Book Review: Quackery - A Brief History of the Worst Ways to Cure Everything by Lydia Kang

This is a charming and funny book all about the various ways humans have promoted fake medical cures in exchange for money.

Despite the grim (and occasionally distressing) subject matter, the tone remains light and poppy throughout. There are lots of snarky asides (especially about the fake medical practitioners) and a real appreciation for the bizarre. It's fun the whole way through, although sometimes at the expense of people who perhaps didn't know better than to trust charlatans.

One thing that is constantly brought back is how it can be hard to determine what is patent nonsense and what is a bone fide cure:

Prevent blood clotting: Extract mucus from the intestinal membranes of slaughtered pigs or from the lungs of slaughtered cows. Inject. (heparin)

Is that any more believable than injecting goat testicles to cure impotence?

It also brings to light how squeamish we can be, especially when faced with unusual medical procedures:

We borrow other people’s wombs for surrogacy. And yet, plenty of people squirm at the idea of breastmilk banks. We are a society of contradictions.

The eBook is beautifully formatted. For once, images are in-line with the text! Usually in books of this sort, publishers treat the eBook like a mass-market paperback and stick the illustrations at the end.

It ends rather abruptly, after taking us through light, electricity, colour therapy, animal magnetism, and a couple of dozen other "cure-alls"

Sadly, there are no references or footnotes. While I have no reason to doubt the veracity of the claims, for a book about scientific misinformation and malpractice, I'd've expected a way to find out more information.