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Podcast: New Books in Medicine
Episode: Lydia Kang, âQuackery: A Brief History of the Worst Ways to Cure Everythingâ (Workman Publishing Company, 2017)
Description: What wonât we try in our quest for perfect health, beauty, and the fountain of youth? Well, just imagine a time when doctors prescribed morphine for crying infants. When liquefied gold was touted as immortality in a glass. And when strychnineâyes, that strychnine, the one used in rat poisonâwas dosed like Viagra.
Looking back with fascination, horror, and not a little dash of dark, knowing humor, Quackery: A Brief History of the Worst Ways to Cure Everything (Workman Publishing Company, 2017) recounts the lively, at times unbelievable, history of medical misfires and malpractices. Ranging from the merely...