The Medical Messiahs: A Social History of Health Quackery in 20th Century America

520 Pages·2016·30.937 MB·English

by  James Harvey Young

THE MEDICAL MESSIAHS

THE MEDICAL
MESSIAHS
zA Social History of
Health Quackery
in Twentieth-Century ^America
JAMES HARVEY YOUNG
PRINCETON, NEW JERSEY
PRINCETON UNIVERSITY PRESS
Published by Princeton University Press, 41 William Street,
Princeton, New Jersey 08540
In the United Kingdom by Princeton University Press, Oxford
Copyright © 1967 by Princeton University Press
New afterword © 1992 by Princeton University Press
ALL RIGHTS RESERVED
Library of Congress Card No. 67-21031
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Young, James Harvey.
The medical messiahs: a social history of health quackery in
twentieth-century America I James Harvey Young.—Expanded pbk. ed
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 0-691-00579-6 (pbk: alk. paper)
1. Quacks and quackery—United States. I. Title.
[DNLM: 1. Quackery—history—United States. WZ 310 Y73m]
R730.Y68 1992
616.8'56'0973—dc20
DNLM/DLC
for Library of Congress 91-45700
First Princeton Paperback printing, 1975
Expanded paperback edition, 1992
Princeton University Press books are printed on acid-free paper,
and meet the guidelines for permanence and durability of the
Committee on Production Guidelines for Book Longevity of the
Council on Library Resources
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 32 (pbk.)
Printed in the United States of America
To the Memory of
Blanche DeBra Young
and
William Harvey Young
Bertha Shirley Goode
and
Galen McGregor Goode

CONTENTS
Preface ix
Acknowledgments xiii
1. Brane-Fude 3
The first court trial under the 1906
Pure Food and Drugs Act
2. The Lawless Centuries 13
History and stage-setting for health quackery
in 20th-century America
3. A Decade of Enforcement 41
Valiant efforts, a Supreme Court defeat, and
ambiguous help from Congress
4. Fraud in the Mails 66
Enforcement of postal fraud statutes from the
late 19th century through the 192ffs
5. B.&M. 88
A decade-long effort to prove fraud in court
during the golden glow of prosperity
6. "Truth in Advertising" 113
Cooperative efforts by the self-regulators and the
Federal Trade Commission to restrict the most
flagrant abuses of nostrum advertising
7. The New Muckrakers 129
The American Medical Association keeps muck
raking currents flowing until the next fhodtide:
the "guinea pig" school of critics
8. The New Deal and the New Laws 158
The hotly contested effort to make federal controls
over self-medication drugs more nearly adequate
to social need
9. In Pursuit of the Diminishing Promise 191
Food and Drug Administration use of the new hw
to drive fake claims from labeling step by step
through court interpretation
I vii ]
CONTENTS
10. Two Gentlemen from Indiana 217
A diabetes clinic run by two physician-brothers
named Kaadt
11. The Gadget Boom 239
Device quackery in America, highlighting Ruth B.
Drowns Radio Therapeutic Instrument
12. The Chemotherapeutic Revolution 260
The way the "wonder drugs" era of prescription
medication influenced patterns of self-medication
13. Mail-Order "Health" 282
The Post Office Department's contest with medical fraud
since the 1930's
14. Proprietary Advertising and the
Wheeler-Lea Act 296
The triumphs and failures of the Federal Trade Com
mission in aiming its 1938 law against abuses in the
advertising of self-medication wares
15. Medicine Show Impresario 316
A Louisiana state senator and his medicine show
for Hadacol
16. "You Are What You Eat" 333
Nutrition nonsense by spielers and door-to-door sales
men: Adolphus Hohensee the main exhibit
17. "The Most Heartless" 360
Cancer quackery, especially the protracted Harry
Hoxsey case
18. Anti-Quackery, Inc. 390
A more cohesive effort to combat quackery, prompted
by quackery's burgeoning
19. Turmoil on the Drug Scene 408
New frights, a new hw, and new awareness of the need
for better comprehension of the phenomenon of
quackery
20. The Perennial Proneness 423
Reflections on the complex motivations that have made
mankind so readily susceptible to the quack's appeal
Afterword 435
A Note on the Sources 472
Index 481
[ viii ]
PREFACE
IN The Toadstool Millionaires I sought to describe the origin,
development, and criticism of patent medicines in America
from the importation of British brands during colonial days to
the enactment in 1906 of the first federal restraining statute,
the Pure Food and Drugs Act. This present book is a sequel
to the former one: The medical messiahs are the 20th-century
successors of the toadstool millionaires.
Many reformers who worked diligently to secure the 1906
law would not have thought that a sequel would ever be
required. The editor of the Nation greeted the new law by
asserting that medical quackery had now been dealt a death
blow. The New York Times and the American Medical Asso
ciation's Journal also predicted the imminent doom of harmful
nostrums.
In our own day, when we consider some of the trends since
1906, we too may be surprised that a sequel has proved neces
sary. For in the six succeeding decades the arsenal of anti-
quackery weapons has been vastly augmented. The rigor of
legal controls has been increased. Standards of medical edu
cation have been upgraded, licensing laws improved, hospital
regulations tightened. Scientific knowledge about the human
body and illnesses that assail it has progressed so far that 1906
seems by comparison a dark age. In that year there was but
the merest hint of the coming revolution in chemotherapy.
The educational level of our citizenry has been markedly
raised. Surely, if not in 1906, at least in 1966, amid all this
enlightenment and law, quackery should be dead.
But of course it is not. Indeed, it is not only not dead; never
in previous history has medical quackery been such a booming
business as now. A reasonable guess as to the "overall annual
quackery take," estimated John W. Miner, a lawyer in the
district attorney's office of Los Angeles County who specializes
in medicolegal crimes, speaking in October 1966, would be
two or more billion dollars. "It exceeds," Miner went on, "the
research total expended on disease."
t ix]