Quackery: A Brief History of the Worst Ways to Cure Everything

Today' post is on Quackery: A Brief History of the Worst Ways to Cure Everything by Lydia Kang MD and Nate Pedersen. It is 352 pages long and is published by Workman Publishing Company. The cover is black with the title in fancy script. The intended reader is someone who likes weird history. There is mild foul language, no sex, and no violence in this book. There Be Spoilers Ahead.

From the dust jacket- Discover 67 shocking-but-true medical misfires that run the gamut from bizarre to deadly. Like when doctors prescribed morphine for crying infants. When snorting skull moss was a cure for a bloody nose. When consuming mail-order tapeworms was a latter-day diet. Or when snake oil salesmen peddled strychnine (used in rat poison) as an aphrodisiac in '60s. Seamlessly combining macabre humor with hard science and compelling storytelling, Quackery is a visually rich and information-packed exploration of history's most outlandish cures, experiments, and scams.
A humorous book that delves into some of the wacky but true ways that humans have looked to cure their ills. Leeches, mercury. strychnine, and lobotomies are a few of the topics that explore what lengths society has gone in the search for health.

Review- A dark topic that is manageable with great humor by the authors. Kang and Pedersen have done excellent research on the topic of bad medicine. They cover everything from King's Touch to the roots of drinking water for your health with lots of jokes thrown in to help with the horror of some the stories.  I did learn some new history like how tobacco was believed to help with constipation by having someone blow the smoke up your bum. Kang also talks about how we still use of older remedies for our modern health care, like we still use leeches but just not everywhere or for everything. If you are looking for a fun read about medical history, then you cannot go wring with this book.

I give this volume a Four out of Five stars. I get nothing for my review and I borrowed this book from my local library.