Quack medicine
Subtitle: a history of combating health fraud in twentieth-century America
By: Eric W. Boyle
Series: Healing society : disease, medicine, and history; Healing society--disease, medicine, and history
Publisher: Praeger
Published: 2013
Place of publication: Santa Barbara, CA
Language: eng
Number of pages: 239
ISBN-13: 9780313385674
Subjects: Quacks and quackery; History
Other titles: Beware the cancer quack
Description: This book "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."--Provided by publisher.
Notes: Includes bibliographical references (p. [219]-229) and index.
Table of contents: title: Introduction; title: Quackery unmasked; title: Rationalizing and regulating the therapeutic marketplace; title: Marketing medicines in an age of reform; title: Propaganda for reform; title: A new deal for quackery; title: Redefining quackery in the age of wonder drugs; title: Reviving the anti-quackery crusade in the 1950s and 1960s; title: Redefining quackery in the closing decades of the twentieth century.