Quacks!

Prepare to feel queasy. 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. Up until relatively recently in history, before 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 (often fraudulently) to call themselves doctors. Was it really possible to diagnose a person’s illness by sniffing their soul through their hair, as one medical man thought? Did Jesus give His followers enemas? Can a man fart his own hair out? Is letting a tapeworm live inside your body a wise way to lose weight? Is it possible to exist off an ultra-low-calorie diet of thin air alone? Is McDonalds’ secret menu of interdimensional foodstuffs a sure-fire path to good health? Could an alien potato from the moon hold the secret to defeating cancer? Is deafness caused by having constipated ears? Should you really wear underpants laced with nuclear radiation? The answer to all these questions is undoubtedly ‘NO!!’, but that hasn’t stopped certain desperate people down the centuries from believing that it might have been ‘YES!!’, such has been their eagerness to find a way out of the medical dead-ends they have found themselves stuck in. This book tells the story of some of the strangest and most insane doctors, surgeons, quacks and food-faddists from throughout history, as well as the often cruel (and always absurd) diet crazes, 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. Now open wide and say ‘Aaargh!’