Quackery

by Lydia Kang

  France, meanwhile, practiced a kind of king’s-touch-on-steroids. From the late Middle Ages onward, the ritual was incorporated into the coronation ceremonies of French kings, a nice way to cement divine right from the get-go.

  The king’s touch reached its zenith of popularity in seventeenth-century France—when Louis XIV celebrated Easter in 1680 not with an Easter egg hunt at Versailles (party!), but by touching sixteen hundred scrofulous patients. Even as the practice declined in the eighteenth century, Louis XV certainly did his part to keep the flame alive, bringing the number-of-scrofula-patients-touched-by-the-king-in-one-sitting record to the staggering figure of twenty-four hundred people.

  It’s a little different, isn’t it, than Queen Elizabeth II waving at the crowd from her motorcade?

  Engraving of the King’s Touch.

  Can’t Get the Real Thing? Try These King’s Touch Knockoffs!

  A very real problem faced by peasants afflicted with the king’s evil: If you have a disease that only a king can cure, you’re kind of dependent on meeting him. Unless you were able to travel to London or Paris for a king’s touch ceremony—in the days before EasyJet and Ryanair—you were flat out of luck. If you were naturally lucky, scrofula symptoms might abate on their own. Or, you could also find alternative healers to kings. Alternative healers such as horses.

  Alexander Shields, a Scottish nonconformist, wrote in his diary in 1688 of a special horse in the Annandale region of Scotland who could cure scrofula by licking the sores of the victims: “I was told, by an eye witness, of a horse in or about the foot of Annandale that cures the King’s evil by licking the sore, unto which many country people resort from all quarters.”

  What a boon that licking horse must have been for the poor people of remote Scotland who had almost zero chance of ever meeting the king in person. And what a boon that licking horse must have been to the farmer who owned her. That farmer must have been a canny businessman with the spirit of a quack doctor, generating a tidy profit by granting access to his miracle horse. (How the horse was convinced to lick the growths in the first place has been lost to history.)

  Also a bit remote for a royal touch pilgrimage, Ireland had its own alternative in the mid-seventeenth century. In 1662, an Irish faith healer with the incredible name of Valentine Greatrakes (aka “the Stroker,” seriously) came to fame, claiming the ability to heal scrofula by touching afflicted patients. This, despite the very obvious fact that Valentine was not a king. Owing to the difficulty of Irish peasantry traveling to London to be touched by the actual king (and undoubtedly helped by the traditional Irish republican view on the monarchy in general), Greatrakes, well, raked it in. Greatly. For three years, masses of people assembled wherever he appeared for the opportunity to be touched by him. Greatrakes eventually drew the ire of the Bishop’s Court at Lismore, who banned him from performing medical cures for the age-old reason of “not having a proper license.”

  That didn’t stop him. In 1666, Greatrakes hopped across the pond to England and continued to touch scrofula patients as he toured across the country. Eventually, Charles II heard of Greatrakes and summoned him to appear in Whitehall to demonstrate his abilities. Despite a lingering doubt over the efficacy of the Stroker’s stroking (and despite a deep personal enthusiasm for his own royal touching abilities), Charles II surprisingly did not forbid Greatrakes from advertising his services, and he let the Irish faith healer continue to travel around England unmolested. The king had more important things to worry about such as the ongoing Second Anglo-Dutch War.

  After igniting quite a lot of controversy in the British press about his touching abilities (Robert Boyle, founder of modern chemistry, even came out as a Greatrakes supporter), the Stroker returned to Ireland in 1667, where he took up farming.

  But if you couldn’t find an Irish faith healer, or a living king, perhaps we could interest you in … a dead one? The French were so enamored by the practice that a belief sprang up that the touch of a king could even cure scrofula from beyond the grave. (Pause here for the sound of thunder to subside.)

  The decayed arm of Louis IX (1214–1270), who had the extra sparkle of being a dead saint in addition to a dead king, was believed to retain the healing power of the king’s touch. Inspired pilgrims from across Europe trekked to a monastery in Spain where the king was buried with one abiding hope: to have their scrofula touched by the skeletal arm of a long dead king.

  Other Kingly Gifts

  Although the French and English rulers were unique among European monarchy in their ability to cure scrofula, they were not the only aristocrats thought to contain innate healing powers. The Hapsburgs of Austria could allegedly cure stuttering by kissing you on the mouth. And the monarchs of Castile in Spain could exorcise demons by praying to God and making the sign of the cross near you.

  So, if you were a demon-possessed stutterer with a bad case of scrofula, you could cure all of your ailments by simply embarking on a Grand Tour of Europe.

  And that might be the best remedy we’ve ever heard suggested.

  Losing Touch

  When William and Mary took the English throne in 1689, the king’s touch fell out of favor entirely. With the continued growth of a Protestantism in England that was strongly anti-Catholic and strongly anti-superstition, the new rulers refused to grant requests for the royal touch. The practice was beginning to be associated, negatively, with Catholicism. William even went so far as to throw down a seventeenth-century burn on a petitioner suffering from scrofula who asked for William’s touch. His response? “God grant you better health … and better sense.”

  Ouch. Just what some poor bastard suffering from scrofula wants to hear from his king.

  Queen Anne briefly reintroduced the practice during her short reign. In March 1712, Anne performed the ritual for the last time and, in a historical footnote under the “strange coincidence” heading, the last scrofula patient to receive Anne’s touch was none other than a little toddler named Samuel Johnson. Yes, that Samuel Johnson, the one who would later become famous for writing the first modern dictionary of the English language. Alas, with the passing of the Stuarts (and their efforts to legitimize their claims to the throne), so too did the practice of the king’s touch pass from England.

  A lodestone that Queen Anne used during ceremonies when she didn’t want to touch peasants directly.

  Meanwhile, in France, the practice also started to decline in the eighteenth century. The French population, awash in the glow of the Age of Enlightenment, began to doubt the efficacy of the king’s touch. The scientific revolution had catapulted reason to the top of the list of “ways to evaluate the world around you,” and in France the Siècle des Lumières led to a fast-growing opposition to an absolute monarchy. An example of the rising skepticism of kingly powers was captured by Voltaire, ever the witty observer, who noted that a mistress of Louis XIV died from scrofula despite “being very well touched by the king.”

  The occasional monarch would continue to resurrect the tradition until 1825, when Charles X touched 121 scrofula patients at his coronation, the last time a French monarch publicly employed the practice. Although, to be fair, the French monarchy was just about over.

  Although France no longer has a monarchy, we can always hold out hope for England. Perhaps once Prince William assumes the kingly mantle, he will decide to reintroduce the practice for the twenty-first century. Legions of fans would willingly infect themselves with scrofula just for that very opportunity.

  A royal reenactment: The queen dishes out cures from the back of a lorry.

  The Eye Care Hall of Shame

  Perfect vision is a rare miracle; much of the world’s population struggles with conditions such as nearsightedness, farsightedness, astigmatism, or presbyopia. Despite the recent trend of vanity glasses and frames-as-fashion-statements, for many of us who suffer from imperfect vision, we’d love to be able to wake up in the morning and not have to reach for our glasses before we can see the alarm clock beside
the bed.

  Many a keen businessman has been aware of that very desire, leading to a variety of quack products and theories promising easy (and sometimes humorous) fixes for complex vision problems. Like most examples of quackery, the only person who tended to benefit from these products and theories was the manufacturer or salesman himself.

  The Bates System of Eye Exercises

  Against all evidence to the contrary, New York ophthalmologist William Horatio Bates thought that wearing eyeglasses was a bad idea for people with vision problems. To improve your eyesight, you simply had to perform a series of eye exercises, such as swinging your eyes from object to object, palming your eyeballs, and visualizing “pure black.” The Bates Method was an enormous hit in the 1920s and ’30s, spawning numerous quacks in its wake and attracting a slavish devotion, for no obvious reason, in Nazi Germany. Happily, the Bates Method was never adopted by the DMV.

  Nose Writing with Aldous Huxley

  One of the most enthusiastic adopters of the Bates Method was Aldous Huxley, English author of Brave New World, who had been haunted by vision problems all of his life. Huxley even wrote a book about his conversion, The Art of Seeing, which was reluctantly published by Harper in 1942 and remains the problem child in Huxley’s literary canon. Among other absurdities, Huxley recommends the practice of “nose writing,” that is, imagining your nose is a pencil and then writing an imaginary signature in the air with your nose pencil … as a way to improve your eyesight.

  Gayelord Hauser’s Wonder Foods

  Gayelord Hauser, tireless self-promoter and creator of one of the first celebrity diets, was one of the better-known quacks to follow in Bates’s footsteps. Hauser’s book Keener Vision without Glasses basically co-opted the Bates method as a way to promote and sell Hauser’s dietary products. You could improve your eyesight if you performed eye exercises … and consistently ate the “wonder foods” that were conveniently sold by Hauser’s own company. (Note: Gayelord Hauser–approved “wonder foods” included yogurt, brewer’s yeast, powdered skim milk, wheat germ, and blackstrap molasses.)

  Galvanic Spectacles

  A steampunk’s dream come true, the “galvanic spectacles” from circa 1905 had dark green lenses and a plastic frame concealing a secondary, metal frame underneath with electric wiring. The glasses purported to send a “continuous stream of electricity to the optic nerve,” the benefits of which, the manufacturers assumed, would be obvious to the consumer. What was less obvious to the manufacturers was the fact that the optic nerve isn’t actually in the eyeball; it’s behind the eyeball, deep in the skull. (Note: Electric shocks to your eyes may give you a lot of steampunk cred, but they will not improve your vision.)

  Dr. Isaac Thompson’s Celebrated Eye Water

  First patented and marketed by Dr. Isaac Thompson (not actually a doctor) in Connecticut in 1795, this general cure-all for eye complaints was still being sold in the twentieth century. No one really knew its ingredients, however, until the passage of the Pure Food and Drug Act in 1906.

  The real reason for its long-standing popularity?

  Opium.

  Nothing to see here, just a leering old man presenting strange medicinal eye water to an innocent young girl.

  Just Look in the Mirror

  A bizarre notion that the irises of the eyes could be used to diagnose patients sprang up in the nineteenth century when Hungarian physician Ignaz von Peczely observed a similar iris pattern in the eyes of both a man with a broken leg … and an owl with a broken leg. Why Peczely didn’t chock this up to chance, why Peczely had an owl in the first place, and why he was gazing so intensely into the eyes of both man and bird that he was able to make this kind of comparative analysis, remain lost to history.

  Regardless, the practice of iridology (still going strong) sprang up in the wake of Peczely’s … discovery.

  The Cancer Cure Hall of Shame

  Cancer is an illness that seemingly changes the unchangeable constant of our very self—our DNA. It begins when one of our own cells transforms irrevocably into something that stops acting, well, normally human. It multiplies, unstoppable in its quest to double and double again, to the point of killing us. Cancer isn’t contagious; it doesn’t seek to find other hosts and spread to others, like viruses or bacteria. It is simply a one-job hit-man.

  Hippocrates coined the terms carcinos and carcinoma to describe malignant tumors in the fourth century bce. Both terms refer to the word for crab because many tumors have creeping projections that resemble crab legs emanating from the center. Sometimes the surface of the tumor resembles a crab carapace; sometimes the lancinating pain feels like a crab’s pincers. By the time Celsus showed up in the first century bce, the word had been officially translated into its current iteration.

  Cancer has been fought in a lot of unfortunate ways. Because we don’t have all the cures yet, quacks continue to abound in their efforts to prey on the desperate—just take a gander at some of the worst treatments you’d never want to try.

  Animals

  In the long line of “like cures like” treatments, this one takes the crab cake, so to speak. In the second century ce, Galen suggested burning crabs and smearing ashes and crab bits onto tumors with a feather. But crabs weren’t the only victims. In the Middle Ages, one method recommended holding a freshly killed rabbit, puppy, kitten, or lamb against the tumor. The idea was that the cancer was akin to a ravenous wolf and would feed off the sacrificed animal rather than the human. Poor critters! In the eighteenth century, such treatments included fox lungs, lizard’s blood, and crocodile dung, along with the usual but useless modalities, like leeching.

  Cancer—a crab, a constellation, a plague on society.

  Grapes

  In 1925, Johanna Brandt introduced her Grape Cure. It’s a pretty simple idea—you fast for a few days, and then use enemas, and then eat seven meals of grapes every day for two weeks. Grape juice enemas, douches, poultices, and gargles were recommended, too. As if once weren’t enough, the American Cancer Society debunked the juicy practice four separate times (the last in 2000).

  Shark Cartilage

  You might have heard that sharks can’t get cancer. In 1992, William Lane and Linda Comac published a book called exactly that—Sharks Don’t Get Cancer—and a roar of interest came with it. Anyone who read the book could pretty much say, “Why yes, I don’t know any sharks with cancer! Not a one!” Perhaps if patients were treated with shark cartilage and whatever magic mysteries it possessed cured cancer, then oncologists across the world would be out of a job. Want to know the results of several scientific studies? (Hint: Oncologists still have a job.)

  In any case, it really did seem an interesting idea, until biologists pointed out this sad fact: Sharks do get cancer.

  Mic drop.

  Zappers

  Royal Raymond Rife was an inventor who claimed his beam ray, the Rife Frequency Generator, could kill the microbes he thought caused human illness, including cancer. He believed he could target these microbes, which—unbeknownst to microbiologists—apparently vibrated and shot off colorful auras (sounding about as believable as rainbow unicorns). The machine was a large black box with dials and a glass “ray tube” that looked like a lightbulb sticking out the side. Though all this occurred in the 1930s, modern Rife devices are still on the market today for thousands of dollars, and several sellers have been convicted of felony health fraud.

  Royal Rife in 1931 with an early microscope invention.

  Cyanide

  In the 1970s, a treatment called laetrile was the hot new commodity. Occasionally called vitamin B-17 (it’s not a vitamin), laetrile is a semisynthetic form of amygdalin, a cyanide-containing compound found in apricot pits and other seeds. Laetrile supporters claimed that it could somehow directly target and kill cancer cells, leaving the healthy ones alone. The claim was false, and subjects taking it in a formal clinical trial ended up with cyanide toxicity. So much for the idea that cancer might be a deficiency in vitamin B-17. Thanks
, but no, humans aren’t lacking in cyanide, and we don’t really want more. Really.

  Laetrile has fallen out of favor in the last two decades, but for those diehard vitamin B-17 lovers, it’s still available on the Internet and at a few shady across-the-border clinics.

  What Actually Works

  Philadelphia physician Benjamin Rush once remarked, “I am disposed to believe that there does not exist in the vegetable kingdom an antidote to cancers.” He might have been surprised to find that yew trees and periwinkle plants would become sources of two powerhouse chemotherapeutics—paclitaxel and vinca alkaloids—that treat a variety of cancers. Many would be shocked to find that arsenic, commonly found in dangerous and useless old nostrums, is now an important treatment for one type of leukemia.

  Today, we battle malignancies with chemotherapy that includes targeted biologic therapies. There’s hormone blockade for hormonally driven cancers, monoclonal antibodies that target cancer cells, and, most recently, directed immunotherapy that activates our own immune system to kill cancer cells. Surgery is now far more precise and safe thanks to antisepsis and a modern understanding of anatomy. And though radiation can cause cancer, contemporary radiation oncologists have a keen understanding of the physics of radiation, and they wield improved technology to target treatment areas with precise doses. Make no mistake, we have a lot more work to do, but we no longer live in those helpless eras where you just ate grapes and hoped for the best.

  Acknowledgments

  One sunny morning at a cafe in San Diego, April Genevieve Tucholke turned to us and said, “You should write a book together.” A very special thanks to April for launching us on this hugely enjoyable ride.

  To Eric Myers, our agent for this book, who saw the diamond-in-the-rough of our proposal, thanks for making this possible.