American Health Quackery (ebook)

Argumento de American Health Quackery (ebook)

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.

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"This wonderful book contains collected essays of America's foremost historian of the patent medicine and health quackery industries.... These essays demonstrate Young's excellent scholarship as well as his marvelous sense of humor and his witty use of the language.... A fitting testimony to the excellent research and writing of the author."--Choice0Preface Acknowledgments Pt. I Telling Why Prologue: A Quota of Quotations on Quackery 3 Ch. 1 Getting into Quackery 6 Pt. II Seeking Patterns Ch. 2 Quackery and the American Mind 23 Ch. 3 "The Foolmaster Who Fooled Them" 32 Ch. 4 Folk into Fake 50 Pt. III Giving Counsel Ch. 5 Health Quackery: A Historian's Advice 81 Ch. 6 The Regulation of Health Quackery 89 Pt. IV Considering Themes Ch. 7 The Long Struggle against Quackery in Dentistry 107 Ch. 8 "Even to a Sucking Infant": Nostrums and Children 125 Ch. 9 The Marketing of Patent Medicines in Lincoln's Springfield 158 Ch. 10 Nutritional Eccentricities 165 Pt. V Narrating Cases Ch. 11 "Euclid + Lincoln = Kent" 187 Ch. 12 When Folk Medicine Flourished in the Shadows of Grady Hospital 199 Ch. 13 Laetrile in Historical Perspective 205 Ch. 14 AIDS and Deceptive Therapies 256 Index 287