Quack Medicine

Quack Medicine

Author: Eric W. Boyle

Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing USA

Published: 2013-01-09

Total Pages: 463

ISBN-13:

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This timely volume illustrates how and why the fight against quackery in modern America has largely failed, laying the blame on an unlikely confluence of scientific advances, regulatory reforms, changes in the medical profession, and the politics of consumption. Throughout the 20th century, anti-quackery crusaders investigated, exposed, and attempted to regulate allegedly fraudulent therapeutic approaches to health and healing under the banner of consumer protection and a commitment to medical science. Quack Medicine: A History of Combating Health Fraud in Twentieth-Century America reveals how efforts to establish an exact border between quackery and legitimate therapeutic practices and medications have largely failed, and details the reasons for this failure. Digging beneath the surface, the book uncovers the history of allegedly fraudulent therapies including pain medications, obesity and asthma cures, gastrointestinal remedies, virility treatments, and panaceas for diseases such as arthritis, asthma, diabetes, and HIV/AIDS. It shows how efforts to combat alleged medical quackery have been connected to broader debates among medical professionals, scientists, legislators, businesses, and consumers, and it exposes the competing professional, economic, and political priorities that have encouraged the drawing of arbitrary, vaguely defined boundaries between good medicine and "quack medicine."


Discovering Quacks, Utopias, and Cemeteries

Discovering Quacks, Utopias, and Cemeteries

Author: Cynthia Williams Resor

Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield

Published: 2019-06-21

Total Pages: 155

ISBN-13: 1475832060

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Discovering Quacks, Utopias, and Cemeteries: Modern Lessons from Historical Themes​ explores two enduring issues – our age-old pursuit of better lives and how the media impacts our choices. In this unique approach to social history, each chapter opens with essential questions asking the reader to consider these issues in historical and modern life. The histories of fake cures, imaginary and real utopias, cemeteries, tombstones, and scrapbooks are explored from ancient times through the transformations caused by the Industrial Revolution into the twentieth century. Historical images, excerpts from primary source documents, and activities adaptable to learners of all ages are included to illustrate the role of historical media. Quacks, Utopias, and Cemeteries, the third in the daily life series by Cynthia Resor, is an ideal book for history enthusiasts, especially social studies teachers, education or humanities professors, museum educators, and anyone wanting to know about the lives of average people in the past.


Duck

Duck

Author: Victoria de Rijke

Publisher: Reaktion Books

Published: 2008-12-15

Total Pages: 196

ISBN-13: 1861894899

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The squat, noisy duck occupies a prominent role in the human cultural imagination, as evidenced by everything from the rubber duck of childhood baths to insurance commercials. With Duck,Victoria de Rijke explores the universality of this quacking bird through the course of human culture and history. From the Eider duck to the Brazilian teal to the familiar mallard, duck species are richly diverse, and de Rijke offers a comprehensive overview of their evolutionary history. She explores the numerous roles that the duck plays in literature, art, and religion—including the Hebrew belief that ducks represent immortality, and the Finnish myth that the universe was hatched from a duck’s egg. The author also highlights the significant role humor has always played in human imaginings of duck life, such as the Topographia Hibernia, a twelfth-century tome contending that ducks originated as growths on tree trunks washed up on a beach. But the book does not neglect the bird’s role in everyday life as well, from food dishes to jokes to beloved animated characters such as Daffy Duck and Donald Duck. Duck is an entertaining account of a bird whose distinctive silhouette is known the world over.


The Social History of Language

The Social History of Language

Author: Peter Burke

Publisher: Cambridge University Press

Published: 1987-10-22

Total Pages: 236

ISBN-13: 9780521317634

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This volume of essays brings together work by social historians of Britain, France and Italy.


Science and Ethics in American Medicine, 1800-1914

Science and Ethics in American Medicine, 1800-1914

Author: Harris Livermore Coulter

Publisher: North Atlantic Books

Published: 1982

Total Pages: 582

ISBN-13: 9780913028964

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Divided Legacy (Vols. I-IV) is a history of Western medical philosophy from the time of Hippocrates to the twentieth century, treating it as a unified system of thought rather than a series of fortuitous discovers. Dr. Coulter interprets the development of medical ideas as the product of a conflict between two opposed systems of thought, Empiricism and Rationalism. This third volume of Divided Legacy continues the account of the conflict between the Empirical and the Rationalist approaches to therapeutics but introduces a socio-economic dimension which had earlier been lacking. In the early nineteenth century, Samuel Hahnemann’s formulation of the Empirical therapeutic doctrine, which he called homeopathy. It flourished especially in the United States. This volume traces the history of the rise and decline of this formulation of Empirical therapeutics in the nineteenth century United States. It analyzes the interaction between the homeopathic doctrines and those of the orthodox school and attempts to illustrate the influence of socio-economic constraints on the movement of medical thought during this period.


Doctoring the Novel

Doctoring the Novel

Author: Sylvia A. Pamboukian

Publisher: Ohio University Press

Published: 2012-03-14

Total Pages: 222

ISBN-13: 0821444069

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If nineteenth-century Britain witnessed the rise of medical professionalism, it also witnessed rampant quackery. It is tempting to categorize historical practices as either orthodox or quack, but what did these terms really signify in medical and public circles at the time? How did they develop and evolve? What do they tell us about actual medical practices? Doctoring the Novel explores the ways in which language constructs and stabilizes these slippery terms by examining medical quackery and orthodoxy in works such as Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, Charles Dickens’s Bleak House and Little Dorrit, Charlotte Brontë’s Villette, Wilkie Collins’s Armadale, and Arthur Conan Doyle’s Stark Munro Letters. Contextualized in both medical and popular publishing, literary analysis reveals that even supposedly medico-scientific concepts such as orthodoxy and quackery evolve not in elite laboratories and bourgeois medical societies but in the rough-and-tumble of the public sphere, a view that acknowledges the considerable, and often underrated, influence of language on medical practices.