that lasted for at least a decade. When local doctors tried to block Mrs. Dr. Keck from practicing in McLean County, Illinois in early 1878, the Bloomington Daily Leader called hers the first test case of the new legislation, "the beginning of a long and tedious litigation" between the "regulars" and the "irregulars." The lasting stigma of these accusations was probably an important reason why her accomplishments faded quickly and completely from public view after her death, and her career remains little known today. Criminal charges were brought against Mrs. Dr. Keck in at least five different counties in Illinois for practicing medicine without a license between 1878 and 1889, but she was ably defended by her lawyer W. S. McCoy and persisted in business in McLean, Logan, Champaign, Peoria and Adams counties in Illinois for twenty years. Iowa's medical legislation had even less effect on her business, and she opened Mrs. Dr. Keck's Infirmary for All Chronic Diseases in Davenport in 1879, practicing with uninterrupted financial success there and in Cedar Rapids, Dubuque and rural communities in Iowa until she retired in 1900. Accusations of quackery Over the years, Mrs. Dr. Keck grew more and more boastful of her ability to cure many types of chronic diseases, including tuberculosis, an obviously impossible task in an era before the bacillus that caused the disease had even been identified. Grateful patients wrote to her when they were cured of chronic lung infections, piles, eczema, general debility, deafness and a host of other issues, and she published their testimonial letters in her advertisements., Fraudulent testimonial letters were a common feature of 19th century patent medicine advertising. Nevertheless, United States Census records from 1880 show that many of