American Health Quackery: Collected Essays

Young, an emeritus professor at Emory University, became fascinated with medical fakeries and fraudulent healing potions in the 1920s, when he first spied a traveling medicine man. In this collection of essays he examines health quackery's evolution to modern times. Medical hucksters, he observes, are often greeted with a wink and a nudge; ``most people still perceive quackery as something quaint, comical, and harmless.'' And while Young shows that Silent George's Swamp Rabbit Milk (small cans of condensed milk with the labels removed and spray-painted gold) won't really harm much more than the buyer's pride and pocketbook, other so-called miracle drugs, such as Laetrile, do have the potential to hurt. He explains the history of drug regulations in America and the use of alluring advertising to sell cures for a patient's ``grimmest diseases.''' One example cited is Listerine: in the late 19th century it was sold to cure gonorrhea, but by the 1920s it promised to protect halitosis sufferers from such scarring social stigmas as ``often a bridesmaid but never a bride.'' Young skewers all forms of medical chicanery, but believes that as long as someone is looking for a miraculous means of relieving an amazing range of afflictions, there will be someone willing to sell it. (June)