in the United States for the week of May 17, 1905. While extremely unpopular with members of the medical establishment in Iowa and Illinois, Rebecca Keck enjoyed glowing front page editorial endorsements from newspapers in the cities where she practiced. Some newspapers ran her illustrated, full-column ads on the front page under the heading, "Mrs. Dr. Keck's Column." The Decatur Review declared on November 15, 1883, "We have a marked example among us of success in medicine, in the person of Mrs. Dr. Keck, well-known in the West," while the Bloomington Pantagraph declared on August 30, 1883 that Mrs. Dr. Keck "absorbs considerable public attention and is a subject for congratulation among the women of America…a forcible illustration of the ability of women to succeed" in "avenues of professional or public life." The Quincy Whig said she was "one of our longest established and best known physicians," while the Evening Peorian referred to her "celebrity as a physician and good name as a citizen." The Peoria National Democrat declared, "her success is unprecedented…she is capable of doing the work of five ordinary women." The regular medical establishment disagreed. The secretary of the Illinois State Board of Health, Dr. John Rauch was quoted in the Chicago Tribune as saying that Mrs. Dr. Keck was "foul and damnable in every way," and mostly male members of county medical associations were hardly less kind; Dr. James Clarke M.D. of Fairfield averred that the sale of her catarrh cures "made the doctor wealthy, even if it did not cure her patients." Regular doctors universally dismissed her as a quack, and her name was excluded from the physicians and surgeons listing in the Davenport business directories every year after 1878, although she continued to describe herself as a specialist and physician in the regular alphabetical listings and bought the entire back cover of the 1882 edition to advertise her infirmary. Legal reform The state of Illinois passed its Medical Practices Act in 1877 in an effort to exert some control of the wholly unregulated medical profession in the state. This Illinois law was a landmark in health law in the United States, leading the way towards improved standards for the dismal state of medical licensing and medical education in the country at that time. The act defined requirements for a physician's license that were extremely loose by modern standards, but which were sufficient to expel