Quackery

by Lydia Kang

  Later in the twentieth century, German-born physician Max Gerson continued the crusade of detoxification and made a tidy profit. Early in his career, a plant-based diet had ended his migraines, and he claimed it cured a pesky bout of skin tuberculosis. He blamed environmental pollutants in the body. In the 1920s, he proposed that cancer, too, could be cured, and recommended vegetable juices, vitamins, pancreatic enzymes, coffee and castor-oil enemas, plus rectal ozone gas treatments. Why use a coffee enema? Apparently, it helped detoxify the liver (which it doesn’t, really).

  Gerson ended up dying under mysterious circumstances—his daughter claims that he was poisoned by arsenic. Nevertheless, the Gerson Institute still touts its claims and plenty of people are willing to believe in coffee enemas’ effectiveness. Fill it to the rim with a nice cuppa joe? If only Starbucks had it on their drive-through menu.

  “Joy, Beauty, Life,” via an enema blast.

  Enemas Today: The Rear Ending

  The idea of autointoxication is hard to kill. Today, people continue to receive high colonics in the name of “detoxing” despite the facts. Since constipation can actually be helped (though not necessarily cured) with enemas, they are a mainstay in the medical world and are available everywhere. The rectum and lower colon have the ability to absorb fluids and medications, hence the existence of suppository medicine. What has changed, however, is why we legitimately give enemas.

  Humoral medicine and “bleed, purge, and clyster” are no longer considered scientifically accurate ways to treat diseases now that we have a firmer understanding of their causes. The idea of ptomaines fell from public consciousness because most people accept that food poisoning occurs from pathogens such as Salmonella and E. coli.

  In 1912, Dr. Arthur J. Cramp wrote a piece in JAMA that skewered Tyrrell and his Cascade. Tyrrell’s professional testimonials were barely legitimate, written by nonphysician patent medicine makers or those who were conveniently dead at the time. Tyrrell called himself a physician when he started the Hygienic Institute, though it was years later, in his late fifties, when he received a medical degree from the dubious Eclectic Institute. It wasn’t exactly Harvard.

  And in 1919, a JAMA article by Dr. Walter C. Alvarez debunked autointoxication once and for all. He railed at physicians who ignored high blood pressure, uterine tumors, and kidney disease and focused solely on constipation as the cause of everything. Alvarez noted that the intestinal wall wasn’t some porous open door to toxins and that the flora of the colon were beneficial, not harmful. A physician needed to listen to reason before “inoculating his patients with fear” and to disregard the “ready surgeons who have short-circuited a few colons.”

  Even so, the concept of removing toxins and “cleansing” via the bowels remains a billion-dollar industry, thanks to word-of-mouth, testimonials, and excellent marketing. One could say that the colon remains as much in the consciousness of the human race as it ever has.

  Gerson’s idea of using coffee enemas for cancer is also still an actively practiced treatment regimen by alternative therapists, despite a National Institutes of Health study showing that patients with pancreatic cancer lived longer with conventional chemotherapy. There will always be supporters of the coffee enema.

  But please, for the love of Hippocrates, don’t use boiling-hot coffee.

  16

  Hydropathy & the Cold Water Cure

  Of Austrian Badasses, Water Cure Establishments,and a Surprising Number of Ways to Get Drenched in Cold Water

  Vincenz Priessnitz was only eight years old when his father went blind in 1807. When that tragedy was followed four years later by the death of his older brother, it left Vincenz the primary caregiver for the family and their farm in the Austrian alps.

  One day, when Priessnitz was eighteen years old, he was driving a cart loaded down with oats to a neighboring farm when his horse startled. He jumped down to calm the horse, but the animal kicked out its hind legs, knocking out his front teeth and throwing him directly in front of the cart, which promptly rolled over him. The boy passed out from the pain of multiple broken ribs and significant internal damage.

  Vincenz Priessnitz, dressing like a badass.

  When he awoke, under the care of a visiting surgeon, Priessnitz was declared a likely goner. With luck, the attending surgeon thought he might live but would certainly be an invalid for the rest of his life.

  Vincenz Priessnitz, however, was a dyed-in-the-wool Austrian badass. He wasn’t going to give up so easily. After tossing aside the surgeon’s hot compresses around his broken ribs, which were just increasing his pain, Priessnitz got up from bed, set a wooden chair against his abdomen, took a deep breath, and … pushed (pausing here for a collective gasp).

  And it worked. The teenager literally set his own ribs back into place, freeing up the terrible pressure on his internal organs.

  While lying in bed recovering from being a badass, Priessnitz recalled a scene in the woods one afternoon where he observed a deer return several times to a cold spring to bathe a wound. Applying the same logic to his current situation, he began treating his injuries with a series of compresses made of linen towels soaked in cold water, a sharp contrast with the hot water compresses advocated by his physician. He also began drinking large amounts of cold water and regularly changing his bandages.

  As a result, perhaps predictably to modern-day audiences, Priessnitz staved off infection, prevented fever from taking root, and had himself sufficiently cured of his injuries to be up and about supervising farm work just a few days after the accident.

  Although he didn’t yet realize it, Priessnitz had also just discovered the “cold water cure,” a phenomenon that would soon sweep the medical community of the early nineteenth century and make him a wealthy and famous man.

  Make Yourself Uncomfortable

  Today, we would largely regard Priessnitz’s medical conclusions as common sense. Drink lots of water? Check. Regularly change your bandages? Check. Clean your wounds? Check. But in the world of his youth, none of these practices were yet accepted as commonplace.

  Priessnitz rebuilt his house into a sanitarium, dubbed the Gräfenburg Water Cure, in 1826. News spread fast through the Austrian Alps of a boy who had brought himself back from the brink of death, a healer who could cure illness and injury with cold water.

  Priessnitz’s popularity and success rate were phenomenal, which more than anything gives us insight into the appalling sanitary conditions of early nineteenth-century Europe. Imagine the days when you could make a successful career as a physician by simply advising people to take a few more baths. Soon Priessnitz even had European royalty lining up to take a turn at the Gräfenburg Water Cure.

  Imitators sprang up all over Europe. In England, numerous water cures—there dubbed “hydropathic institutes”—opened for business, attracting attention and glowing reviews from a variety of Victorian luminaries such as Thomas Carlyle, Charles Dickens, and Alfred Lord Tennyson.

  Each hydropathic institute was basically a slight variation on a common theme: Bathe more often and drink more water. Specific techniques varied, however, from place to place. Although the concepts of bathing and hydrating are sound, like so many quack treatments, the water cure often took its good ideas to uncomfortable and dangerous proportions. Here are some of the water cure methods you would find at hydropathic institutes in the nineteenth century:

  Rub-a-dub-dub …

  … . three men and a tub.

  Wet sheet In a treatment seemingly inspired by the symptoms that fever victims endure, a patient was wrapped tightly in a sheet soaked with cold water, then instructed to lie down. After the sheet dried, the patient would begin to sweat profusely from the constricting body wrap. Eventually, the sheet was removed and the patient was dumped into a pool of cold water, followed by a rigorous drying. This cold-hot-cold treatment was a good way to stay awake, but probably not the best idea if you were sick with a cold, or a fever, or really pretty much anything at all.

  Wet
dress A loose-fitting nightgown, soaked in cold water, was worn by the patient as he or she walked about the institute, thus first introducing to fashion the perennially popular “wet T-shirt look.” (Happily, to conform to Victorian standards of propriety, there were separate wings for men and women.) Sometimes patients even slept in a wet dress. This billowing dress became so popular in the confining age of corsets and petticoats that it led to an entirely new women’s fashion statement: bloomers (so named for journalist Amelia Bloomer, who wrote passionately and frequently about the streetwear version of the wet dress introduced by Elizabeth Smith and Elizabeth Cady Stanton). The only real benefit to wearing a wet dress was the refreshing break for your body from the crushing confines of a corset. As for being cold and wet? That was just an obstacle for your body to overcome so you could enjoy that free-flowing dress.

  Cold shower This practice, familiar to today’s reader, was quite a shock to the nineteenth-century water cure patient. Remember this was the era of “I think I bathed sometime last January, so I’m still good for a while.” Not exactly a showering culture. Some hydropathic institutes plumbed in cold river water to plunge down onto patients from a height of at least ten feet above their heads, a practice that literally flattened some poor bathers onto the ground. In winter (and water cure establishments didn’t break for the winter, by the way), patients also had to dodge falling icicles. Surviving the cold shower treatment at a hydropathic institute was really its own accomplishment.

  Cold water enema Self-explanatory.

  Charles Darwin

  Charles Darwin was an enthusiastic adopter of the water cure. The scientist suffered all his life from a mysterious, undiagnosed ailment with a bizarre array of symptoms. As a result, Darwin spent much of his time trying new medical developments, including hydrotherapy. (Note: After the topic baffled medical historians for many years, many experts now conclude that Darwin suffered from Crohn’s disease.)

  Darwin wrote of his treatment at a hydropathic institute: “I cannot in the least understand how hydropathy can act as it certainly does on me. It dulls one’s brain splendidly, I have not thought about a single species of any kind since leaving home.”

  High praise indeed from someone obsessed with the evolution of species.

  The Power of Shock

  While the treatments patients encountered at hydropathic institutes were often uncomfortable, they were at the very least voluntary. You could come and go as you wished. Those simple freedoms of choice and movement, however, were not luxuries enjoyed by the patients at insane asylums in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, where they were repeatedly doused with cold water or nearly drowned in baths in attempts to generate fear or “correct” behavior.

  As the nineteenth century progressed, a comparatively enlightened viewpoint descended upon the asylum physicians, who began to use hydrotherapy in a non-punitive manner. Or at least that’s how they felt about it. Asylum physicians started employing a variety of hydropathic techniques to calm patients, “shock” the madness out of their brains, or relieve the seemingly feverish heat of insanity. The patients, however, probably felt like the following hydropathic techniques were pretty damn punitive:

  Cold water pour Recommended by Dr. Benjamin Rush, the “Father of American Psychiatry,” the cold water pour attempted to “establish governance over the deranged patients” by dumping streams of cold water down their coat sleeves.

  Continuous hot bath Imagine being trapped in a hot tub you can’t escape. The patient was lowered into a tub with a continuous flow of water kept between 95 and 110 degrees. The tub was then covered with a sheet that had a hole in it for the patient to stick his head through. The patient was kept in the tub for anywhere from a few hours to a few weeks. A Swedish nurse recollected the treatment: “Patients could live in there for three weeks at a time in the bath. They slept in the bathtubs too. We fed them in the bath and held the drinking glass up to their mouths… . They peed and defecated in the water, of course… . Some patients became calmer from it, they really did! It exhausted them.”

  Douche A different type of douche than what just popped into your mind. This douche was a stream of cold water falling continuously on the head of a restrained patient. It was greatly feared, often producing faintness, vomiting, physical exhaustion, and shock.

  Pelvic douche A high-pressure water jet aimed at the genitals, and a much more pleasant alternative to the “douche” technique listed above. The “pelvic douche” was employed to cure all manner of “women’s disorders” such as the pervasive hysteria diagnosis that ran rampant in the nineteenth century. The goal, of course, was to obtain the euphoric benefits of an orgasm, although no one involved in pelvic douches would have called it that at the time. Writing in 1843, a French physician described the popularity of the pelvic douche among his female patients: “The reaction of the organism to the cold, which causes the skin to flush, and the reestablishment of equilibrium [author’s note: best orgasm euphemism ever] all create for many persons so agreeable a sensation that it is necessary to take precautions that they do not go beyond the prescribed time, which is usually four or five minutes.”

  Drenching Remember taking part in the ice bucket challenge in 2014 that raised a lot of money for ALS? Drenching was basically an involuntary ice bucket challenge, not for a good cause, and repeated ad nauseam. (Literally.)

  Dripping machine A bucket positioned above a patient’s head would drip slowly and steadily onto a specific spot on the patient’s forehead. And yep, this is the exact same technique more commonly labeled “Chinese water torture” (although, to be fair, that was supposedly invented by an Italian sometime in the fifteenth or sixteenth century).

  Eight Glasses? Try Thirty.

  Vigorously ingesting cold water was one of the signature treatments at a water cure institute. Our modern medical advice to drink “eight glasses of water a day” originates from hydropathy treatments, although it’s a bit more moderate in its amount. At one water institute, a patient reported drinking thirty glasses of water—before breakfast!

  Of course, it was inevitable that some quacks would take a good idea, like drinking water, and push it to excess. Enter Dr. Fereydoon Batmanghelidj, whose popular book Your Body’s Many Cries for Water came out in 1992. Batmanghelidj claimed that dehydration was the cause of “many painful degenerative diseases, asthma, allergies, hypertension, excess body weight, and some emotional problems, including depression.” The cure? Drink water. A lot of water.

  Batmanghelidj claimed for himself a compelling origin story: While the physician was a political prisoner in Iran, he was often instructed by the guards to treat his fellow inmates. Lacking proper medical tools, the doctor turned to the only thing available to him: water. He concluded that pain is really the body’s way of calling out for more water. So water became Batmanghelidj’s cure for, well, basically everything.

  The physician’s science, however, was a bit off. He claimed in his book that water was a main source of energy for the brain and the body by producing “hydro-electric” energy, which is totally baseless. He also claimed an extensive background in medical research, a background that was mysteriously elusive when other physicians attempted to check his credentials. And the connection between drinking water and curing the pantheon of diseases claimed in his book has no scientific basis at all.

  Nevertheless, Batmanghelidj’s book was a bestseller in the 1990s and remains in print, and popular, today.

  In the wake of Batmanghelidj came the Millennium Oxygen Cooler, which debuted in the early 2000s with effusive claims to oxygenate your water. The cooler boasted a 600 percent higher concentration of oxygen than your average, run-of-the-mill tap water. The proclaimed benefits of these elevated levels included providing more oxygen to the blood cells “to enhance the body’s ability to fight infectious bacteria, microbes, and viruses.” The oxygenated water would even clean out “excreta and those toxins left in the body.” The manufacturer even included the bizarre claim
that the oxygen level in the air today is “far less than in ancient times (oxygen content was at 38 percent ten thousand years ago compared with the 21 percent it is now).”

  In a panic yet? Don’t be. The oxygen content of the earth’s atmosphere is about the same as it was ten thousand years ago. And your body can’t extract oxygen from water, even if it were beneficial to do so. Humans aren’t fish. If you want to take in more oxygen, try this simple suggestion instead: Take a deep breath.

  Mineral Water

  The twenty-first-century bottled water trend, a $15 billion industry in 2015,also has its origins in nineteenth-century medicine. In the later part of the 1800s, Americans drank gallons of mineral water from more than 500 springs around the country. Their goal was to be cured of all manner of diseases, but most particularly that general catchall nervous exhaustion, a term better understood now as stress.

  Mineral water grew in popularity as a general belief spread that minerals naturally occurring in spring water were curative and a much better choice for drinking than gross city water. (Considering the general state of city cleanliness in the late nineteenth century, they probably had a good point.) Doctors recommended that patients drink mineral water during the “inactive phase” of the disease, at the rate of about two to four glasses per day.

  The medical claims about mineral water, however, were not actually based on scientific evidence, and mineral water manufacturers drew the ire of the American Medical Association, which issued a damning report in 1918: “No mineral water will be accepted by the medical profession for alleged medicinal properties supported only by testimonials from bucolic statesmen and romantic old ladies.” Ouch. Bottled mineral water fell out of fashion as a result, but resurfaced again in the 1980s when Americans were suffering a collective hangover after the decade-long binge of alcohol drinking between 1970 and 1980. Bottled mineral water became a popular alternative to a stiff drink at the end of the night. And the practice has stuck with us ever since.