412 ANNUAL REPORT SMITHSONIAN INSTITUTION, 1937 



WHY QUACKS OFTEN APPEAR TO WORK MIRACLES 



But some of you will remind me that sometimes the quack does cure 

 after able physicians have faUed. And you are right; I have seen 

 this myself, but no one who knows anything of quackery, or human 

 suggestibility, or hysteria, or the tendency of most diseases to let 

 up without any treatment at all, is ever going to conclude that simply 

 because a man is curing some people and is gathering crowds on his 

 doorstep he is a good physician, and his system of practice is worth 

 investigating or imitating. This statement A\dll doubtless seem so 

 paradoxical to some of you that probably I should digress for a moment 

 and explain. 



PATIENTS WHO CANNOT AFFORD TO GET WELL TOO QUICKLY 



Occasionally I see patients who I feel sure could be cured more 

 easily by some spectacular form of quackery than by my prosaic 

 brand of psychotherapy. For instance: Diu'ing the World War a 

 young man's business necessitated liis traveling back and forth 

 through an ocean infested with German submarines. He went 

 without protest, outwardly brave, but inwardly terrified. One day 

 in Europe everything went black, and he returned home stone blind. 



From the minute when I first saw him I felt that the bhndness must 

 be hysterical in nature. A man can hardly associate with the sick 

 day after day for 30 years without learning the significance of many a 

 httle telltale sign, and as I expected, when I told him I thought he 

 could be cured he showed no enthusiasm and soon departed. 



Later, as I thought the problem over, I saw that I couldn't hope to 

 cure him wdth undisguised psychotherapy because if I did, this would 

 leave him in an embarrassing situation. It would expose him to the 

 accusation of having beon either a fool or a coward or a cheat. No; 

 he could afford to get well only in some spectacular way, and I was not 

 at all surprised some months later, when I saw by the papers that an 

 irregular practitioner had reduced a dislocated vertebra in the neck, 

 a vertebra that had been pressing, so they said, on the optic nerves. 

 As you know, these nerves do not go anywhere near the neck, but no 

 matter — the fact appears to have been that the patient's sight was 

 instantly restored. 



Now imagine the effect of such a newspaper report on the minds of 

 blind men and women everyw^here; they who have gone to many 

 ocuhsts without help and wdthout encouragement. It will immediately 

 occur to some of them that perhaps they, too, have a displaced vertebra, 

 and it certainly wouldn't hurt to look. And so they borrow what 

 money they can or draw out their httle savings, and off they go to 

 see the new miracle man. The sad thing is that in 99 such cases out 

 of 100 the eyes are hopelessly damaged, and the poor blind man must 

 return home even more discouraged than he was before. 



