MEDICINE FAKES AND FAKERS OF ALL AGES 



Strange Stories of Nostrums and Kingly Quacks in 

 Every Era and Clime 



By John A. Foote, M. D. 



Author ok "The Geografhy of Medicines" 



WHATEVER King Solomon had 

 in mind when he said, "There 

 is nothing new under the sun," 

 to a great many people his reputation as 

 a wise man is based on that one remark. 

 "Nothing is new excepting what has been 

 forgotten" was the historic reply of 

 Marie Antoinette's dressmaker when the 

 queen demanded an absolutely original 

 gown. But this point of view is so un- 

 usual as to be considered epigrammatic. 



Guy de Chauliac, a famous surgeon 

 who lived 600 years ago, wrote a surgical 

 text-book which is now only a historical 

 curiosity, and at the end of it he ex- 

 pressed the belief that probably no fur- 

 ther progress in surgery would ever be 

 made. In fact, each generation has been 

 conceited enough to think that it knows 

 much more than the preceding one ; that 

 it is, in fact, more progressive. 



CUR^-ALLS AS OLD AS CIVILIZATION 



Accordingly, we are quite surprised, or 

 even amazed, when, as happens every 

 now and then, some "ologist" emerges 

 from his excavations, or his library, and 

 announces, for example, that the Baby- 

 lonians had artificial teeth and bridge- 

 work, or that the Pompeians, just before 

 the eruption of Vesuvius, were wrestling 

 with the problem of suffragette pickets. 



The fact is that we have kept on dis- 

 covering and forgetting, and then redis- 

 covering, ever since man began to think. 

 Most new things, as a rule, have been 

 received with more or less distrust at 

 first, forgotten, and then rediscovered and 

 acclaimed. However, this generality has 

 one marked exception in cure-alls and 

 patent medicines. Cure-alls we have al- 

 ways had with us — these and the drug 



fakers and substitutors. The slogan of 

 "something just as good" is older than 

 Babylon and Tyre, older than Crete, per- 

 haps as old as Egypt. 



That over-used and abused word, psy- 

 chology, is called upon nowadays to cover 

 things as antipodal as the rat-like cunning 

 of a yeggman, and Dr. Freud's interpre- 

 tation of an iridescent dream. It has ac- 

 quired so many meanings that its very 

 diffuseness has made it almost meaning- 

 less. So it will not explain matters sim- 

 ply to say that our hunger for nostrums 

 is a question of psychology, and that the 

 nostrum venders must necessarily have 

 been psychologists. 



There are, to be sure, many kinds of 

 psychologists nowadays ; yet to most of 

 us only two main groups exist — the theo- 

 retical and the practical. 



The theoretical kind we visualize as 

 college professors who try to take our 

 minds apart and put them together again, 

 and invent names for our different kinds 

 of thoughts that we would never recog- 

 nize the poor things by. 



The practical or applied psychologists 

 are individuals who specialize on figuring 

 out how people are going to think about 

 one certain thing. The inventor of poker 

 must have been one of these, P. T. Bar- 

 num another, but nostrum venders were 

 the deans of this school of psychology. 



ALL are) BELi£VLRS in miraclls 



Truly, the explanation of the perennial 

 youth of the "cure-all," of its endurance 

 throughout the ages, is not an easy matter, 

 since this endurance is deeply grounded in 

 a weakness of human nature common to 

 all peoples and all times — possibly in our 

 primeval instinct to live. No one wants 



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