Quackery

by Lydia Kang

  Somewhere in the next life, the Bennetts are having a little lover’s quarrel over that.

  Don’t Lick the Wallpaper

  Arsenic also made a beautiful array of dyes with names like “Paris Green” and “Scheele’s Green” that were used to color artificial flowers, fabrics, and wallpaper. The dyes were so popular that by the mid-1800s, England was said to be “bathed” in green with 100 million square feet of arsenic-infused wallpaper. Unfortunately, these products poisoned many of their users by releasing flakes of poisonous paper into the environment or infusing the air with arsenic over time. Once their dangers were understood, they were used as rodenticides.

  A beautiful dye by-product called London Purple was a fantastic insecticide that also spray-painted plants. Got vermin? Or boring walls? Feeling murderous? Arsenic is your jam.

  The death of Napoleon in 1821 has been blamed on many things, including mercury, but high levels of arsenic were found in his hair. Could arsenic have killed him? It might have contributed, but was unlikely the sole cause of death. Samples of wallpaper with those beautiful greens show that they were likely the source. We now know that his nicely decorated prison was probably sickening him.

  Arsenic Today

  All this talk of poison and toxicity and death! Arsenic as medicine seems like bad judgment in pill form. Worse than, say, flossing with razor wire. But arsenic has actually had a legitimate place in medical history for some time.

  Salvarsan, neosalvarsan, and bismarsen are all arsenical compounds that finally brought syphilis to a stop after centuries without a cure. Eventually, penicillin usurped their place. And although older arsenicals were used for the sleeping sickness infection (trypanosomiasis), their toxicity was intolerable. Newer anti-protozoal arsenicals emerged in the twentieth century, but in the 1990s, they were taken off the market once their association with cancer was discovered.

  Speaking of cancer, the multipurpose Fowler’s Solution was also touted as an anticancer agent. Surprisingly, in this particular realm, it seemed to do some good. In the mid-1800s, it seemed to temporarily stop the signs and symptoms of chronic myeloid leukemia. White arsenic has been used to treat acute promyelocytic leukemia, and is curing many patients today.

  Like so many medicines, arsenic has a complex reputation, to say the least. It can be a hero with a homicidal past. (Mary ended up in Sing Sing’s electric chair—nicknamed “Old Sparky”—after that fateful third homicide. Murderers can only be so lucky for so long.) It can be a “beautifier” that’ll kill you in the process. It can cause and fight cancer. As Paracelsus once said, “All things are poison and nothing is without poison, only the dosage makes a thing not poison.”

  Arsenic, it seems, is no exception.

  4

  Gold

  Of the Philosopher’s Stone, Drunkard’s Cures,Gilded Pills, Heartwarming Drinks,and Dope for Your Dolls

  In 1893, Eugene Lane was found at the entrance to the Brooklyn Bridge late on a Friday night exceptionally drunk. So drunk, in fact, that the police officer described him as “blind and deaf and dumb.” He was dragged off to the New York City prison in downtown Manhattan, fondly called The Tombs, and locked up.

  The next day, with a searing headache, eyes like a dead fish, and among his “odorous surroundings,” Lane was able to explain how he’d ended up in jail. He had just been celebrating a successful alcoholism treatment program with other graduates from the Keeley Institute in White Plains. Or it seemed, not so successful.

  Dr. Leslie E. Keeley was a Union Army surgeon who promised a miraculous addiction cure. In 1880, he began treating alcohol and opium addicts in his Dwight, Illinois, sanatorium. Going against the medical status quo, he exclaimed, “Alcoholism is a disease and I can cure it.”

  And cure it, he tried. For years, the trains to Dwight were filled with “sots” desperate for sobriety. After checking in, the patient was immediately given an injection in the arm. A tonic was also prescribed, one teaspoon every two hours. The patients would line up, waiting to get their multiple shots and teaspoons per day with military-like precision.

  The formula for the tonic and the injections was proprietary and fiercely protected. In fact, the actual recipe went to the grave with Keeley. But there was one ingredient he proudly and openly advertised—gold.

  Drinkable Gold: Immortality in a Glass

  Keeley wasn’t the first to swear by the curative properties of a gold-flecked tonic. Humans have been trying to consume gold for their health for thousands of years. But here’s the rub: More often than not, the body can’t do anything with it. When taken orally, pure gold passes right on through, making our stool more sparkly and valuable than it was the day before. For a long time, physicians had no idea what to do with the stubborn element. It didn’t change chemically, didn’t mix in solutions, and didn’t seem to do anything to anybody. Even some of the most outspoken experts in medicine (Hippocrates, Celsus, and Galen) were quiet on the subject.

  So why did we keep trying to consume this beautiful but seemingly useless element?

  Immortality, for starters. Of course, luxurious gold is where medical innovation gets greedy. Sure, you reached for antimony when you needed to vomit or for the lancet or leech if you needed to bleed, but sometimes defeating illness wasn’t quite enough. When it came to defying death itself, alchemists were repeatedly lured by the glitter of gold.

  As far back as 2500 bce, the Chinese had known that gold was resistant to corrosion and thus associated it with prolonged life. In the third century ce, alchemist Wei Boyang wrote, “Gold is the most valuable thing in the world because it is immortal and never gets rotten. Alchemists eat it, and they enjoy longevity.” Trying to consume gold wasn’t exactly a new concept. For almost two millennia starting in 202 bce, the Bencao gangmu materia medica included a few gold recommendations such as this one for sores of the mouth and gums: “Cook a gold article with water and gargle with it regularly.” Gold-gargle-schläger, anyone?

  With the rise of alchemy in medieval times, the quest to create a drinkable form of gold kicked into high gear. The alchemists’ main goal? To create the elixir of life, aka the Philosopher’s Stone, aka the magical substance that would bestow immortality. (This was before Harry Potter, of course.) Around 1300 ce, an alchemist named Geber finally figured out how to make gold dissolve in a liquid. This aqua regia (royal water) was a yellowish-orange lethal mix of nitric and hydrochloric acid that gave off fumes like your average Disney witch’s cauldron. Magically, it could dissolve pure gold, and after further processing, produce a salt—gold chloride—that could be drunk when mixed with water. But even though potions of gold chloride were terribly corrosive, it was a breakthrough. For the first time, chemists felt as if they might unlock the life-giving secrets of this glistening metal.

  Paracelsus, in particular, rallied around drinkable gold—aurum potable—in the sixteenth century. Believing that gold could make the body “indestructible,” he might’ve oversold the element a bit: “Drinkable gold will cure all illnesses, it renews and restores.” He claimed it could help with mania, St. Vitus Dance disease, and epilepsy. Also, it “made one’s heart happy.”

  Did it really cure? Hard to say. One thing was for sure, it was definitely toxic. The gold chloride salts could cause kidney damage and something called auric fever, which not only made the sufferer feverish, but also involved profuse salivation and urination.

  Maybe people were better off when gold wasn’t so drinkable.

  Paracelsus majestically ponders over drinkable gold.

  Gilded Pills, Explosive Cordials, and Other Shiny Bad Ideas

  Oddly enough, physicians—such as seventeenth-century botanist and doctor Nicholas Culpeper—continued to prescribe gold for the same reasons Paracelsus did (sometimes even coating the gold chloride with a layer of gold to make a gilded pill, for extra effect). The drawbacks were a risk patients were willing to take. For those who were suffering from the likes of epilepsy or mental illness, the shimmering promise of g
old was still worth a shot.

  Unfortunately, many charlatans exploited gold’s allure to sell useless medicines. One such salesman was Leonhard Thurneysser zum Thurn. The son of a goldsmith, Thurneysser began his tarnished career in the sixteenth century when he gilded chunks of cheap metal and tried to sell them as pure gold. He eventually decided that practicing medicine was where the money was and started a business creating and selling exorbitantly priced elixirs that claimed to include potable gold with dramatic names like “tincture of gold” and “magistery of the sun,” which likely had no soluble gold chloride in them. It was all flash and no medicine. Eventually, a professor in Frankfurt wrote a scathing exposé. Thurneysser lost his business and his riches as well, via a very modern route—a scandalous divorce. Surely, there is a lesson here somewhere.

  Although we see gold appear in many seventeenth-century pharmacopeias, it’s clear that quacks, rather than real practitioners, were more apt to sell these potions. Doctors, after all, had yet to demonstrate that gold had any beneficial effect on the body. But who cares about a minor thing like empirical findings when you have great marketing? Gold medicine peddlers’ favorite promise was that gold possessed “cordiality.” Not friendliness, but rather a good and warm effect on the heart (cor = heart, Latin). Because the old alchemists thought that gold represented the sun and the heart was the physiologic equivalent to the sun and warmth, it sort of made sense. Cordials would be made for hundreds of years, bringing warmth (usually via alcohol) to the drinkers, sometimes swimming with flecks of physiologically inert gold particles to make the buyer think they were getting the royal treatment. Certainly, today’s imbibers of Goldschläger feel like they’re getting a spangled treat!

  Even though these salesmen were lying about their products, it might have been for the best. Yes, these tonics and tinctures didn’t contain gold, but you probably didn’t want the real thing anyway. Besides the fever-inducing salt, alchemists stumbled upon something called fulminating gold, a toxic combination of gold, ammonia, and chlorine. Also touted as a “cordial” heart-warmer, the compound exploded onto the pharmaceutical scene. And we mean that literally: It had a lovely tendency to explode spontaneously. Wonderful for pyromaniacs, not so much for the sick. Sometimes innovation is a bad thing.

  By the eighteenth century, gold did the impossible and lost its luster. Physicians started listening to chemists who dismissed the alchemical framework of its medicinal potential. Some like Herman Boerhaave said that it was “of little use in medicine, except for ostentation.”

  But it would take more than a few critics and explosive cathartics to tarnish this metal. Medicinal gold wasn’t finished yet.

  Sex, Drugs, and Booze: Gold for STDs and Alcoholism

  In the nineteenth century, the desperate search for a cure for syphilis brought gold back onto the medicinal scene. Even though mercury was far more loved when it came to treating the STD, some turned to gold in the form of a less caustic preparation of sodium chloride and gold chloride. Like many medicines treating syphilis at the time, it seemed to work because syphilis symptoms abate on their own. But the power of anecdotal evidence did the job. Gold was back in the form of pills, lozenges, gold salt powders for the gums, and even an injection and tonic that promised to cure an affliction affecting thousands—alcoholism.

  Dr. Leslie Keeley was no idiot. In fact, at the time, his idea of treating alcoholism as if it were a disease and not a personal failing was shocking and groundbreaking. But could four injections a day and a slurped tonic really cure thousands of American drunkards? Keeley thought so. He touted a staggering 95 percent cure rate with his gold injections.

  Ad for a branch of the Keeley Institute. The flying skeleton is a nice touch.

  First of all, was there even any gold in those injections? It was the most alluring part of his advertising. But Keeley staunchly refused to give up the formula. On a few occasions, he personally provided samples for testing, revealing traces of gold in the injectables.

  Secret testing by others without Keeley’s permission could not find substantial amounts of gold in either the potion or the injections. What they did find, however, were plenty of interesting ingredients: morphine, cannabis, cocaine, willow bark extracts, and alcohol. Other analyses found strychnine and atropine. At the height of its popularity—it was easily found throughout the United States, either in institutes or by mail order—Keeley’s medicine was universally known as “dope” and children would threaten their dolls with “dope” if they didn’t get better soon. That would explain why the officers who arrested Eugene Lane said he appeared stupefied and unintelligible by “some o’ them drugs they do be takin’ up there at Dr. Keeley’s.”

  As for the gold? It seemed to be only gilding on a treatment that might have done more to sedate patients through their tough alcohol withdrawal than actually cure them. Detractors at the time reported their own numbers, claiming that instead of the 95 percent cure rate that Keeley boasted, only about 20 to 50 percent of patients stayed dry initially. Given that there was no compulsory data on long-term follow-up, the final number was likely far lower.

  After Keeley’s death in 1900, a legal battle ensued between the company and one of his early partners, Fred Hargraves, who claimed that the remedies contained no gold. Early on, he and Keeley had treated one man with a gold formula, and that man had died. Not exactly promising results. But they kept the “gold cure” name. It seemed Keeley was satisfied enough with the idea that “there is a trace of gold in everything, gold in sea water, in mud—everything. There is a trace of gold in it, and that is enough.”

  Apparently, not all that glitters in advertising is gold. It certainly doesn’t cure alcoholics.

  Just ask Eugene Lane.

  Lunacy and Blue Men

  Medicinal silver may not have the glitz of gold, but it does have more substance. Used today topically as an antimicrobial, silver was reputed to deter spoilage in ancient times—a reputation that extended to the era of American pioneers, who reportedly dropped silver coins in containers of milk to keep them fresh.

  Alchemists connected silver with the mind and the moon (akin to gold’s relationship with the sun), giving rise to terms of mental disorders like lunatic. The rich who ingested enough silver from their spoons that it changed their skin color were known as “blue-bloods.” Like silver lovers of yore, some proponents today consume so much silver to prevent infections that it’s turned their skin blue (a condition known as argyria). Stan Jones, a Libertarian politician who unsuccessfully ran for Senate and Montana governor twice between 2000 and 2006, had developed a severe case of argyria after drinking large amounts of colloidal silver to prepare for Y2K, thinking there would be an antibiotic shortage. Speaking to reporters about his gray-blue skin, he said, “People ask me if it’s permanent and if I’m dead. I tell them I’m practicing for Halloween.” Or a Smurf parade, perhaps.

  A true blue Libertarian.

  The Modern Gilded Age

  Nowadays, people would be surprised to hear that gold actually does have a legitimate place in the medical toolbox. Alas, after all of humanity’s efforts in the name of aurum potable, those potions were either useless or too toxic. But its other forms have plenty of uses. Colloidal gold—a mixture of microscopic gold and other substances—is used in electron microscopy. We can thank gold alloys for filling our cavities. Gold nanoparticles are being investigated as cancer treatments; they accumulate preferentially in tumor cells, can bind to proteins and drugs, and may enhance the effect of certain therapies.

  Gold compounds, either injected or in pill form, have been used in the treatment of rheumatoid arthritis, possibly due to anti-inflammatory properties (the reason isn’t completely understood yet). Sometimes these gold compounds have a hefty side effect profile—one of which is chrysiasis. That’s when gold particles (it takes about eight grams’ worth—several years of treatment) accumulate in skin pigment cells and, with exposure to sun, turn the patient a shade of blue-gray. As far as skin
goes, physically gilding a human can’t really help you, but it can’t kill you, either. Remember that James Bond Goldfinger scene with the dead, golden woman who died of “skin asphyxiation”? It made for a rather arresting scene, but it was all dazzle and no science.

  It’s no surprise that the modern usage of medicinal gold is very narrow. All these years, it’s been more sparkle than it’s worth.

  5

  Radium & Radon

  Of Poisoned Playboys, the Curies, Radium Suppositories, and How to Irradiate Your Drinking Water

  Late one November evening in 1927, Eben Byers—a forty-seven-year-old industrialist, socialite, and ladies’ man—fell from his berth in his private chartered train.

  That night he’d been in an exuberant mood, having just watched Yale, his alma mater, defeat Harvard in their annual football match. Buoyed by his team’s win, Byers launched the kind of party only a wealthy playboy could host on a private train in the Roaring Twenties (aka the kind of party we all wish we could attend every Friday night).

  During the late-night revelry, Byers took a bad fall and injured his arm. When the pain remained with him several days later in the comfort of his mansion, he turned to his handsomely paid physicians. They were stumped. Despite their best efforts, Byers’s arm pain would not subside. The injury had a detrimental effect on his serious golf game. (He had won the US Amateur Championship twenty-one years earlier, in 1906.)

  Worse for the wealthy playboy, the injury dampened his raging libido.

  The notorious womanizer was desperate for solutions. At a loss, one of Byers’s physicians suggested he try a new patent medicine called Radithor. Manufactured by Bailey Radium Laboratory in New Jersey, each bottle of Radithor was guaranteed to contain two microcuries of radium, the new kid on the medical block and still blossoming with potential. Radithor was widely advertised as a cure-all for some 150 maladies, including dyspepsia, high blood pressure, and impotence. It also didn’t hurt that the doctor, along with every other physician who prescribed Radithor, received a generous 17 percent kickback from the manufacturer.