Quackery: A Brief History of the Worst Ways to Cure Everything Hardcover – Illustrated, October 17, 2017

LOVED this book. The writing is so entertaining, and so many fun facts included for those of us who enjoy non-fiction. I can’t tell you how many times I <<audibly>> laughed out loud (or snorted) reading this! LOLing is A little awkward on early morning or late night flights, but totally worth it. I would often have to read my friends/family passages of it because they were so *golden*. ABSOLUTELY LOVED IT and have been recommending it to all my friends! Was going to lend it to my dad who has a medical background but I’m just going to buy him a copy instead so I don’t have to give up my copy!

As a medical professional, I have read many books about quackery and have even published some articles about the subject, and this is the best one I have ever read. Quackery: A Brief History of the Worst Ways to Cure Everything is well illustrated, covers most every well-known example, and is very well written by a qualified medical doctor. I was surprised how many quacks and the persons they fooled were highly educated professionals and university professors. The author even covers the putative cold-water cure that fooled the famous popularizer of evolution, Charles Darwin (p. 173-179). My only concern was Dr. Albert Abrams, who graduated from a world renowned medical school at age 19. Was he fooled in the Scientific American exposure of his radionics scam that made him very rich by the blood of a Guinea pig, as Dr. Kang claimed on page 311, or a rock roster, as another source claimed. Abrams was led to believe that the source was a human, and diagnosed the client as having a very human disease. This event ended up exposing his scam. Another issue was the very small and hard to read type face. Nonetheless, the book was a gold mine of information.

This a good overview of bad medicine and the charlatans that prosletyzed them. There is a lot of good material to learn, and my only two gripes are that it had gone into more depth and discussed more bad medicines, but then already hefty 490 pages would easily be over 1000. My second minor gripe is the tone gets a bit too sparky and on-the-nose. The quips, asides, and light joking make this book very approachable, but it also comes across as too much when it occurs every third paragraph, sometimes more. However, this is a good read for people interested in the subject.I would be interested in an updated version that covers the covid era. "Quackery" oftens treats the best medicine, up to World War 2, sometimes beyond, but we all know that quackery still exists in the modern age, right ivermectin?

I love this book! I've reread & shared so many of the topics in here because Quackery still abounds in our world. It boggles my mind how people today are trying stuff like this & saying "it worked back then, but now big pharma doesn't want you to know." It did not work back then & it shouldn't be tried now. Compare life expectancy & quality of health now versus then. We're always still learning & experimenting, so what works now will likely be mocked in the future, but that's how progress & advancement work. There's so much that we've learned & built on from all this quackery & I love how this book shows this. It does make the occasional joke at history's expense but it mostly strives to touch on a multitude of topics to explain the logic/beliefs of the times, how that was applied to human health issues then & how we look at all of that in hindsight. All of this book is riveting to me & I cannot recommend it highly enough.

I really enjoyed reading this book. It took you through a large history of quack cures. It was Interesting, funny, and I learned what some references in books I read mean. Like why are you bringing laughing gas on a trip? I guess that was a fun recreational thing at one point?I also liked how some of these cures carried on into our modern world. One being leaches used to help restore blood flow in delicate reconstruction areas like the tongue.Some things were just gross but interesting. Like the forever poop pills and vomit cups. Who would have thought that was a great idea?The book was just entertaining and made me think of one of my teachers I had in college. Kind of

Before getting into content, I will talk about the thing we all judge books by. The cover was even more beautiful in person than in the picture. All of the yellow looking letters in the title is actually a florescent orange, which contrasts beautifully from the rest of the cover. The pages are thick and feel high quality. There were pictures peppered all through the book which helped the flow of the book and gave pictures of the contraptions they're describing.This book is easy to read and flows very well. The short chapters have a variety of topics under the main theme of the chapter. They are informative without being too saturated in information, avoiding becoming boring, overwhelming, or confusing. It's the type of book that can be picked up and put down without any problem, which makes it a good read when you don't have much time to do so.

I enjoyed reading this book. It was fantastic and easy to follow.

It was quite interesting, but being a scholar of medical history myself I found several inaccuracies and time/date discrepancies. I have to ding Dr. Kang one star for that. Also, the cutesy writing style as if the book were being written for Kindergartners and the pop cultural references may appeal to some readers, but I found it off-putting in a book about quite a serious subject matter. Lastly, the book was not so subtly infused with the authors' progressive political views and feminism. I strongly support her rights to hold these beliefs as protected by the First Amendment of the U.S. Constitution, but they have no place in a book about medical history & quackery.