Quackery: A Brief History of the Worst Ways to Cure Everything

Quackery: A Brief History of the Worst Ways to Cure Everything (2017) Lydia Kang & Nate Pedersen

Honestly, the title tells you everything you need to know: snake oil to mercury to light therapy. All the ways doctors and charlatans have sold “cures” throughout the ages.

Parents, hoping to ease the teething pain of their infants, rubbed one of many available calomel-containing teething powders into their babies’ sore gums.

…

For hundreds of years, mercury-containing products claimed to heal a varied and strangely unrelated host of ailments. Melancholy, constipation, syphilis, influenza, parasites.

I actually knew about mercury treatment for syphilis. And it’s association with millinery.

Mercurial erethism, a neurological disorder that includes depression, anxiety, pathological shyness, and frequent sighing. Together with tremors of the limbs, these symptoms were often called mad hatter’s disease or hatter’s shakes.

This book is full of many many many such treatments for many many different kinds of illnesses and disorders. And a lot of advice no one should ever take.

The Trotula also gives contraceptive advice: “Take a male weasel and let its testicles be removed and let it be released alive. Let the woman carry these testicles with her in her bosom and let her tie them in goose skin . . . and she will not conceive.”

At this point, everyone knows Coca-Cola originally contained cocaine, but I was unaware of other pharmaceutical facts, such as:

Bayer touted heroin as a cure for morphine addiction.

The book contains a tremendous amount of sarcasm and snark, which is probably one of the only ways to deal with the underlying horrors of some of these disorders (like “hysteria”) and treatments.

Another physician applied 130 leeches to a poor soul’s testicle for gonorrhea treatment. It is, perhaps, one of the best advertisements for STD safe-sex campaigns.

Once again, I am delighted to be living in the future, instead of in the “good old days” of leeches and blue mass pills and many other horrors.

Although as is pointed out, in a hundred years some of our current medical practices might be looked upon with the same horror.

Publisher: Workman Publishing

Rating: 8/10

• Browse the archives:
  
• « « Dead Heat