Quackery: A Brief History of the Worst Ways to Cure Everything reminded me a lot of Jennifer Wright’s Get Well Soon; they both tackle the history of early medicine and make you happy to live in the modern age. Quackery is brief, each chapter is essentially an extra long Cracked article, but Kang provides a lot of information in a short amount of time and if any topic really intrigues you it would probably be easy to discover a more in depth article on the Internet.
Sure, we all know cocaine and other Class A drugs have their roots in medicine but humans also used poison a lot when it came to early “cures.”
Strychnine also crept its way into a German drug for digestion problems called Dr. Koester’s Antigas Tablets. In the early 1940s, Dr. Theodor Morell began prescribing these tablets to one of his patients who suffered from constipation and flatulence from a vegetarian diet. The doctor recommended his patient take between eight and sixteen tablets per day, which he did, faithfully, for nine years, until he took his own life in a bunker beneath Berlin at the conclusion of World War II. Yes, Adolf Hitler was consuming near-lethal doses of strychnine during his reign of terror.
And when getting an amputation what do you value most- speed or survival?
His speed was so mighty that once he accidentally sliced off the testicles of the patient. A free castration, to boot! Another time, he accidentally cut off the fingers of his assistant (who often held the leg in place); during the procedure, one of the onlookers dropped dead from terror when the knife slashed close enough to cut his coat. Unfortunately, the patient died. The poor assistant also later died of gangrene from the finger amputations, and thus Liston became the proud surgeon who could now boast a stunning 300 percent mortality rate from one surgery.
Kang and Pedersen inject a lot of humor into this history of not so modern medicine but they also do an excellent job of delivering the facts to the reader. From arsenic to strychnine, radium to mercury and of course good old fashioned bloodletting, lobotomies and pelvic massages (for all that female hysteria) this book is incredibly informative and also a little gross. Like, definitely gross- I don’t recommend reading it while eating but it was an enjoyable pedicure read!
