[PDF] Quackery eBook

Author : Lydia Kang
Publisher : Workman Publishing Company
Page : 353 pages
File Size : 47,10 MB
Release : 2017-10-17
Category : Medical
ISBN : 1523501855

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What won’t we try in our quest for perfect health, beauty, and the fountain of youth? Well, just imagine a time when doctors prescribed morphine for crying infants. When liquefied gold was touted as immortality in a glass. And when strychnine—yes, that strychnine, the one used in rat poison—was dosed like Viagra. Looking back with fascination, horror, and not a little dash of dark, knowing humor, Quackery recounts the lively, at times unbelievable, history of medical misfires and malpractices. Ranging from the merely weird to the outright dangerous, here are dozens of outlandish, morbidly hilarious “treatments”—conceived by doctors and scientists, by spiritualists and snake oil salesmen (yes, they literally tried to sell snake oil)—that were predicated on a range of cluelessness, trial and error, and straight-up scams. With vintage illustrations, photographs, and advertisements throughout, Quackery seamlessly combines macabre humor with science and storytelling to reveal an important and disturbing side of the ever-evolving field of medicine.

Author : Eric W. Boyle
Publisher : Bloomsbury Publishing USA
Page : 265 pages
File Size : 48,76 MB
Release : 2013-01-09
Category : Health & Fitness
ISBN : 0313385688

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This timely volume illustrates how and why the fight against quackery in modern America has largely failed, laying the blame on an unlikely confluence of scientific advances, regulatory reforms, changes in the medical profession, and the politics of consumption. Throughout the 20th century, anti-quackery crusaders investigated, exposed, and attempted to regulate allegedly fraudulent therapeutic approaches to health and healing under the banner of consumer protection and a commitment to medical science. Quack Medicine: A History of Combating Health Fraud in Twentieth-Century America reveals how efforts to establish an exact border between quackery and legitimate therapeutic practices and medications have largely failed, and details the reasons for this failure. Digging beneath the surface, the book uncovers the history of allegedly fraudulent therapies including pain medications, obesity and asthma cures, gastrointestinal remedies, virility treatments, and panaceas for diseases such as arthritis, asthma, diabetes, and HIV/AIDS. It shows how efforts to combat alleged medical quackery have been connected to broader debates among medical professionals, scientists, legislators, businesses, and consumers, and it exposes the competing professional, economic, and political priorities that have encouraged the drawing of arbitrary, vaguely defined boundaries between good medicine and "quack medicine."

Author : Caroline Rance
Publisher : The History Press
Page : 206 pages
File Size : 20,67 MB
Release : 2013-10-01
Category : History
ISBN : 0750951834

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From the harangues of charlatans to the sophisticated advertising of the Victorian era, quackery sports a colourful history. Featuring entertaining advertisements from the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, this book investigates the inventive ways in which quack remedies were promoted – and suggests that the people who bought them should not be written off as gullible after all. There’s the Methodist minister and his museum of intestinal worms, the obesity cure that turned fat into sweat, and the device that brought the fresh air of Italy into British homes. The story of quack advertising is bawdy, gruesome, funny and sometimes moving – and in this book it takes to the stage to promote itself as a fascinating part of the history of medicine.

Author : James Harvey Young
Publisher : Princeton University Press
Page : 312 pages
File Size : 49,54 MB
Release : 2014-07-14
Category : History
ISBN : 1400862914

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James Harvey Young, the foremost expert on the history of medical frauds, finds quackery in the 1990s to be more extensive and insidious than in earlier and allegedly more naive eras. The modern quack isn't an outrageous-looking hawker of magic remedies operating from the back of a carnival wagon, but he knows how to use antiregulatory sentiment and ingenious promotional approaches to succeed in a "trade" that is both bizarre and deceitful. In The Toadstool Millionaires and The Medical Messiahs, Young traced the history of health quackery in America from its colonial roots to the late 1960s. This collection of essays discusses more recent health scams and reconsiders earlier ones. Liberally illustrated with examples of advertising for patent medicines and other "alternative therapies," the book links evolving quackery to changing currents in the scientific, cultural, and governmental environment. Young describes varieties of quackery, like frauds related to the teeth, nostrums aimed at children, and cure-all gadgets with such names as Electreat Mechanical Heart. The case of Laetrile illustrates how an alleged vitamin for controlling cancer could be ballyhooed and lobbied into a national mania, half the states passing laws giving the cyanide-containing drug some special status. And AIDS is the most recent example of an illness that, tragically, has panicked some of its victims and members of the general public into putting their hopes in fake cures and preventives. Young discusses the complex question of vulnerability--why people fall victim to health fraud--and considers the difficulties confronting governmental regulators. From the late 1960s to the early 1990s, the annual quackery toll has escalated from two billion to over twenty-five billion dollars. Young helps us discover why. Originally published in 1992. The Princeton Legacy Library uses the latest print-on-demand technology to again make available previously out-of-print books from the distinguished backlist of Princeton University Press. These editions preserve the original texts of these important books while presenting them in durable paperback and hardcover editions. The goal of the Princeton Legacy Library is to vastly increase access to the rich scholarly heritage found in the thousands of books published by Princeton University Press since its founding in 1905.

Author : Roy Porter
Publisher : Tempus Publishing, Limited
Page : 0 pages
File Size : 22,72 MB
Release : 2003
Category : Medicine
ISBN : 9780752425900

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This illustrated history of quack doctors in their heyday of the 17th and 18th centuries looks at the various treatments and diagnostic methods used.