Quacks!

Overview

A raucous history of medicine's more bizarre attempts to understand and preserve the human body

Are you suffering from a life-threatening illness? Do you possess chronic fatigue, sexual dysfunction, severe mental impairment, or have to endure constant, debilitating pain? If not, then you might do so after reading this book! Snake-oil salesmen, preying like vultures upon the hopes and fears of the sick and the dying, are nothing new. Until relatively recently, with the miraculous medical advances made during the 20th and 21st centuries, doctors killed many more patients than they ever cured—and it was no wonder when you consider some of the appalling quacks who have felt themselves qualified to place the letters M.D. after their name. This book tells the story of the strangest and most insane doctors, surgeons, and psychiatrists from throughout history, as well as the often cruel (and always absurd) diet-fads, treatment-regimes, and beliefs they unleashed out onto an unsuspecting world—proving once and for all that the one thing there really isn't a cure for is human gullibility.

Author Biography

S. D. Tucker is an author and journalist. He is the author of Forgotten Science, Great British Eccentrics, and Space Oddities, and writes a regular column in Fortean Times magazine.