Quack History

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Quack History

 

Pay no attention to the man behind the curtain.

(Frank Morgan in The Wizard of Oz)

 

Some quacks are so famous that their names have

become generic, as Kleenex is for facial tissues (when

is the last time someone asked you for a " facial

tissue? " ). To this day in Australia, people talk of

Hoovering the carpet. And worldwide, Mesmerism is the

term of choice to describe a nut who has persuaded the

sick and gullible to try wacky and useless nostrums.

Franz Anton Mesmer was a real person, and by some

accounts quite a gifted healer, who lived some two

hundred years ago. He may have been the first really

successful clinical hypnotherapist. He certainly made

a name for himself and a good living to boot from his

" specialty, " which the great musical satirist Tom

Lehrer would call " diseases of the rich. "

 

Two questions must be asked of his methods, and the

methods of all quacks, and indeed the methods of all

physicians: are they safe, and are they effective?

Mesmer is not known to have killed anybody. Well,

maybe he diverted people away from scientific medicine

and harmed them in so doing. But were medical doctors

any better? Arguably they were worse, perhaps much

worse. Remember that around this time of Voltaire and

George Washington, doctors did not even wash their

hands between patients. They would go from lancing a

boil to delivering a baby and from dissecting a

rotting cadaver to doing crude cataract surgery with

no anesthetic. Doctors would not wash their hands for

another century and even then obstetrician Ignaz

Samuelveiss, M.D., lost his reputation, his career,

and his sanity in a failed battle to convince a

stubborn, arrogant and barbaric profession of

well-educated physicians that they were actually

spreading disease more than they were curing it.

 

When we look at what the regular, fully educated

doctors were offering (bleeding with dirty lancets and

pond leeches, for example) Mesmer doesn't look all

that bad. Doctors of the eighteenth century used

outhouses like everyone else, and certainly no less

often, and none of them washed their hands before

surgery or between patients. Even today, half of all

physicians surveyed don't wash their hands after using

the toilet. I'll bet you'd love a reference for that

statistic, because you don't believe it. Of course

you can research it at your library and see for

yourself. While you are at it, hunt this one down:

there have been over one million accidental hypodermic

needle pricks each year in the United States. It is

believed that fewer than a third are reported, so that

makes possibly three million or more, says the Centers

for Disease Control. (Okay, okay: USA Weekend, April

8-10, 1994). In an age of AIDS and hepatitis, this is

the carelessness that quack legend is made from. Yet

all these are certified medical professionals: the

phlebotomists, nurses, and doctors.

 

Back to the past again, to the time of Mesmer. One

of the common remedies of the 18th and 19th centuries

was mercury. Mercury is well known today to be a

toxic heavy metal, the very vapors of which are

dangerous. Any junior high science teacher knows

this, and has in her lab classroom a mercury clean-up

kit, for immediate, safe isolation of any spill, no

matter how small. No longer will my grade-school

friends and I be allowed to play with " quicksilver, "

mercury's common name. No longer may anyone roll the

heavy, cold, shiny liquid about in their hands and try

to coat pennies with it. It is too dangerous.

 

Yet in the not too far past, mercury, often as the

drug calomel, was administered to countless innocent

and trusting patients, not by Mesmer or any other

oddball, but by the family doctor. Well, we can

dismiss the dark ages of medicine as over and done

with, right? Wrong. Mercury, making up over half of

a so-called " silver " amalgam dental filling, is still

placed into the living bone tissue of adults and

children, where it may well stay, 24 hours a day, 7

days a week, for ten years of more. Some of my

mercury amalgam fillings lasted me from childhood into

fatherhood. If a science teacher encouraged a 13 year

old put mercury into his mouth, it would be gross

negligence, bordering on criminal. Dentists do it

every day.

 

Who, then, are the quacks?

 

Moving into the mid 19th century, we run into entire

flocks of medical wackos. In this age of free-market

anything, prescribed medicines and patent remedies

shared a common feature: they were poisons. Along

comes a series of surprisingly well educated medical

doctors who rebelled against their own profession by

recommending vegetarianism, fasting, water and

sunlight, and, gasp, even exercise to cure the many

diseases of the day. Whether it was James Calab

Jackson, MD, of Dansville, NY's " Home on the Hill "

spa, or the much better known John Harvey Kellogg, MD

of Battle Creek and cereal fame, these quacks were

neither fleecing nor killing their patients.

Following the cardinal rule of healing, " First do no

harm, " the naturopathic branch of health science was

far ahead of its time in many ways. For instance,

" Dr. Quinn, Medicine Woman " would have had to be a

naturopath, for no drug school would even accept a

woman as a student in her day. The nature-cure

schools did, graduating the first female American

physicians in history.

 

All these women were quacks, of course, because they

advocated fasting, water cures, sunlight, exercise and

good diet. You will learn of them in detail in The

Greatest Health Discovery, by the American Natural

Hygiene Society.

 

There are two dramas about medicine that you will

never see produced on Broadway or made into TV movies.

One is Dr. Jack Kevorkian's satire of hospitals'

mistakes, and the other is The Doctor's Dilemma, by no

less than one of the most distinguished playwrights

since Shakespeare, George Bernard Shaw. Shaw observes

that quacks and regular doctors are about equally

dangerous and equally effective, and probably equally

useless. It is in Shaw's prefaces to his plays, more

than the plays themselves, that one often learns the

most about the man and his ideas. The prefaces are

not performance material, but the preface to The

Doctor's Dilemma will hold your attention just fine.

 

Far more scathing attacks on modern medicine's

dangers will be found in Confessions of a Medical

Heretic, by Robert Mendelssohn, MD, Medical Nemesis,

by Ivan Illich, and Who Is Your Doctor and Why, by

Alonzo Shadman, MD. Most people will never read these

books, as they are too disturbing. I have an entire

family full of doctor-worshippers. Perhaps you do,

too. Doctors command far more respect than they've

earned. It amounts to a religion, almost a perverse

opposite of Christian Science, when we have so much

faith in people. Odd thought though it may be,

consider that you may well be born without being

baptized, and die without seeing a rabbi or priest.

But you will not even exist as a human being until

some doctor signs your birth certificate, and you are

not free from the IRS until some doctor signs your

death certificate.

 

Between these events, doctors enjoy high incomes,

high social status and immense authority. Like

priests, says Dr. Mendelshonn. Ralph Nader, the

nation's foremost consumer advocate, thinks that the

medical profession kills nearly 300,000 Americans each

year. Even if Nader exaggerates by an extremely

improbable 95%, that's a horrible number of funerals

caused by physicians. Napoleon said that in the next

world, doctors would have more deaths to account for

than generals. Author, endocrinologist and ayurvedic

physician Deepak Chopra, MD, has said that more people

live off cancer than die from it.

 

Grit your teeth as you read that, or toss this book

into the dumpster. It doesn't matter to me. When

ready, the books I referred to above will still be in

your library system, somewhere, waiting on the shelves

for you to get them out by interlibrary loan.

 

It is easy for Hollywood to put together a fictional

film (bordering on the libelous) such as The Road to

Wellsville, which makes a mockery of Dr. Harvey

Kellogg. Television presents us with many doctor

soap operas and prime-time-wasting doctor shows such

as ER. Invariably, these politically correct programs

show as little of the realities of medical practice as

An Officer and a Gentleman or Top Gun show about real

life in the Navy. Doctors are wonderful, wounded

warriors, we are to believe, battling against the twin

evils of ignorance and frequent commercial breaks.

 

The fact that so many of those commercials are for

patent medicines would lead a skeptic to suspect

conflict of interest. After all, if you were a

pharmaceutical company, spending more on advertising

that you do on research, would you sponsor any part of

an anti-doctor show? This explains why a Learning

Channel expose on Mesmer would be easy to produce and

sell. When is the last time you saw a favorable news

account, anywhere, in any media, about quacks?

 

Of course, it's in the name itself. " Quack " is a

condemnatory word. Even eye-witnessed murderers are

called " suspects " well into the legal process.

" Quacks, " by definition, cannot be good. Even

witches, a familiar childhood symbol of evil, are cut

more slack: " Are you a good witch, or a bad witch? "

Dorothy was asked. No one has ever asked me, " Are you

a good quack, or a bad quack? "

 

There have been an embarrassingly large number of

" good " quacks, even in recent medically-dominated

history. It is not easy to be the small mammal in the

Age of Doctorsaurs, but a persistent minority,

generally medical doctors themselves, have rebelled

against their own training.

 

Copyright C 1999 and prior years Andrew W. Saul.

From the books QUACK DOCTOR and PAPERBACK CLINIC,

available from Dr. Andrew Saul, Number 8 Van Buren

Street, Holley, New York 14470.