Quackery

by Lydia Kang

  Excessive Chewing

  One diet fad wasn’t about what you ate, but how many hundreds of times you chewed it. Horace Fletcher (d. 1914), called “The Great Masticator,” promoted the excessive chewing of food to the point where it liquefied and became utterly tasteless. Any leftover fiber was spit out. If all went well with Fletcherism, you ate far less (too busy chewing) and you had a dismal social life. (Fletcher was reportedly a bore at meals because it’s impolite to talk while chewing.) If you were a “super-masticator” you might have stools like Fletcher’s—biscuitlike and so odorless you could parade them around and show them to people. Which is what Fletcher did.

  What a great idea! Not.

  Mysterious Powers

  Waves, Rays, and Curious Airs

  24

  Electricity

  Of Dancing Corpses, Electric Corsets, the Pulvermacher, Galvanic Baths, and the Eternal Beauty of Margaret Thatcher

  On a cold January day in London in 1803, George Forster was hanged for the murder of his wife and child. In addition to hanging “until dead,” Forster was sentenced to be dissected, a form of punishment that reached into the afterlife, for the general belief held that disassembled bodies could not be resurrected on Judgment Day. But Forster’s body had another surprise on its way from gallows to grave: a public demonstration of the new scientific field of galvanism, that is, using electricity to stimulate muscles.

  In the dark shadow of Newgate Prison, Forster’s body was given to Giovanni Aldini, an Italian doctor with a taste for morbid theatrics, who propped Forster up in front of a crowd and ran electrical currents through the poor man’s corpse.

  The Newgate Calendar reported on what happened next:

  On the first application of the process to the face, the jaws of the deceased criminal began to quiver, and the adjoining muscles were horribly contorted, and one eye was actually opened. In the subsequent part of the process the right hand was raised and clenched, and the legs and thighs were set in motion.

  The sight of Forster’s newly hanged body, suddenly grimacing and flailing, caused such a sensation among the onlookers that many believed Forster had been resurrected from the dead. Genuine concern about this possibility was incorporated into his sentencing. In case the condemned man was indeed brought back to life by Aldini, the executioners were on standby, ready to promptly hang him again.

  It’s a miracle! Snatched from the demonic clutches of hell by the power of electricity!

  From Lightning to Laboratory

  The marvel and mystery of electricity has intrigued us since early humans were awestruck by the power of lightning. They also noticed that after amber was rubbed, it attracted hair and other light objects. They were witnessing what we today call the triboelectric effect, wherein materials acquire an electric charge after contact with something else. Most static electricity is triboelectric—the next time your clothes stick together after a bout in the dryer, you’re witnessing the effect in action. It wasn’t until 1600 that William Gilbert, part of Queen Elizabeth I’s court, distinguished this reaction from magnetism (without the benefit of a clothes dryer) and coined the term electricity from the Greek elektron, for amber.

  In the eighteenth century, scientific inquiry turned to electricity in earnest. The first Leyden jars were invented, solving the problem of how to store an electrical charge. And who could forget the image of Benjamin Franklin with his kite in Philadelphia’s stormy sky in 1752? Franklin was followed by an Italian physicist, Alessandro Volta, who invented the first electric battery, and Luigi Galvani (Aldini’s uncle) who discovered that the muscles of a dead frog’s leg twitched when struck by an electric spark. That particular experiment involved hanging a bunch of dead frog legs on a metal banister during a storm. Galvani wasn’t exactly a hit with his neighbors.

  When Aldini provided the crowd at Newgate his gruesome and shockingly unethical spectacle with the corpse of George Forster, he was also demonstrating a very real, very important, and very new scientific breakthrough. For the first time in history, human beings could harness the power of electricity to manipulate the body.

  In addition to stimulating frogs and criminal corpses, galvanism was embraced by medical practitioners aglow with the curative properties of electricity. A con­temporary of Galvani, Christian Gottlieb Kratzenstein, began experimenting with medical uses of electricity by administering shocks to patients suffering from rheumatism, malignant fever, and the plague. Kratzenstein observed an increase in one’s pulse after administering electrical shocks, which he believed aided the healing process in some diseases. He also observed that electrification of patients made them, somehow, tired. Kratzenstein suggested this effect might be beneficial for those whose “riches, sorrows, and worries prevent them from closing their eyes at night.” Next time you can’t sleep, just stick your finger into an outlet—just kidding, please don’t do that.

  Excerpt from Ikea-esque instruction booklet for a frog leg electrocution kit.

  In France, physicians began to experiment with electricity on paralyzed soldiers. On December 26, 1747, for example, a doctor drew sparks from a paralyzed arm for two hours in the morning and again for two to three hours in the afternoon. After enduring that treatment for a month (!), the patient was successfully cured of the paralysis. Other experiments were less conclusive, although the occasional success story and general excitement about the mysterious process of electrification led one French physician to comment “in this town, everybody wants to be electrified.”

  It wasn’t long before quacks arose to fulfill that desire.

  Electric Brushes, Corsets, and Belts

  The public’s enthusiasm for electricity was rampant in America as well, where a variety of devices were patented to help spread the electrical gospel, including electric brushes (for baldness!), electric corsets (for weight loss!), and electric belts (for erectile dysfunction!). Like the lines outside Apple stores whenever a new iPhone is released, people were practically tripping over themselves to acquire devices for self-electrification. New technology creates excitement, and excitement creates fertile ground for quackery.

  In 1880, a certain Dr. Scott introduced an electric hairbrush, which quickly became all the rage in America. Dr. Scott’s Electric Hair Brush contained a magnetized iron rod in its handle, but did not actually contain a, you know, power source. It was basically a mildly magnetized hairbrush, which is certainly a less sexy advertisement. But Scott, a genius at marketing, jumped on the electricity bandwagon, exploiting the little-understood phenomenon to make a tidy fortune.

  “A marvellous success!” “A beautiful brush!”

  Scott, who plastered advertisements in newspapers across the country, claimed that not only could his electric brush cure the expected problems of baldness and headaches, but also—and the logic here falls flat on its face—such ailments as lameness, paralysis, and constipation.

  Scott distributed his hairbrushes with a warning that simultaneously ensured higher sales and laid the groundwork for family squabbles: “In no case should more than one person use the brush. If always used by the same person it retains its full curative power.”

  Scott later expanded his non-electric electric empire to include corsets. Like his hairbrushes, Scott’s “electric” corsets were just slightly magnetized. Advertised as “unbreakable”—one shudders at the thought of forcing a human body into an “unbreakable” corset—the electric corsets could cure all manner of unlikely diseases. The corsets could also, when “constantly worn,” become “equalizing agents in all cases of extreme fatness or leanness by imparting the required amount of odic force which Nature’s law demands.”

  Cinch that waist with some electricity!

  Women weren’t the only ones to benefit from the curative properties of electricity. Men were granted electric belts.

  Enter the Pulvermacher.

  If you were a fashionable, wealthy man in the late nineteenth century, you probably had a Pulvermacher. In addition to being an excellent
name for a German death metal band, “Pulvermacher” was shorthand for the Pulvermacher Electric Belt, the crème-de-la-crème of electric belts at the turn of the century. The belts provided “mild, continuous currents” of electricity during the eight to twelve hours per day you were supposed to wear them. In addition to belts, the Pulvermacher Galvanic Company (headquartered at the Galvanic Establishment in San Francisco) produced a variety of electric chains that could be attached to almost any part of the body.

  The zeal of electric belt wearers even made its way into fiction. In Gustave Flaubert’s novel Madame Bovary, the character Homais is described as being “enthusiastic about the hydro-electric Pulvermacher chains; he wore one himself, and when at night he took off his flannel vest, Madame Homais stood quite dazzled before the golden spiral beneath which he was hidden, and felt her ardour redouble for this man more bandaged than a Scythian, and splendid as one of the Magi.”

  Pulvermacher belts, constructed with zinc and copper and soaked before use in vinegar, did in fact produce light currents of electricity by drawing out a minor current from the human body itself (so it was, quite accurately, “galvanic”). The current was just enough to ensure the wearer that the belt or chain was working.

  This surety was also grounded in the aggressively confident promotional materials from the Pulvermacher Company, who made a habit of filling their “Electricity Is Life” advertisements with lengthy endorsements from prominent physicians. The only problem was they never actually attracted any endorsements, so they just made some up.

  Electric belts were, of course, advertised as cure-alls, attacking ailments of the kidneys, stomach, liver, bowels, and, particularly, dyspepsia. Special models of electric belts also included a connection for the penis, which could be stimulated into action by the magic of galvanic current. Manufacturers played up a common fear of the late nineteenth century—that men had only a finite supply of semen they could distribute throughout their lifetime. Masturbation early in life, therefore, was blamed as the source of later problems with erectile dysfunction. Happily, running a light electric current into a tired old penis could go a long way to restoring it to its former glory days.

  The delicate preparation of the electric belt.

  Let’s Mix Electricity with Water!

  If you weren’t getting the expected results from your corsets or belts, you could up the ante by soaking in an electric bath. Despite the generally sound principle of avoiding contact between water and electricity, a nineteenth-century movement led to the development of electric, or “galvanic,” bathhouses. One such bathhouse—the Therapeutic and Electrical Institute—was opened by Jennie Kidd Trout, later commemorated on a Canadian stamp as the first woman to obtain a medical license in Canada. When Trout opened her institute in Toronto in 1875, it included six bathhouses. Patients would submerge a part or the entirety of their bodies in warm water in a metal-plated bathtub. The patients then held on to electrodes (not submerged, thankfully) connected to batteries, allowing a low-level current to electrify the water. It was basically a hot tub, but with the electricity inside the water rather than outside it.

  It is worth noting that Trout, who also operated a free dispensary for the poor, was an intelligent, well-intentioned doctor and did not falsely advertise the medical claims from her treatments. She, along with many other physicians in the era, genuinely believed the electric bath treatments were helpful to her patients. The electric cur­rent was supposed to stimulate your organs and circulation, while the heat from the warm water also “opened your pores” and induced sweating to help flush out your toxins. As such, electric baths were advertised to help with a variety of chronic conditions such as rheumatism, gout, and sciatica.

  Russian electricity shower. Looks legit.

  Although electric baths are no longer part of mainstream practice, they are still used in the medical underground. As recently as 1989, a minor scandal broke out when Vanity Fair reported that the United Kingdom’s Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher regularly took electric baths as part of an elaborate health and beauty routine. The prime minister visited a “certain Indian woman” who supposedly treated “the most high-powered women in the world.” Thatcher paid upward of £600 for her special bath treatments, where 0.3 amps of electricity were run through the water.

  The “Switched-On Prime Minister.”

  The British tabloids had a field day with this news, with headlines like “Indian Guru Keeps Her Switched On—Maggie’s Bathtime Secrets” and “The Switched-On Prime Minister’s Amazing Secret.”

  Did the baths work? Well, you would hope so for £600 a treatment. Although there is no scientific causality at play here, Thatcher did attract endless tabloid speculation toward the end of her career about her ability to appear younger as she grew older. So it was either the electric baths or the natural vigor generated by crushing a welfare state and destroying worker pensions.

  Electricity Today

  Although electric baths, belts, and corsets have largely disappeared, the twentieth century produced a variety of legitimate electrical devices, including the EKG (electrocardiogram), which measures the electric activity of the heart. Electricity has also been used by orthopedists to help bones in their healing process and by cardiologists to regulate heartbeats with pacemakers. And then, of course, there is the defibrillator, which has saved countless lives over the years by sending a vital electrical shock to the heart.

  So the medical community has made its peace with electricity. Still, one misses the trend-setting Pulvermacher. Just think of how, in those serious old photos of New York businessmen, somewhere beneath those stuffy clothes an electric belt was quietly humming.

  It’s a more pleasant thought, anyway, than dancing corpses beneath the gallows at Newgate Prison.

  The Temple of Health

  The powerful placebo effect generated from the invisible magic of electricity was well exploited by quacks, perhaps none as artfully as James Graham, a Scottish “doctor” who inspired wealthy patrons to back his crazy plans. One such venture was the Temple of Health and Hymen at the Adelphi in London in 1780. The experience included scantily clad goddesses reciting odes to Apollo and “the largest and most elegant medico-electrical apparatus in the world.” Here’s the kicker: the machine was just there as a display piece; Graham didn’t actually use it on patients. Instead, the machine added to the atmosphere by “gently pervading the whole system with a copious tide of that celestial fire, fully impregnated with the purest, most subtle, and balmiest parts of medicines, which … flow softly into the blood and nervous system, with the electric fluid, or restorative aetherial essences.”

  Graham also had a Celestial Bed available for couples struggling with fertility. The bed, twelve feet long by nine feet wide, was supported by forty pillars of colored glass and decorated with large crimson tassels. Perfumes were blown in via glass tubes; melodious music played in the distance. Beneath the bed there were magnetic lodestones—to provide the “celestial fire”—along with an electrically charged vacuum tube that occasionally would crackle and, apparently, contribute to the erotic atmosphere. Couples willing to pay £50 were allowed use of the bed and guaranteed “immediate conception” to boot.

  Despite the scantily clad goddesses and the sheer awesomeness of Graham’s audacity, the temple went bankrupt two years later.

  An expensive date night.

  25

  Animal Magnetism

  Of Franz Mesmer, Father Hell, the Universal Magnetic Fluid, Grand Theatrics, and the Origins of Christian Science

  Imagine you’re a wealthy French noblewoman in 1788, suffering from those horrors of horrors: boredom and malaise. You’ve heard your friends talking about an exciting German physician and his strange new theories of animal magnetism. Indeed, you’ve heard of little else in the drawing rooms and parlors of Paris this past week. You decide to give this funny little man a try yourself, arriving at the delightfully well-appointed rooms at the House of Mesmer.

  The ligh
t filters in through stained glass windows on the spacious saloon. All the walls are adorned with mirrors. The scent of orange blossoms wafts through the air. In the distance, you hear gentle singing and the light strumming of a harp.

  In the center of the room, you see a large oval vessel, about four feet long and one foot deep. Inside, there are a large number of wine bottles, filled with “magnetized water.” An assistant comes in and pours more water into the vessel, filling it to the top of the bottles. He then covers it with a hole-laden iron sheet called a baquet and inserts long rods into each opening. The other participants, almost all upper-class women like yourself, are invited to press the afflicted parts of their bodies—legs, arms, backs, and necks—against these iron rods to engage the healing powers of the magnetized water.

  You are encouraged to sit close together around the baquet, with your legs touching your neighbor’s, to “facilitate the passage of magnetic fluid.”

  Once everyone is in position, the “assistant magnetizers” appear and begin gently touching the knees, spines, and yes, even breasts of your fellow participants, all while staring directly into their eyes. They intend to manipu­late the “universal fluid” within each of you through touch. The assistant mag­netizers, you notice, are young and handsome. You are shocked and more than a little bit scandalized.

  Some of your neighbors begin laughing hysterically, others begin sobbing, some shriek, some scream, some flee the room, and some faint. As for you, well, you certainly are feeling cured (for the moment) of your boredom and malaise.

  Once the room has descended into mass delirium, you watch as the great prophet himself, Franz Mesmer, finally enters the parlor. An attractive man in his midforties, he is dressed in a long white robe embroidered with golden flowers. In his hands, he holds a large “magnetized” rod. Mesmer moves slowly from woman to woman gently stroking her with said rod to restore her to calmness again. You watch as one by one, your fellow patients relax.