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"Quackery - history"
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Finger surgery for deafness: rethinking quackery in medical history
In 1923, American news dispatches announced that King Alfonso of Spain had summoned a famous New York osteopath to treat his 15-year-old son, Infante Don Jaime (1908-1975). Deaf and mute following a severe case of mastoiditis, Don Jaime was judged \"incurable\" after Spanish specialists unsuccessfully operated on him in 1912. According to court insiders, an osteopath took only 20 minutes to perform a bloodless and painless operation that miraculously cured the prince. Reporters deduced that one man fit the bill: Brooklyn-based Dr. Curtis H. Muncie (1887-1963), who happened to be sailing on the Majestic, which was bound for Europe, to promote his \"constructive bi-digital intra-aural\" technique, otherwise known as the \"Muncie Reconstruction Method\" or simply \"finger surgery.\" The technique required Muncie to insert his fingers through a patient's larynx to manipulate the eustachian tube and manually correct aural defects causing deafness. Allegedly, it had a 90% success rate in incurable cases. The popularity of finger surgery as a cure for deafness certainly reflected broader cultural expectations of normalcy and eugenics that required American citizens who were deaf to be godly, educated and civic minded.
Journal Article
The “Controversial Cundurango Cure”: Medical professionalization and the global circulation of drugs
This article examines the medical and political discussions regarding a controversial medicinal bark from Ecuador – cundurango – that was actively sponsored by the Ecuadorian government as a new botanical cure for cancer in the late nineteenth century United States and elsewhere. The article focuses on the commercial and diplomatic interests behind the public discussion and advertising techniques of this drug. It argues that diverse elements – including the struggle for positioning scientific societies and the disapproval of the capacities of Ecuadorian doctors, US abolitionist history, regional and local political struggles – played a role in the quackery accusations against cundurango and its promoters. The development and international trade of this remedy offer interesting insights into the global history of drugs, particularly how medical knowledge was challenged during a period when scientific medicine was struggling for hegemony. It explores how newspapers expanded “the public interest” in a possible cancer cure.
Journal Article
Doc or quack : science and anti-science in modern medicine
\"From pharmaceutical companies to acupuncture, an essential investigation of the constantly evolving relationship between mainstream Western medicine and quackery. Reaching from the beginnings of scientific medicine in the nineteenth century through to the present, Sander L. Gilman examines the ever-shifting boundary between scientific medicine and quackery, asking if such a fixed boundary can actually exist within mainstream medical practice. Through detailed case studies--of stomach ulcers, eye disease, and acupuncture--Doc or Quack reveals the influence of pharmaceutical companies in determining the science of medical practice, the pros and cons of the increasing specialization in medical practice, and the murky issue of \"race\" in scientific medicine. This readable account covers medical practice from the Enlightenment to the present, offering a realistic view of health politics in the United States, Germany, and the United Kingdom. It's an essential read for anyone interested in the history and politics of Western medicine.\" -- Publisher's description.
BOOK
Pseudo-Science and Society in 19th-Century America
Progressive nineteenth-century Americans believed firmly that human perfection could be achieved with the aid of modern science. To many, the science of that turbulent age appeared to offer bright new answers to life's age-old questions. Such a climate, not surprisingly, fostered the growth of what we now view as \"pseudo-sciences\" -- disciplines delicately balancing a dubious inductive methodology with moral and spiritual concerns, disseminated with a combination of aggressive entrepreneurship and sheer entertainment.
Such \"sciences\" as mesmerism, spiritualism, homoeopathy, hydropathy, and phrenology were warmly received not only by the uninformed and credulous but also by the respectable and educated. Rationalistic, egalitarian, and utilitarian, they struck familiar and reassuring chords in American ears and gave credence to the message of reformers that health and happiness are accessible to all.
As the contributors to this volume show, the diffusion and practice of these pseudo-sciences intertwined with all the major medical, cultural, religious, and philosophical revolutions in nineteenth-century America. Hydropathy and particularly homoeopathy, for example, enjoyed sufficient respectability for a time to challenge orthodox medicine. The claims of mesmerists and spiritualists appeared to offer hope for a new moral social order. Daring flights of pseudo-scientific thought even ventured into such areas as art and human sexuality. And all the pseudo-sciences resonated with the communitarian and women's rights movements.
This important exploration of the major nineteenth-century pseudo-sciences provides fresh perspectives on the American society of that era and on the history of the orthodox sciences, a number of which grew out of the fertile soil plowed by the pseudo-scientists.
eBook
Charlatan : America's most dangerous huckster, the man who pursued him, and the age of flimflam
Tells the story of the little-known Dr. John Brinkley and his unquenchable thirst for fame and fortune and Morris Fishbein, a quackbuster extraordinaire who relentlessly pursued the greatest charlatan of the 1920s and 1930s.
Book
Managing the \Obscene M.D.\
This article examines links between mid-Victorian opposition to commerce in popular works on sexual health and the introduction of a legal test of obscenity, in the 1868 trial R. v. Hicklin, that opened the public distribution of any work that contained sexual information to prosecution. The article demonstrates how both campaigning medical journals' crusades against \"obscene quackery\" and judicial and anti-vice groups who aimed to protect public morals responded to unruly trade in medical print by linking popular medical works with public corruption. When this link was codified, it became a double-edged sword for medical authorities. The Hicklin test provided these authorities with a blunt tool for disciplining professional medical behavior. However, it also radically narrowed the parameters through which even the most established practitioners could communicate medical information without risking censure.
Journal Article
If it sounds like a quack ... : a journey to the fringes of American medicine
\"A bizarre, rollicking trip through the world of fringe medicine, filled with leeches, baking soda IVs, and, according to at least one person, zombies. It's no secret that American health care has become too costly and politicized to help everyone. So where do you turn if you can't afford doctors, or don't trust them? In this book, Matthew Hongoltz-Hetling examines the growing universe of non-traditional treatments -- including some that are really non-traditional. With costs skyrocketing and anti-science sentiment spreading, the so-called \"medical freedom\" movement has grown. Now it faces its greatest challenge: going mainstream. In these pages you'll meet medical freedom advocates including an international leech smuggler, a gold miner-turned health drink salesman who may or may not be from the Andromeda galaxy, and a man who says he can turn people into zombies with aerosol spray. One by one, these alternative healers find customers, then expand and influence, always seeking the one thing that would take their businesses to the next level--the support and approval of the government\"-- Provided by publisher.
Book
Quacks and hacks: Georgian medicine and the power of advertising
Given the exuberant mercantilism of the period, no Georgian scandal-sheet would be complete without a smattering of advertisements for bizarre medications. Both the cult of celebrity and the burgeoning influence of newspapers on the consumer were exploited to potent effect by the 18th-century quack.
Journal Article