Quack Medicine

Quack Medicine PDF Author: Eric W. Boyle
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing USA
ISBN: 0313385688
Category : Health & Fitness
Languages : en
Pages : 265

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Book Description
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."

Quack Medicine

Quack Medicine PDF Author: Eric W. Boyle
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing USA
ISBN: 0313385688
Category : Health & Fitness
Languages : en
Pages : 265

Get Book Here

Book Description
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."

Quacks

Quacks PDF Author: Roy Porter
Publisher: Tempus Publishing, Limited
ISBN: 9780752425900
Category : Medicine
Languages : en
Pages : 0

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

Quackery

Quackery PDF Author: Lydia Kang
Publisher: Workman Publishing Company
ISBN: 1523501855
Category : Medical
Languages : en
Pages : 353

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Book Description
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.

Doctoring the Novel

Doctoring the Novel PDF Author: Sylvia A. Pamboukian
Publisher: Ohio University Press
ISBN: 0821444069
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 222

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Book Description
If nineteenth-century Britain witnessed the rise of medical professionalism, it also witnessed rampant quackery. It is tempting to categorize historical practices as either orthodox or quack, but what did these terms really signify in medical and public circles at the time? How did they develop and evolve? What do they tell us about actual medical practices? Doctoring the Novel explores the ways in which language constructs and stabilizes these slippery terms by examining medical quackery and orthodoxy in works such as Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, Charles Dickens’s Bleak House and Little Dorrit, Charlotte Brontë’s Villette, Wilkie Collins’s Armadale, and Arthur Conan Doyle’s Stark Munro Letters. Contextualized in both medical and popular publishing, literary analysis reveals that even supposedly medico-scientific concepts such as orthodoxy and quackery evolve not in elite laboratories and bourgeois medical societies but in the rough-and-tumble of the public sphere, a view that acknowledges the considerable, and often underrated, influence of language on medical practices.

My Chicken Thinks I'm a Quack

My Chicken Thinks I'm a Quack PDF Author: Jennifer Smith
Publisher:
ISBN: 9781945962219
Category : Alternative medicine
Languages : en
Pages : 199

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Book Description


The Quack Doctor

The Quack Doctor PDF Author: Caroline Rance
Publisher: The History Press
ISBN: 0750951834
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 206

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Book Description
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.

Quack, Quack, Quack

Quack, Quack, Quack PDF Author: William H. Helfand
Publisher: Grolier, Incorporated
ISBN: 9780910672405
Category : Art
Languages : en
Pages : 252

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Book Description
"This catalog accompanies an exhibition on medical quackery, tracing its prevalence from the itinerant seller of nostrums four centuries ago to unsolicited spam on the Internet today. Prints by William Hogarth, Honore Daumier and others highlight the theatrics of the quack at work; posters by Jules Cheret, Maxfield Parrish and their contemporaries illustrate the remarkable artistry with which proprietary medicines were once advertised; and works by H.G. Wells, Weir Mitchell and other writers offer a delightful look at the elaborate language once used to promote the quack's wares." "The quack doctor's lavish pronouncements and excessive postures were matched only by similarly exalted promises of therapeutic cure. Quacks dressed elaborately, inflated their credentials, and embraced a particularly extravagant vocabulary to market their panaceas, at times claiming their pills and salves would cure all disease. Some wryly observed that the quacks' nomadic nature was necessary to enable them to avoid the inevitable reprisals of dissatisfied customers. They were later succeeded by the makers of proprietary medicines, many of whom adopted quackery's promotional methods while, at the same time, introducing new ones of their own. These vendors advertised widely (often with celebrity testimonials), publishing broadsides, posters, pamphlets and manifestoes to further amplify the popular reach of their product claims. Until the mid-nineteenth century, both physicians and quacks relied upon certain standard agents - including opium, quinine and antimony (which worked) and a great many others (which did not)."--BOOK JACKET.

Health for Sale

Health for Sale PDF Author: Roy Porter
Publisher: Manchester University Press
ISBN: 9780719019036
Category : Health & Fitness
Languages : en
Pages : 304

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Book Description


Quack!

Quack! PDF Author: Bob McCoy
Publisher:
ISBN: 9781891661105
Category : Consumer protection
Languages : en
Pages : 0

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Book Description
InQuack! Tales of Medical Fraud from the Museum of Questionable Medical Devices, curator Bob McCoy shares his collection of the hilarious, horrifying, and preposterous medical devices that have been foisted upon the public in their quest for good health. From the Prostate Gland Warmer to the Recto Rotor, from the Nose Straightener to the Wonder Electric Generator, these implements reveal the desperate measures taken by the public in their search for magic cures. With period advertisements, promotional literature, and gadget instructions, this book offers a wealth of past--and present--medical fraud. For instance, you'll learn about: Albert Abrams, the "King of Quackery," who believed that all that was needed from a patient for diagnosis was a drop of blood, a single hair, or even a handwriting sample as these would give off the unique "vibrations" of that individual. His theories were so popular that none other than Upton Sinclair promoted them in an article forPearson's magazine. Wilhelm Reich, the groundbreaking psychiatrist who, in the latter portion of his storied career, discovered "Orgone"--the energy supposedly released during sexual orgasm. According to Reich, absorbing large quantities of Orgone through his Orgone Energy Accumulator would make a person healthier. Dr. Albert C. Geyser, whose Tricho machine for removing unwanted hair through x-ray depilitation resulted in thousands of women contracting hardened and wrinkled skin, receded gums, never-healing ulcerated sores, tumors, and, of course, cancer. And if you think quackery is a thing of a past, a sampling of late night television commercials advertising everything from fat burners to magnetic and/or copper pain relievers will cure you of that notion. In fact, in the mid-1990s, a product called "The Stimulator" was advertised on television as a "cure" for pain, menstrual problems, arthritis, and carpal tunnel syndrome. The commercial--featuring Evel Knievel as its spokesperson--was so effective that over 800,000 Stimulators were sold for $88.30 before the FDA shut the company down. Still, the owners made quite a hefty profit on what was simply a one dollar gas grill igniter!

The Quack's Daughter

The Quack's Daughter PDF Author: Greta Nettleton
Publisher: University of Iowa Press
ISBN: 1609382420
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 420

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Book Description
Raised in the gritty Mississippi River town of Davenport, Iowa, Cora Keck could have walked straight out of a Susan Glaspell story. When Cora was sent to Vassar College in the fall of 1884, she was a typical unmotivated, newly rich party girl. Her improbable educational opportunity at “the first great educational institution for womankind” turned into an enthralling journey of self-discovery as she struggled to meet the high standards in Vassar’s School of Music while trying to shed her reputation as the daughter of a notorious quack and self-made millionaire: Mrs. Dr. Rebecca J. Keck, second only to Lydia Pinkham as America’s most successful self-made female patent medicine entrepreneur of the time. This lively, stereotype-shattering story might have been lost, had Cora’s great-granddaughter, Greta Nettleton, not decided to go through some old family trunks instead of discarding most of the contents unexamined. Inside she discovered a rich cache of Cora’s college memorabilia—essential complements to her 1885 diary, which Nettleton had already begun to read. The Quack’s Daughter details Cora’s youthful travails and adventures during a time of great social and economic transformation. From her working-class childhood to her gilded youth and her later married life, Cora experienced triumphs and disappointments as a gifted concert pianist that the reader will recognize as tied to the limited opportunities open to women at the turn of the twentieth century, as well as to the dangerous consequences for those who challenged social norms. Set in an era of surging wealth torn by political controversy over inequality and women’s rights and widespread panic about domestic terrorists, The Quack’s Daughter is illustrated with over a hundred original images and photographs that illuminate the life of a spirited and charming heroine who ultimately faced a stark life-and-death crisis that would force her to re-examine her doubts about her mother’s medical integrity.