Robert Youngson - A Brief History of Bad Medicine

BROUGHT TO YOU BY KeVkRaY

Highlights from the series

A Brief History of British Kings & Queens

Mike Ashley

A Brief History of the Crusades

Geoffrey Hindley

A Brief History of the Druids

Peter Berresford Ellis

A Brief History of the Dynasties of China

Bamber Gascoigne

A Brief Guide to the Greek Myths

Stephen Kershaw

A Brief History of Henry VIII

Derek Wilson

A Brief History of the Hundred Years War

Desmond Seward

A Brief History of Life in the Middle Ages

Martyn Whittock

A Brief History of Mankind

Cyril Aydon

A Brief History of the Middle East

Christopher Catherwood

A Brief History of the Private Lives of the Roman Emperors

Anthony Blond

A Brief Guide to Secret Religions

David V. Barrett

A Brief History of Secret Societies

David V. Barrett

A Brief History of the Third Reich

Martyn Whittock

Trust me, Im a doctor has been the message of the medical fraternity down the ages. And impressed by their apparent ability to understand the hidden mysteries of the body, and the even more hidden matters of the mind, the vast majority of people have indeed trusted them. Patients have been amazingly patient, acting as human guinea pigs, submitting themselves to the knife, to noxious medicines, to ordeals of both a physical and a psychological nature.

But how much do doctors really know? And how often is the patients trust abused by quacks or incompetents? Robert M. Youngson and Ian Schott have produced a gripping selection of the worst frauds, blunders and abuses perpetrated over the centuries in the name of medicine - a horribly fascinating account of wrong thinking and wrongdoing from the Ancient Greeks to the wilder shores of the contemporary medical scene.

Robert M. Youngson, a doctor himself, says that although doctors are in general more careful than other people, cases of mishap and malpractice, from wrong dosages to the removal of perfectly healthy parts of the body, do occur in everyday medicine , while professional arrogance and ambition have led to transgressions from some of the most eminent names in the medical research field. Ian Schott is an experienced investigative journalist, who makes it his business to uncover fraud and expose incompetence. Occasionally names and details have had to be altered to protect patients still living who would not wish to be identified, but all the stories included in the book are true, in that the events actually happened, and many have been previously reported in the medical press.

Chapter One

The Golden Age of what might be called pseudo-technological quackery was the period following the end of the Second World War. Throughout the Deep South and the west coast of America, there appeared a species of ingenious medical entrepreneur. From the early 1950s a range of exotic-looking devices, covered with a profusion of knobs, flashing lights and spurious dials, came on the market. Pride of place among all these imaginative products of human chicanery should go to the Film-O-Sonic, the invention of a San Bernadino chiropractor and a snip at $500. To a casual observer, this might have looked like a primitive tape recorder with the speaker removed (which in fact it was). While a mysterious tape played in the machine (which no one could hear, there being no speaker), pads attached to the device were applied to the body to expel cancer, cataracts, heart diseases and ulcers. So what was on this tape that was so therapeutic to the patient and that made diseases so keen to flee the body? It was a loop-tape of Frank Sinatra singing Smoke gets in your eyes.

Another device was that made by Mark Callert, a self-styled radon expert, lecturer and naturopath, in 1952. His device a panel covered by a rash of switches and lights, all connected in electrical series resembled the flight deck of an intergalactic cruiser. It was asserted that it could diagnose and treat tumours, cancer, syphilis and most other diseases to boot. The deluxe model sold at $545, and Callert did a brisk trade. He himself practised with it, and added zodiacally-inspired diagnostic techniques into his patter. To reach an opinion on a patient, he stroked a metal plate on the machine; when it squeaked back at him, he pronounced judgement. To prescribe a treatment, the patient invariably being told that he was gravely ill, Callert placed a number of bottles of coloured water on the machine, and invited it to select one, which it did by means of a flashing bulb. Within a short time, Callert established a thriving practice, until he unfortunately told an unusually healthy federal investigator that he was afflicted by cancer of the liver, a tumour pressing on the heart and lymphogranuloma . Despite the ostentatious electrical wizardry of the machine, it transpired that the only circuit in it was the one connecting it to the mains.

The imaginative merging of scientific technology has always been a facet of quackery. Dwellers in the twilight zone of postwar America saw the germination of a space programme, the first vast, unwieldy, but impressive computers, television and tape recorders. The world moved into the nuclear age, without understanding fully the consequences of atomic radiation. It became perceived as a mystic source of power, whose destructiveness bore witness to the miraculous good it might produce if harnessed differently. The curious militant aspect of technology was reflected in the weird and wonderful death-rays and space-rockets that filled the paranoid fiction of the time, in which small-town America was constantly threatened by blobs of alien goo, body-snatching plants and creatures that burrowed in under ones skin and consumed the human brain. Like disease, these creatures threatened the health of every American. In the films they were fought with ingenious technology . People began to look for suitable space-age weapons to fight their own sicknesses, cancer in particular.

Callerts device was highly influential in this sphere, and spawned such imitators as Ralph R. Ruebers Analyzer, which was rather more compact, consisting of three electrical circuits which lit up two bulbs and warmed a plate which was stroked to reach a diagnosis. Rueber also produced an Energiser, which was very similar except for the peculiar addition of a couple of pounds of tar.

Other unusual diagnostic machines included the McCoy Device, which was popular in San Jos in 1951. McCoy, an oil dealer, created a machine which deduced the nature of ailments from the patients signature. Clients then had to undergo at least ninety days treatment on his Oscilloclast at, at least, $1 a day, after which the state of their signature would indicate that they were cured. Six years of technological advancement later, Dr Newfield produced Dr John Sumner Newfields Electro-Metabiograph Diagnostic Machine and Quantimeter, which retailed at $250 and could diagnose and cure heart diseases , high blood pressure and prostate gland disorders.

Radiation fascinated people. They had a vague notion that it might produce terrible mutations, but they believed that used correctly it was a wonder cure for cancer. People paid $200 a day to sit in old radium mines, and paid hundreds more dollars to attend one of a series of Uranium Centers set up in 1953 in northern California. In these, they lay in cubicles lined with low-grade uranium ore, or on beds with trays of uranium under them, hopefully exposing themselves to hideous doses of radiation in the belief that it would destroy cancer and arthritis.