David Olmos

Early last year, when prices for computer memory chips were climbing as quickly as a squirrel up a tree, Jeff Bittner saw a good chance to make a fast buck. Bittner bought 5,000 of the tiny semiconductors for $3.50 each on a Wednesday, sold them two days later for $5 each, and pocketed a tidy $7,500 profit. Still, he regrets that he didn’t hold on until the following Monday, when the price climbed another dollar.

“I gave the working people a service for a price they couldn’t get elsewhere.” --Edgar Rudolph “Painless” Parker, a controversial California dentist from early this century. * By all accounts, “Painless” Parker, who set up shop in Los Angeles in the early 1900s, was a real piece of dental work. Sporting a beaver-skin hat and a necklace strung with extracted incisors, Parker used traveling circuses, newspaper jingles and jugglers to promote business.

Many of the patients were desperate. By the time they arrived at the dowdy little hospital in San Bernardino County, they had lived for years with excruciating pelvic and bladder pain. Doctors repeatedly had told them there was no known cause or cure. Most were women, who said their lives were being ruined by two baffling disorders--interstitial cystitis and vulvodynia.