Quack medicine : a history of combating health fraud in twentieth-century America / Eric W. Boyle.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Boyle, Eric W.

Series:

Healing society--disease, medicine, and history

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

Quacks and quackery--United States--History.

Quacks and quackery.

Physical Description:

1 online resource (232 p.)

Place of Publication:

Santa Barbara, Calif. : Praeger, 2013.

Language Note:

English

Summary:

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 &quote;quack medicine.&quote;

Contents:

Introduction

Quackery unmasked

Rationalizing and regulating the therapeutic marketplace

Marketing medicines in an age of reform

Propaganda for reform

A new deal for quackery

Redefining quackery in the age of wonder drugs

Reviving the anti-quackery crusade in the 1950s and 1960s

Redefining quackery in the closing decades of the twentieth century.

Notes:

Bibliographic Level Mode of Issuance: Monograph

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN:

9798216134657

9780313385681

0313385688