Quackery

by Lydia Kang

  Mollie never really recovered. She was put to bed to heal; her engagement fell apart; and she began manifesting a bizarre series of symptoms, eventually losing the majority of her senses, including sight, touch, taste, and smell. Either because of her illness or in an attempt to recover, Mollie also stopped eating. She reportedly went a full sixteen years without consuming any food. Observers claimed that her stomach “collapsed, so that by placing the hand in the cavity her spinal column could be felt.”

  While lying in a supine position with her arm drawn over her head, her legs twisted beneath her, and her eyes closed, Mollie also claimed to be able to read minds, read writing from a great distance, and offer prophecies. In a country bewitched by the spiritualist movement, she was an overnight sensation. Between 1866 and 1875, stories repeatedly surfaced in the press about the wondrous spiritual abilities of the Brooklyn Enigma, and the case of Mollie Fancher was much debated in medical and societal circles.

  Sometime in the late 1880s or early 1890s, Mollie apparently began eating food again, and, in turn, her strange symptoms began to disappear. (Reversing starvation is really a wonderful cure.)

  Mollie lived on, without further incident, until 1916.

  The Miracle of Malnourishment: Fasting Across the Ages

  Hazzard had taken to a dangerous extreme a medical practice that, with some legitimacy, stretches back centuries.

  In ancient Greece, Pythagoras argued that periodic fasting was good for the body. In the Renaissance era, Paracelsus referred to fasting as “the physician within.” And the well-worn maxim of “feed a cold, starve a fever” has been traced to a 1574 dictionary by English lexicographer John Withals, who wrote, “Fasting is a great remedy of fever.”

  In moderation, Paracelsus was right: Fasting can be good for the body. Religious leaders throughout history also recognized that it can be good for the soul. Fasting as a spiritual practice sprang up independently across the globe as a means of preparation for religious rituals, or to invite ecstatic visions and dreams. Looking for a divine revelation? Fasting was seen across cultures as a pretty good way to get you there.

  One of the first recorded people to combine fasting for spiritual enlightenment with fasting for medical treatment was Saint Lidwina. In Lidwina’s time in the late fourteenth century, ice skating was still the primary method of travel along the Netherlands’ frozen canals during winter. When she was fifteen years old, Lidwina took a bad spill while out on her skates. A really bad spill. So bad, in fact, that she never completely recovered, progressively becoming more and more disabled. (Today, Lidwina is generally thought to have been one of the earliest cases of multiple sclerosis.)

  St. Lidwina’s ice-skating accident.

  In what began as an attempt to heal and quickly became laced with religious overtones, Lidwina began a hardcore fast, working her way down from apples, to dates, to watered wine, to river water contaminated with salt from the sea, to eventually breath alone. Her reputation grew as a healer and holy woman, and Dutch officials stationed guards around her to verify her claims of not eating anything at all. They agreed that she wasn’t eating (and maybe even raped her while they were at it, according to some accounts). As Lidwina’s disease progressed, she apparently dropped various body parts, which were quickly scooped up and used as religious idols.

  Including her intestines.

  Fasting continued to captivate people for centuries after St. Lidwina, spreading into the secular world with the rise of “fasting girls” in the Victorian era. Cases like Brooklyn’s Mollie Fancher (see box “The Curious Case of the Brooklyn Enigma,” opposite) and Wales’s Sarah Jacobs quickly became international news. Originally fasting for healing purposes, both were transformed into overnight celebrities. (Ever heard the phrase “starving for attention”?) While Mollie resumed eating and eventually recovered, Sarah was not so lucky. Considered miraculous by the Welsh peasantry, Sarah’s case drew the attention of the press and inspired a round-the-clock guard by several local nurses to confirm that she actually was not eating. She must have been eating secretly because, under the strain of the 24-hour surveillance, Sarah lapsed into unconsciousness after four days, starving to death shortly after. Her parents were quickly convicted of manslaughter and shipped off to prison.

  You’d think after such horror stories, humanity would have learned its lesson. But the quackery of fasting was just getting started.

  A Plate of Air and Sunshine

  Fasting got a boost in the late nineteenth century when several doctors on both sides of the Atlantic began advocating a set of health practices broadly referred to as “Natural Hygiene.” With slight variances from practitioner to practitioner, the recommended healthy behaviors included eating a balanced diet, getting plenty of fresh air and exercise, taking in the sun, and drinking lots of water. So far, so good, right? But the Natural Hygiene movement also included recommendations for avoiding physician-prescribed drugs when sick and healing yourself through fasting.

  An entire book about not eating breakfast.

  Dr. Edward Dewey, an American who practiced in the second half of the nineteenth century, was a leader in the therapeutic fasting movement. He outlined his vision for health in a book entitled The No-Breakfast Plan, which spread its way around the globe. The No-Breakfast Plan boiled health down to two basic principles: Don’t eat breakfast (in case that wasn’t obvious from the title) and don’t eat when you’re sick. Unless you’re hungry.

  Somehow Dewey stretched out those two simple points into many pages, mostly by filling them up with wordy testimonials from the hundreds of patients he claimed to have cured. Dewey also trained a variety of other young physicians in his methods. Including a young girl from Minnesota named Linda Hazzard.

  When Hazzard wrote about Dewey’s 1904 death, she criticized her old mentor for realizing the health benefits of the enema too late in life. She also berated him for dying from paralysis because of an “error in personal dietary.” Although Dewey strictly observed his touted No-Breakfast Plan, he ignored “food values, food adaptability, [and] food combination” in his two permitted daily meals. As a result, to Hazzard’s great horror, “meats and fish, eggs and milk, breads and pastries, with comparatively few vegetables in combination, and these mostly of the starchier kinds, formed his food supply. What wonder that hardened veins, high blood pressure, and ultimate paralysis developed!” And so Hazzard provided the groundwork for her medical philosophy at Starvation Heights.

  The Natural Hygiene movement was later co-opted into the “Nature Cure” in the twentieth century by Dr. Herbert Shelton, of “Dr. Shelton’s Health School” fame, who purported to have cured more than forty thousand patients with water fasting.

  Shelton wrote of his formative educational experiences: “I postgraduated from the University of Hard Knocks and left before I got my diploma. I went through the usual brainwashing process of the school system in Greenville, Texas, and revolted against the whole political, religious, medical, and social system at the age of sixteen.”

  Shelton went on to obtain a “doctor of physiological therapeutics” (never heard of that degree?) from a bogus college established by Bernarr Macfadden. His first book, The Fundamentals of Nature Cure, arrived in 1920 and was just the start of a prolific outpouring of writing in support of his ideas. Some of those—eating low fat, high-fiber foods, drinking lots of water, and getting outside—had merit. Other ideas, however, didn’t.

  From one of the brochures:

  Natural Hygiene rejects the use of medications, blood transfusions, radiation, dietary supplements, and any other means employed to treat or “cure” various ailments. These therapies interfere with or destroy vital processes and tissue. Recovery from disease takes place in spite of, and not because of, the drugging and “curing” practices.

  The same brochure also described the Nature Cure approach to fasting:

  Fasting is the total abstinence from all liquid or solid foods except distilled water. During a fast the body’s recuper
ative forces are marshaled and all of its energies are directed toward the recharging of the nervous system, the elimination of toxic accumulations, and the repair and rejuvenation of tissue. Stored within each organism’s tissues are nutrient reserves which it will use to carry on metabolism and repair work. Until these reserves are depleted, no destruction of healthy tissue or “starvation” can occur.

  Shelton obtained a substantial degree of popularity in the middle part of the twentieth century, operating a health school out of San Antonio, Texas, and running for president as part of the American Vegetarian Party (which took one-issue politics to a whole new level). He was also arrested, repeatedly, for practicing medicine without a license. (And no, “Dr.” Shelton, your physiological therapeutics degree doesn’t count.)

  In 1942, Shelton was charged with negligent homicide after a patient starved to death, but the case was dropped. Again, in 1978, Shelton was sued for negligence after another patient died at his school. This time he lost. The subsequent judgment bankrupted him and his health school closed, happily preventing any further lives from being lost.

  But the quackery of the Natural Hygiene movement wasn’t so easily defeated. After Shelton fell, a new trend rose to pick up the mantle of perverting the power of fresh air and sunshine. With supposedly ancient roots in Ayurvedic medicine, Breatharianism is the belief that human life can be exclusively sustained by cultivating prana, a universal life force found in all living things. Some Breatharians view sunlight as a primary generator of prana. Sunbathing, therefore, can be a substitute for eating … and drinking. Fun experiment: Try growing your houseplant without offering it any water. Watch what happens next.

  Breatharianism found a foothold on the extremes of alternative health movements in the late twentieth century and was co-opted for monetary gain by charismatic charlatans like Wiley Brooks, founder of the Breatharian Institute of America, who first began espousing his crazy ideas on the TV show That’s Incredible! in 1980. Brooks claimed to eat only when there was no fresh air to breathe, or when he couldn’t get enough sunshine. He purported that humans, in their natural state, needed no other nourishment.

  No other nourishment, that is, except for a Twinkie, a Slurpee, and a hot dog from 7-Eleven, all of which were seen clutched in Brooks’s arms by an observer in 1983.

  As his ideas devolved, Brooks began spewing some really out-there pseudo-philosophical mumbo-jumbo to justify his healthy diet of light, air, and junk food. Spiritually moved by the Double Quarter Pounder with Cheese at McDonald’s, Brooks claimed that the burger possessed a special “base frequency” useful to Breatharians. You could wash it down with a Diet Coke because the soft drink made up of aspartame and dye is really “liquid light.”

  Confused yet? Not to worry, because somewhere between $100,000 and $1 billion will get you guidance from Brooks himself on how to live without food. In what must be an example of a Breatharian sliding scale, Brooks’s Institute offers a payment plan to folks willing to fork up $10,000.

  We could devote an entire book to cataloging charlatans like Brooks. And therein lies what makes this particular brand of quackery so dangerous: The problem with fasting, as opposed to say, neurosurgery, is that anyone can do it. Plenty of unqualified nonmedical professionals offer their opinions and advice. Even respectable writers get in on the game.

  One of fasting’s more enthusiastic adherents was none other than Upton Sinclair, author of The Jungle and famously gullible patient, who threw his full weight behind a variety of twentieth-century quack cures (see also Radionics, page 303). Sinclair’s 1911 book, The Fasting Cure, detailed his personal experiments in not eating. Not content with merely describing his own experiences, Sinclair also offered general advice to the hundreds of people who wrote to him seeking his medical opinion—as a journalist—on whether fasting would help cure them. He recommended long fasts for those with “really desperate ailments” such as “Bright’s disease, cirrhosis of the liver, rheumatism, and cancer.” (Although modern doctors would strongly disagree with Sinclair’s unsolicited medical advice, there have been some recent promising studies on the impact of fasting on mice with cancer. Human studies, however, are still lacking.)

  In his book’s preface, Sinclair recommends two places for fasting patients to “be taken charge of.” In addition to Bernarr Macfadden’s Healthatorium in Chicago, one other address is listed:

  Dr. Linda B. Hazzard, of Seattle, Washington.

  The Detox Box

  Detoxing, a modified form of fasting aimed at removing toxins from the body, is the diet trend du jour. In a typical detox, you abstain from consuming food for a period of days, instead relying upon juices and/or water and/or specific supplements to sustain yourself. The Liver Cleanse, the 10-Day Green Smoothie Cleanse, the Colon Cleanse, the Blueprint Cleanse, and Slendera Garcinia Cambogia are all variations on this theme.

  The most notorious cleanse, however, is the Master Cleanse, developed by Stanley Burroughs, which relies upon drinking a concoction of lemon water, maple syrup, and cayenne pepper, in conjunction with a detox tea, for ten days. Short-term side effects of the Master Cleanse include nausea, dehydration, dizziness, and fatigue. Long-term side effects of the Master Cleanse include … death. In fact, that’s exactly what happened to one of Burroughs’s patients in the 1980s. A cancer patient named Lee Swatsenbarg sought out medical advice from Burroughs, who recommended a thirty-day cleanse, combined with exposure to specific colors of light and intense massages.

  Swatsenbarg took Burroughs up on his advice, embarking on a month-long detox wherein his health continually worsened and he began vomiting and suffering from severe convulsions. He died before he could complete the treatment, after suffering a massive hemorrhage in his abdomen thanks to the abdominal massages that Burroughs threw in (for an additional fee) on top of the detox plan. Burroughs was convicted on charges of involuntary manslaughter (and practicing medicine without a license), a fact worth remembering before you embark on your own version of the Master Cleanse.

  The Mayo Clinic advises eating a healthy diet based on fruits and vegetables, whole grains, and lean sources of protein as a better alternative, with longer-lasting benefits, than going on a detox diet.

  Which isn’t to say that fasting is all bad. Recent animal studies have demonstrated that intermittent fasting for short periods of time may slow aging, protect against stroke damage, and slow cognitive decline. But extended fasting is, and always has been, incredibly dangerous.

  Just add cayenne pepper and you’ve got yourself a Master Cleanse.

  The Weight Loss Hall of Shame

  Humans have long been on a tumultuous journey to fight gluttony and achieve an elusively perfect figure. What weapons we use in that battle change depending on the year and societal customs. The history of quackery is filled with weight-loss schemes that we have either tried ourselves or laughed at. Rub it away, purge it away, pop pills, eat only cabbage—these schemes have a past, present, and, no doubt, a future. So kick back, cheat on that cleanse with a cupcake, and enter the Weight Loss Hall of Shame.

  Tapeworms

  The tapeworm diet fad started in the 1800s. The idea is you eat tapeworm eggs, and the parasite eats your food for you. Often, the mail-order eggs were dead (or weren’t there at all). A good thing, too, because an actual tapeworm infection might cause headaches, brain inflammation, seizures, and dementia. Tapeworms grow to thirty feet long, live for decades, and are hermaphrodites, which means they’re making more tapeworms inside you. (Yep, you’d be hosting a tapeworm orgy!) So. Not. Worth. It.

  Sweating

  In the nineteenth century, Charles Goodyear invented vulcanized rubber and voilà, the sadomasochist’s version of Spanx was born in the form of rubber corsets and undies, promising to help sweat the fat away. Around the same time, other methods popped up, like vapor baths, dry heat, and light therapy (a sweltering 145˚F treatment), which offered a good weight loss–inducing sweat. But as any good wrestler or pounds-shedding MMA fighter will
tell you, sweating as a means of weight loss is temporary. The weight returns, along with a pretty ravenous thirst.

  Thyroid Extracts

  Boosting metabolism via thyroid extracts was very popular in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Since the thyroid gland helps regulate metabolism, dried and powdered glands from pigs and cows were found in nostrums like Dr. Newman’s Obesity Pills. Sure, you might lose weight, but you could also get hyperthyroidism from all the excess hormones, giving you palpitations, sweating, bulging eyes, hair loss, and diarrhea.

  Because the element iodine is necessary to make thyroid hormone, some patent medicine pawners touted iodine-containing nostrums to boost metabolism. Did they work? Not really. Products like Allan’s Anti-Fat contained bladder-wrack, an iodine-rich seaweed found in many oceans. Nice idea, but products like this didn’t budge your metabolism if your thyroid gland was already working fine.

  Dinitrophenol

  A compound called dinitrophenol entered the market as a weight-loss medicine around 1934. Pro: It rapidly increased metabolism. Cons: It was used to create explosives, was carcinogenic, and had a nasty habit of killing people as they were “literally cooked to death” by the rapid increase in body temperature. The consolation prize wasn’t great, either: If you didn’t die, you might get a rash, loss of taste, and become blind. Yay! Because of the deaths and the terrible side effects, it disappeared off the market only four years later.

  Amphetamines

  1-phenylpropan-2-amine, also known as amphetamine, Benzedrine, and Dexedrine, was synthesized in 1929. At first it was marketed for stuffy noses, then for minor depression. World War II servicemen received it to boost mood and alertness, but it had a surprising side effect of decreased appetite and weight loss. By the late 1960s, 4 billion doses (available without a prescription) were being manufactured per year.

  The pills were also called “mother’s little helpers” to create peppy, slim housewives. Unfortunately, they also caused “amphetamine psychosis,” with users experiencing hallucinations (such as evil, talking toilet bowls) as they spiraled into addiction. In 1970, amphetamines finally came under tight restrictions, which probably quieted down a heckuva lot of talking toilets.