In 1923, the New York Times and Time Magazine reported that King Alfonso of Spain summoned a famous New York osteopath to treat his fifteen-year-old son, Infante Don Jaime (1908-1975). Deaf and mute following a severe case of mastoiditis (middle-ear infection) and possibly tuberculosis at a young age, Don Jaime was adjudged “incurable” by Spanish… Continue Reading
Latest in: quackery
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Sometime in the early 1880s, a man by the name of J.H. Nicholson, who called himself an “aural specialist,” introduced himself to a French doctor by the name of Drouet. Hospitalized for tuberculosis aggravated by alcohol, the doctor was once an obscure general practitioner operating in the tough Belleville district in Paris. It appeared that… Continue Reading
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BOOK REVIEW Joseph M. Gabriel, Medical Monopoly: Intellectual Property Rights and the Origins of the Modern Pharmaceutical Industry (Chicago & London: The University of Chicago Press, 2014). In the 1980s, historians began to refer to the “medical marketplace” as a model for analyzing the experiences of health and illness. Adopting a normative understanding of the… Continue Reading
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The history of the Actina, an “electric pocket battery” claimed to cure eye and ear diseases, rightly began in a manufacturing factory in Bristol, England. There, William C. Wilson, born in 1837 in Newcastle-upon-Tyne, started a company in the 1870s selling “galvano-magnetic clothing.” After working as an apprentice cabinet maker and an auctioneer in London,… Continue Reading
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From The Albion Magazine (1907): When a man suddenly becomes deaf there is little or nothing he would shrink from if it afforded, or seemed to afford, the smallest chance that he would recover the enjoyment of a sense which he never properly valued until he lost it. About sixteen years ago, when well advanced in life,… Continue Reading
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In 1905, Dr. Guy Clifford Powell, of Peoria, Illinois invented and marketed a device he called the “Electro-Vibratory Cure for Deafness.” The apparatus apparently cured a patient of deafness by pumping air through the ears via cotton-covered electrodes soaked in salt water. After pumping in air, a jolt of electricity generated by the solenoid coils… Continue Reading
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Galvanism is a medical treatment that involves the application of electric currents to body tissues in order to stimulate the contraction of muscles. First experimented in the late eighteenth-century by Luigi Galvani (1737-1798) who investigated frog legs twitching once sparked by an electric current, galvanism was believed to be a miraculous application of scientific prowess… Continue Reading
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In 1908, V. Walbram Chapnnam wrote to John McKinna, secretary for the Metropolitan Ear, Nose, and Throat Hospital on 64 Grafton St., London. In his correspondence, Chapnnam encloses a copy of a letter dated 6th April, from a person calling himself Herbert Clifton who styled himself as a “Aural Specialist.” The copy included an advertisement… Continue Reading
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quacksalver KWAK-sal-ver, noun: 1. a charlatan. 2. a quack doctor. And there was that quacksalver Mellowes again, with his pernicious theory that consumption was caused by an excess of oxygen. — Patrick O’Brian, Desolation Island, 1978 Anon, we grow persuaded that he traded both eyes for hooks and beneath the roof of his friend, Prince of Hesse Cassel,… Continue Reading
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From the Pall Mall Gazette, Friday 22 February 1889: A distinguished “aurist” was once rather amusingly “done” by an enterprising American, who bounced into his room one morning, exclaiming, in stentorian through nasal tones, “Say, before we do bus’ness, guess I should like to know the price of fixing me up.” “Two guineas for the first… Continue Reading
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During fall of 1848, a practitioner imposed himself upon the inhabitants of Newcastle-on-Tyne, announcing himself as “Mr. Yearsley” and distributing posting-bills around the area. Sporting a mustache on the upper lip and an imperial on the nether lip, and a cherished crop and carefully-nourished tuft of hair, he strutted himself peddling his wares. Urging the… Continue Reading
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During the 1830s, Alexander Turnbull (c.1794-1881), advertised a remedy he conjured, which he professed was capable of curing any cases of deafness not arising from organic disease. In particular, he advocated the use of veratria, a poisonous alkaloid obtained from the hellebore root, as an ointment applied to the external ear; the same treatment, along… Continue Reading
From the Hands of Quacks 