Transcripts For CSPAN2 Lydia Kang Quackery 20171209

Programs and Publications Department of the enoch pratt free library. Welcome to writers wise. Thank you for joining us to welcome dr. Lydia kang to baltimore. We hope you will join for some of our upcoming events, and stearns, author of finding age, and caregivers guide to living your best life. Will be rating on wednesday november 29 at 12 p. M. At the Senior Center in canton. And then we are hosting, same day, mark bowden, a turning point in vietnam come in conversation with steve luxenberg. At 7 p. M. At church of the redeemer. You can sign up for our email list or pick up a flyer or copy of compass at the table to the right. So tonight dr. Lydia kang, practicing internal medicine physician and author of adult and young Adult Fiction will share from her book quacker a brief history of the worst ways to cure everything. Cowritten with Nate Pedersen, a librarian, historian and freelance journalist with over 400 publications in print and online. So quackery offers 67 tales about outlandish treatments complete with vintage illustrations, photographs and advertisements. Youll read about times when a cute cows was in vogue, or how families has down heirloom pills. Yes, think i got to pass those down. They write with fascination for and argument. The platitudes no pain no gain, and what doesnt kill you makes you stronger come to mind while reading that take blood on a coat was a sign of a good surgeon, or that electric, unbreakable courses for topoftheline. Many of the proposed remedies were comically useless and wildly hyped, yet conventional wisdom was that the poison is not a poison in the hands of the physician. While reading quackery you may begin to wonder what product to pedal today could elicit another volume of the book in 100 years. It was painful to be a human, and it still is. Here to provide levity and wisdom in the quest, please give a warm welcome to dr. Lydia kang. [applause] thank you. Can you hear me okay . So thank you so much for having me here today. Thank you to him not prep periods like be the comforter this is where i was born and raised, 18 years in baltimore and i had been since then at 16 years in new york city and tenures in omaha, nebraska, which is where i now live with my kids and Practice Medicine at the university of nebraska. So hold on a second. So i do right of the books as well. So quackery is my first Nonfiction Book visually exciting to work on it. Before that control was my first book ever wrote the out in 2013. My most recent adult, my first adult book is a beautiful poison, and the kind of melded medicine and the birth of forensic medicine in new york city world war i, the influenza epidemic all in one together with a murder mystery and a lot of poisons so that we just came out in august and the most recent young adult book is the november girl with mcmillan and just came out about a week ago. That takes place on lake superior, and was inspired by the song the wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald by gordon lightfoot, one of my most favorite songs, a heartbreaking song and i knew something was going to pay tribute to it and thats what this book is about. The november girl is the witch of november. Were not going to talk but if that today. Were going to talk about quackery. What im going to do is take you through two of the book. Theres too much in the book to talk about in one evening so i figured what i would do is talk of some of my favorite subjects in the book. I figured a good place to start would be with snake oil. Its interesting to think my audience sometimes i passed students in middle school have you heard of the term snake oil or Snake Oil Salesman . No hands go up at all. I look at them and i go i cant believe you dont know this. The term snake oil is a product that is fake or someone is up just to make a buck off you. It doesnt work and a Snake Oil Salesman is a charlatan, someone whos doing the best to make money off of you knowing what theyre trying to hawk doesnt work very well. The story comes from a very real person, clark stanley, in the late 1800s he was at this exposition and he made this very showy, it was pretty funny because he basically took a reallife snake, a rattlesnake and had that in one water any kill the snake and plunged it into the boiling water. When the fat rose to the top he skimmed it off and put in some charts and sold it. He claimed his snake oil could cure anything. Achy joints, not feeling well, is liniment could fix it all. By the time they got a chance look at the contents of the liniment several years later they realize that didnt have any snake component in it at all. All. It was just fake. The interesting thing about it, it was born on the concept that made a lot of sense. In the 1800s when they were laying the railroads down across the United States, there were chinese laborers who are doing a lot of this work and they brought with them a medicine that was made of chinese water snakes. Its also a liniment and the use under aching joints. The fat of chinese water snakes is very high in omega3 fatty acids which does have some antiinflammatory activity. Clarks summit saw this, but it was exotic, but he could make us all but the interesting thing is that in the United States we dont have chinese water snakes, for one thing. For another thing we have a lot of rattlesnakes but they dont have as much fat in them as the chinese water snakes nor did they have the content of the omega fatty acids. He was working on a concept that sort of made sense but in the end it was just kind of smoke and mirrors. Thats the origin of the concept of the term snake oil and the Snake Oil Salesman. On to the next subject. Does anybody know what this is . [inaudible] that does look like a knife. Can you be more specific . [inaudible] yes. It is for bleeding someone. You can buy these on the internet. You can get them on ebay and i thought of bringing one with don torricelli realized that tsa would probably tackle me at the gate. So i said no, im not going to do that. [inaudible] exactly. This is called sleam. If you notice there is a notch on the side and thats a notch, not the long played that is used to cut. Its the knowledge thats used to puncture blood vessels for bloodletting. Were going to talk about bloodletting. It is a practice that is going on for hundreds and hundreds of years. Nowadays we sit in movies. We scratch read and wonder that person is really sick of want to do is pump two pints of blood out of them when they need upload. Especially now in most physicians realize we do as much as we can to keep peoples blood in them and not spill if we dont have to. But why did this happen for so long . It really was a main part of medical therapies for a long, long time. It goes back to the ancient theory of medicine. This is a bit of a graph that shows you some of the concepts. They believed, this is from the time of hippocrates so hundred year bc. The human body, the health of human body was based in the four humors, blood, yellow bile, black bile, and slim. These elements were in your body in this balance. When you were sick they would blame the illness on and balance of one of those humors. So to get things back in order you would do something to maybe get rid of the blood if theres too much of the blood humor, or if youre too much of the black bile you would give yourself something that would make you have horrible diarrhea and cause you to have this sort of blackish colored stools and that would mean you would get that black bile balanced out. They even blame peoples personality on whether or not you had a tendency towards one humor or another. Epc if you see you simply get of those four people youll see thats what they said you look like that because you are too much phlegm are too much blood. There were relationships with the times of the year, the earth elements like dryness, witness, fire, that sort of thing. So for most of this time it was often thought blood was atomic humor that tend tends to be out of whack were often than the other ones. That is what bloodletting was a commonly used to treat somebody thinks because they kept blaming it on too much of the blood humor. This is a different way of taking blood out. What i showed you before, its a pretty big knife, about this big. Oftentimes they use that on larger people and horses actually. Horses were bled and they still have led today at some recent told me a one of my meetings. That its commonly done with thoroughbreds after a bad race for the good heart failure. But other methods of bloodletting existed as well. This one is called which sounds like a movie, a gory movie. Its from around 18201870s and you can also get these on ebay. Apparently you can find all these things on ebay. The way it worked is it had somewhere around 15 place in it and it was springloaded so you put it against somebodys arm, so touched the trigger and then the blade with just impale your arm and youd have all these different cuts. Ideally, that was often used with, they would take a small glass cup, keep it over a flame and they would put the cup on top of cuts and once it form a a seal and the air inside the cup cool, it would suck out more of the blood. So scar vacation was often used with copying as a method. Most of the time when bloodletting was that it was done in a classic way which was from upper arm of the vein which is located right here in your arm. Many of you gentlemen probably recognize that from outside a barber. Who here goes to the barber and there is a full still outside . There you go. Still around. Still better do you know what colors are on the pole outside of your establishment . Certainly red and white. Okay, suggest red and white. Its not always red, white and blue. Sometimes it is only red and white but the history at behind this goes back to bloodletting. There were surgeon barbers who the people who took care of bloodletting it wasnt your physician like me. I would order the surgeon barber to take off the fight and they would scurry off of a get that done along with getting your nails cut and your hair trimmed and a rotten teeth pulled, your boils lanced. They did all those kinds of things. What they often did was put a tourniquet up on your arm, oftentimes it was a white cloth and so that sort of symbolized the white. When you get your blood drawn at the doctors are something you probably are used to having to put a tourniquet on and do Say Something like pump your fist. Instead of pumping her fifth oftentimes they would have you hold onto a full. The reason is that helps the blood flow come down to your arm and allow for more genius by closer you get a better bleeding. They have yelled onto the pole and we have a pool. At the bottom there was a bit of the dish and sometimes should hold the pull downward. The blood would run down your arm, down the pole and collect in the dish. Theres the red, that symbolized the blood as well as possibly the arteries. They were not really using the arteries. It was the veins. This is where this comes from. Barbers way back when with a way to doing a lot of this bleeding and that paul was a very useful instrument for them. Next time you get your good you can ask your barber if he knows his bloody history and where he actually got his trade from 100 years ago. Okay. We talked about using fleam and good oldfashioned tourniquets. There were other ways to remove blood from the body as well. This is a woodcut around 1638 that shows a lady putting some leeches on are suffrages got ne bowlful of leeches. So why do people use leeches instead of bloodletting . Any ideas . [inaudible] they can. Why else might they be used . Blood. To suck the blood, right. Who here has ever been bitten by a leech . Who has ever been bitten by a leech . Anybody . You have. Do you remember getting bit . No. Because leeches are very stealthy about biting. So in their saliva they have an anesthetic, which means when they bite you it goes very now very quickly and also have an anticoagulant in their saliva which is a blood thinner. That way they can bite, you dont know whats happening because a lot of, the less think of what you do know is just laugh it off or pull it off because they want a nice long drink. It will drink, bite, quietly, painlessly, suck out about anywhere from a teaspoon to tablespoon of blood depending on how long it stays on and then when fearful they let go, rolloff and go on their merry way. Leeches compared to a nice its a lot gentler. Some people found that it was more humane as a means of bloodletting. The great thing about leeches is they are small, which means that you can use them sort of in all these different parts of your body that you might want to not do so bloodletting. Oftentimes there was this idea if you can blade close to the place where youre having a problem you would help that problem better. So for example, if you had a headache, its hard to do bloodletting from what a going to tourniquet . Your neck . It doesnt turn out that way. They could apply some leeches to your temple or behind your ear if you hadnt here, to your stomach if you had a stomach ache. Leeches were used anywhere and everywhere. When i see everywhere, i mean everywhere. It could be used in your armpits, on the gentlemen they could be used on the testicles. For ladies they could be used internally. It would sometimes have been applied to the cervix and it also applied rectally. So they were actually rectal lynchings that were happening. If they felt the need to take care of that area there was a special rod that had little crews we could put the leeches and up it went and yeah, im so sorry. I hope you guys have already eaten dinner. I notice a couple of people crossing the legs going oh my god. They had chairs with holes cut out of the bottom so you could do rectal lynchings. Before leeches, honestly it was really kind of sad. These are a couple of leech applicators because interestingly with leeches if theyre hungry and you pick them up there . The . Regret and try to bite you because they are hungry. These were a couple of leech applicators we were you could put the squirmy guy in there and applied place where you want it to. They even did lynchings like inside your mouth or on your tonsils. They dont want you to swallow the leech because for one thing they want to reuse the leeches. This is not in the time of single use anything. Leeches were hard to get by because the became so popular that there was such a huge demand in england and the United States that the rebellions of leeches being imported and so they wanted to reuse them if they could. Sometimes they would so a silk thread through the tail of the leech and then they would sort of put it down any sort so they they can get right on your tonsils and when the leech was done, instead axially choking on or swallow it they would get get out little string and they got their leech back. They are all different, their books on how to take care of leeches and keep them alive and all sorts of things. The leeches didnt always want to do their job. I found out they can feed come have blood feeding and then six months later there still fine. The doctors for the medical people who are using them might be like no, no, we need you to eat. Sometimes they would dunk them in wind to get them in the mood. [laughing] they would cut the skin, get a little bit of blood flowing to entice it to take a bite. When they wanted to pull it off they did want to yank it off. They would flick it hard with her finger, for some salt on it. These poor leeches, they just werent, i dont think that quite a great life, especially when you consider, i read this one passage where someone one of the leech to continue to get the blood out but the did what it to switch leeches have just cut the tail off so it would drink and drink, they never get full. It was like terrible. So yeah, it was amazing how much was written on how to take care of them, how to use them right, how to reuse them. There were some cases where, there was one written case of young girl getting syphilis because of a reused leech off of a previous person who went syphilis. There are cases of people i got it and sometimes by leeches that they bled to death. It wasnt always such a gentle treatment. I have a treat for you. This is my pet leech. I gave at ted talk in a home a few weeks ago and i brought the leech with me to make a point on stage but also realize that if i did that i would have to take care of this leech for life. Heres what he looks like. Hes actually quite colorful. Hes like red, green, a little bit of purple. [inaudible] not me. My kids have refused to let him eat off of me. We feed him little cubes of defrosted beef liver, and we drop it in there and then he gets really excited. He start swimming around the ball but then he cant find. It would have to bring them closer to anthony sort of sucks on one side into the other side. And then at some point in time he stops and keep swimming around the ball like he seems to recognize his uncensored diet because its not the real thing. He doesnt get full. So far so good. Hes doing okay in our house but that is our pet leech. His full name is george leech of her. He does it in our kitchen. He tried to escape once. That was really interesting. He lives in a fishbowl and we have little piece of like plastic wrap on top. After we had him for a couple of weeks we realize he never went out of the water because hes a water creature. One day i took the top off, and went to work, came home and my daughter, id drop the kids off in the became him like ten minutes after that might argument in and she was like he tried to escape. I found it on the kitchen floor. He was halfway across the kitchen floor, like the Sahara Desert of leeches. I dont know what he was any for. It clearly wasnt beef liver because he is unsatisfied with of house. She plucked him up and put them back in the bowl and now we keep the top on. So we dont wake up dead nightmares of the leech trying to find us in our bed. Okay. So well talk about gold now. Gold is such a fun topic because people wear for jewelry. Its been around forever as a substance that weve craved in wanted and we use it as money. Well, a lot of people thought that gold is particularly special and must have some sort of magical qualities to it in medicine as well. Part of that comes from the idea that gold doesnt tarnish. Real gold if you just leave it out there it will not tarnish like silver. That quality of it not changing made it feel like it was this really magical element above and beyond other elements. Obviously out alchemists were obsessed with making more of it. The problem with the goal is a realized early on was that if you take a chunk of gold, pure gold and you swallow it, its going to pass right through your digestive system and your feces come out pretty leaned out but you didnt do a whole lot because you dont absorb the gold, elemental gold. Quite sometime people figured gold must be good for you sooner but if we can figure out a way to make it absorbable, then weve got our stuff. In the middle ages around the 13th century they finally figured out how to make this solution that was called which means well water. This royal water to dissolve gold. Once that happened you can make a gold, you could either and its over. This was made of this very gruesome concoction of nitric acid and hydrochloric acid. So yes, you can dissolve gold. When you do it turns into cold chloride so that yellow liquid is a gold chloride solution. So great it worked. The poem was when drink it it was, the toxicity profile was terrible. People would get something called rx depot where that fever, chills, shaking. They felt really bad so it was easy to get poisoned by gold. They managed to compass with the wanted but the end product wasnt very good. Another product that they had those also absorbable something called fulminating cold which unfortunately would spontaneously explode. Sometimes advancement are not a good thing. Just because gold didnt turn out to be a great treatment doesnt mean people didnt still use it to sell stuff. There are people who would paint rocks and try to sell them off as the real thing or make cordials and claimed that had gold in them but actually didnt have any. Yes . Gold nowadays [inaudible] they do. We mentioned that in the book as well. There are several things that are in the book that seem kind of ridiculous or strange but have reallife uses and that is one of them. Gold cells used in electron microscopy as well and for long time it was used, the gold salts were used in Rheumatoid Arthritis because they did help with swelling in the joints for ra, but most rheumatologist dont use because the toxicity profile is a very good and are better medicines today. But in the late 1900s and early 20th century, people thought that gold goal could be distant as with actually curing drunkenness. There was a gentleman who, granted its a very good ideas because he did believe that alcoholism was a disease. He and fortune also believed he could cure it very easily. He had sanitary is all around the country we could go there if you were a trunk and they would like you off sometimes it and give it a shot of something and youd also drank this gold elixir, this gold tonic. After you doing this for a couple of weeks youd be cured and you would be good to go. The problem was when they kept on trying to secret test his drinks and things like that come it didnt have any gold in it at all. He knew this but he didnt really say it out by vicki said theres kind of gold and everything, isnt there . Theres gold in the soil, so they must be some gold in my tonic. When the tested them, he handed the tonic over to test this they would find go. If someone grabbed off the shelf and tested it would be no gold. With the did find was in his injections and his drinks with things like cannabis, opium, alcohol. It was the all these other substances that probably made the alcoholics forget that youre missing alcohol because they were either getting alkyl or getting drunk on something else. That went on for a while, and to his death he never revealed the actual contents of his special elixirs. So on to the next subject. This is one of my favorite subjects of the book mostly because was the most horrific and shocking to me as a physician but we now going to enter the realm of course in cannibalism. So what you say, the gallows in england and was going to happen is that some criminals most likely young male criminals are going to get hung. And after the hangman or the executioner says okay, there officially dead, what often happened was people go up to the swinging bodies and if they had a wart on their hand or a boil, they would rather on the hanging dead body. On occasion they would let her body down and cut the next open, get some blood people suffered from epilepsy would drink the blood because they knew this was a surefire way to take care of their epilepsy. So corpse in cannibalism medicine as horrible and unbelievable as it is to us today was a very commonplace thing for many hundreds of years. Those same executioners were in the markets and the sales of human so that often got to keep the bodies afterwards if they were not say given to a medical person for a dissection. They would harvest the fat and so as a ligament or a south or people use all sorts of things. They used it for symptoms of rabies. They used it for aching joints or any kind of skin condition. They called it hangmans salve and mans grease but it was a commonly used treatment that the executioners and their wives would sell. This is actually shockingly from early 20th century. These are sterile ampoules of human fat from a German Company that was selling them for use here that wasnt that long ago. Now, executions oftentimes were really popular place for people to look for treatments, partially because there was a magical idea that when a human body dies it still holds this spirit, the sort of healing spirit or healing power in it. Ideally, you want to somebody who is young and healthy, who had died a very sudden death. So the last person you want to use for a corpse medicine is some who was older, someone who has a chronic illness. You want someone who is young and strong and at the peak of their vitality when did i suddenly, and hopefully wiley because then all all of the ese is in them which is why drinking gladiator blood was a popular thing. You didnt want to use a hung fema because females were considered light as strong and you do a summary was older who had an ongoing illness. Outside of that there are also other types of quartz medicines. Egyptian mummies. Egyptian mummies for quite a long time were plundered from their tombs. Tunes. They were ground up with really fancy ingredients and sold around europe. It was considered one of the best medicines, like topoftheline here if nothing else worked, you need to use the money medicine. The interesting thing is that mummies were used as medicine probably because of a mistake. For a long time there was this Petroleum Product that came out of the ground that was called maria. In persian it was a word for blacks because like a sort of waxy black substance. And they use it in, they found was helpful. At some point in time on the should sack that would happen so open an egyptian mummy, saw some of the blackish material inside the corpse and said this is the same thing. This is a different place we can get it from so thats what they were using. Then mummia became synonymous with medicine from egyptian mummies as opposed to the original Petroleum Product. Were going to go on to another subject which im sad to say opium and opium problems is not really left our sensation at all. All. It seems like its getting worse and worse as we speak. But opium has been used for quite a long time as well. Alongside many of these very, very harsh treatments. So in the beginning of the book we talk about things like mercury. Nobody would willingly eat mercury nowadays because we know its toxic. We freak out if theres too much mercury in our fish. We dont want mercury in our medicines or anything like that. Arsenic and strychnine radioactivity things, radioactive water, these are all things that we know were just awful. Back then those with the mainstays of treatment and they were really harsh. So antimony for example, major vomit pretty badly. Mercury products generally gave you horrendous diarrhea. So in comparison to that, things like opium were a lot gentler. They made make you feel better. They actually helped with pain and they were not nearly as harsh on the body. The people did turn to opium and opium products as way for making them feel better entering themselves even though he didnt do anything. It just made them feel better. So a little back story on one of the monsters of our day, heroin. So what opium was being used in pills and things like that it was very easy to get. You could go to your local store and there it was. People are giving to the babies when they were keeping. They were just doing it for whatever made them feel ill. Now, in the 1900s, excuse me, in the 1800s they finally were able to figure out what was the main component in opium that made it so awesome, and i was morphine. So the isolated morphine and soon after that they also invented a hypodermic syringe. So that combination of having this very purified drug plus a way to get it intravenously created a lot of morphine addicts. Syringes at the time were expensive, hard to get. They were in these beautiful cases so generally the wealthy with the ones suffering from morphine addiction. The realized towards the end of the 1800s there was a big problem with addiction and wanted to figure out a way they could take care of paint paints going to be addictive. The company in germany was kind of playing around with two medicines. It had recently been invented. One was aspirin and the other one was heroin. They were trying to figure out what can we use will make us some money . They looked at aspen and said this will never make us money, lets try something else. So they look at morphine and they realize they cant use very, very little of it and have an effect. They started testing it on themselves and after the tested on the self which is not the way youre supposed to do things today, a lot of people with the guinea pigs had make them feel heroic. And so heroin was born. The name comes from the german word for heroic. So heroin was born. They thought this would be fantastic, a great pain relieving because youre you ho salute because its a potent, it will be addictive and it was sold that way. It was sold as lozenges, cough syrup, pills. And for about two years anybody said heroin is the best thing ever. Physicians writing about internal st. Kitts nonaddictive. Its going be fantastic. About two years into the realized how wrong they were. A couple years later we had the narcotics act that got past and we started in the United States really regulate the sale and creation and distribution of narcotics. Bayer took heroin off the market and, on, for bayer it stop being a product, but the damage was already done. That sort of the dark, a very positive history as far as like what they were intending to do with heroin, but in real life it turned out to be this kind of terrible mistake that we see action repeated over and over again when it comes to producing new medicine. People get excited, they think the best thing ever. They start using it everywhere and then they start really get in as they realize it even not as good as they thought it was, not a soulful or the side effects are really quite dangerous. [inaudible] a second choice that buyer had those do a tremendous amount [inaudible] they cant earn any money from it. Not anymore. Aspirin, its funding how they didnt think aspen was going to be a big deal but aspirin is an incredibly wonderful medication with very strong antiinflammatory effects. Its an antiplatelet medicine. It is say people from heart attacks. Its funding how they were kind of wrong about their first choice when you decide to go with heroin. So were going to talk a little bit about mercury. This is another one of us question ask middle schools and the just gave me a blank look but ask them how many of you have played with mercury as a kid . Yes, many of us. So mercury as many of us know it, its the silver stuff that you found in thermometers and a broken skittle around for and you could play with it. Hopefully you didnt eat it. But ill talk about that in a little bit. Mercury is a fast and elevator is the only metal that is liquid at room temperature. It comes with the name high trireme, which means water silver. Its also called quicksilver. The symbol in the middle is the alchemist symbol for mercury and it is the only element that is named after a roman god. Mercury has been huge part of the medical compendium for a long time because it was used as a cathartic, as a prejudice to cause horrible amounts of diarrhea and is used to treat many may think. It was a staple in a medicine cabinet for quite a long time. This this is a woodcut from 186d it shows that the raceways mercury was used to treat syphilis. So syphilis was a major scourge on society for a long time. It was very easy to get. It was spread through sexual activity. I kind of syphilis in the past is quite bad. People would have like holes in the cheeks and rotting, festering wounds. The poor gentleman down on the right has a case of syphilis. You could see he has the pox with all the skin manifestations. This poor gentleman in the middle who looks like hes inside a bomb or a barrel, so he is getting treatment for syphilis using, its kind of a spa treatment. Hes in the barrel and underneath their heating up a pan of elements of mercury. When you keep it up hot enough if vaporizers are you getting this night vapor bath of mercury. Remember when it told you not to worry as a kid . Elemental mercury if you swallow it stays mostly elemental, passes treaty. If you do get some mercury poisoning is because some of the Mercury Vapor rises and you absorb it to your intestines. Some vaporizing mercury is one of the worst things you can do as far as toxicity but they loved it because they felt mercury was working if you show signs of toxicity. One of the ways you would know youre giving away too much mercury in a good way was you would create like pints and pints of saliva. Up in the top like theres a poor fellow lying in bed and theres this continual waterfall of saliva coming out of his mouth because they would know, were treating you well if youre just like drooling like crazy, like just pints and pints of drool. So why did they think murky work . This was used for hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of years. This was the staple treatment for syphilis. Part of it is because when you took mercury unit was working. Unit was doing something because a major feel bad. The second thing was that a lot of illnesses, particularly syphilis, they are episodic. Syphilis comes in several different stages of the Natural History of it is that after the first stage, the symptoms all sort of go way after few months. Then a couple years you are symptomfree. The second stage comes and you get the pox like the rash and after couple of months of that that also goes way that you can have a third stage. He puts it all right, come back, it would go away so they thought it worked. The natural course of the disease fool people into thinking that it worked. The same thing goes for the common cold. Its going to go away on its own so anything that you choose to take is going to make you think that it made it better. One of the diseases that crops up time and time again in the book is epilepsy. Seizures for many epilepsy sufferers are episodic. They will come, you will have a couple, maybe one of the new might have a couple days free or a couple weeks or months free without anything and then you get another seizure. Its easy for people to say i just had a seizure, i need to do something. They take something, its gone, it works. This was a common repeating pattern we saw throughout the book. So were going to call a bit of an archaeology lesson. Benjamin rush was one of our founding fathers, he was the physician sorted in charge of the lewis and clark expedition. He was the person wrote this very long set of papers that detailed to lewis and clark how they would take care of themselves on the trip entered to get sick and had to stay healthy. One of the things he told them was to include his own proprietary blend of mercury and an herb that was a cathartic and make you have diarrhea. He called these pills his thunderbolts or his thunder clappers because of what you did to the toilet when you took them. So there are these wonderful documents that are read in his pupil beautiful handwriting that basically said things like when you have some constipation, take one or two. When youre not feeling right, take one or two. If you know is coming on, take one or two. This went on and on. It was like use for everything. He wanted use for everything. They took some were about 600 thunder clappers with them on their trip. Yes, oh, lord is right. 600. We know the pathway that lewis and clarke took across the United States, but for a long time we didnt actually know what the specific campsites were. So several years ago in montana for did some excavating as if at the campsite, and to carbon dating they realize this is probably the area where a campsite was set, and the timing of it and the dating of it seems to match the time to lewis and clark wouldve passed through. The expedition was a military one, which means they were following the instructions something called the military blue book which told them exactly how do everything precisely the way you would do in the military. Every time that a campsite the blue book with a you have to put your latrines 300 feet away from the kitchen area which is a very safe and sensible thing to do. In montana when archaeologists found the kitchen campsite based on sampling the soil and a 300foot radius, and lo and behold they started finding huge volumes of mercury in the soil at the right depth. They basically had a scatological bingo winner and that is other able to document the lewis and clark actually literally squatted in montana. [laughing] so were just about finished, our talk, but last word on mercury. Theres our handsome god in the middle and hes Holding Company targeted but hes holding some of the symbols that hes very famous for. Hes got the wings on his little helmet and is holding a rod, and even look carefully you will see that there are two snakes on the rod. That is what hes famous for. Mercury is also known as the god of the quick tongue. Hes also, people call in the god of fees. Now, in 1902, 1905, the u. S. Army medical corps decided theyre going to make their symbol and they grabbed the caduceus andy slavitt on that. That was the wrong symbol. What do try to do was there to use the rod of the greek god of healing and of medicine and if you look on the right side that is the flag the World Health Organization and youll notice the symbol is the symbol with the state, no wings, no double snakes. Back when the army medical court may dismiss technique of repeated so many times that the caduceus has become synonymous with the medical establishment when, in fact, its completely wrong. Not only does it symbolize medicine that was used for all the one purposes but also its also like a symbol of the god of thieves and trickery which is the last thing you want to do when it comes to quackery and physicians. I just drove by a street like yesterday and it was a physicians site of that had the caduceus on and i just, i thought i should email them or something. You shouldnt have that on there. Most legitimate Health Organizations today, universities and national institutions, if theyre going to put a symbol and youll notice it is the rod and it is great. But a lot of times because people dont know the history, youll see the caduceus improperly put on a sign or Something Like that. Now you all know that if you ever see that you can point it out to them and say i think you have the wrong rod better. Okay, so well finish up. This is the last step of my tour, and my coauthor Nate Pedersen has all so finish his torso we going out with a bang. You can find Nate Pedersen on his website Nate Pedersen. Com. He is in oregon and on the west coast, and use on twitter as well. You can also find me on my website lydia kang. Com and on facebook and twitter. She read email. Always happy answer them. I think this is a part where we get to ask some questions if you guys have any. But thank you for coming and thank you for listening, and not being too grossed out by a lot of this. I saw a lot of faces tonight, a lot of so i apologize for that. [applause] i have two questions. Did you get your leech on ebay . No. I think i got it on Something Like leech. Com. I literally googled i want to buy a leech and it showed up and a body. I think he was like seven dollars and he came in the mail in a Little Package and i put them in someone and he started swimming around. I thought i cant believe i just did that. So now we had him forever. We will see how it goes. The term quackery . Quackery the term is actually a middle dutch word, classic silver which is a hocker. Its an old word that directly represents people who would stand on the street corners and try to sell their wares that maybe didnt work at all. But its originally a dutch word. Yes . I really dont think its cracked up to be what you are advertising, but the part of leeches, there are people who collect leech jars. They used to make leech jars and you could buy them and you would store your leeches in those leech jars. There are many other things people use, take a venom from snakes, not snake oil but snake venom and use that to treat lots of diseases. There are still people who do that. Yes, there are a lot of things we didnt cover in this book and that we didnt research but we know, its deathly out there. After the leech jars they are very much available. Again on ebay. I dont represent them and have no stake in ebay whatsoever, but you can find it and there are these beautiful jars with you would carry, keep leeches and carry them around with them. Leeches are interestingly still used today in very particular circumstances. So for example, if you are getting a surgery in a very delicate place lets say like the tip of your nose sliced off and got sewn back on, because its such a small piece of tissue and its a susceptible to dine, if it swells up enough that cuts off its own blood supply and the new tissue that you just so don might die. Sometimes a put a leech on in the leech would decompress some of the extra fluids, keep the blood flowing because the blood thinning saliva and prevent that tissue from dying. There are some surgeon to use. At the university of nebraska asked one of my friends who is a pharmacist there if they kept leeches in the pharmacy, and they do. It is still used in very rare circumstances in medicine. You talk about [inaudible] used for science at the time. Im curious about [inaudible] have you any idea what it is that makes people grab onto certain things or have you noticed any pattern . Im also think it more moderate things like [inaudible] people are still doing it. Have you noticed any pattern of where something has no real support but just passes on . Thats a very good question, like why do some things catch on and fight about whether so scientific basis for it . A lot of times it seems to be supported by some of the great danes of the time who are a lot of people have some difficulty a coaching them or for example, peristalsis is one of these great things who decide a lot of the teachings of were not up to stuff because what we needed to do, still look at the humor is look at the universe in the cosmos as this macrocosm and the human body was the microcosm. If you find those relationships you would realize that actually marjorie was one of these elements that was secure a lot of things because it was like ash, and these other elemental thinks. He would have a theory that fit his world and was so bombastic about it and so [inaudible] it is. Its part of his knee. He was so bombastic about it. He was so vehement about supporting this idea that he had these people gather dragon and believe the same thing. And it lasted for a very, very long time. A lot of it has to do with the cold of person who speaks the loudest and the strongest about something and seemed to be making the most since. I think in a lot of other cases that isnt going to be one obvious and to ask why that is, like youre talking about this idea that you can have this vitamin in your body. If that actually vitamin, that it made a sign i type compound will kill cancer cells directly. How does a to do that . We dont know but they say it does. It has been disproven multiple times, but as long as theres going to be, so much of our fax and our research is imperfect and its easy to find a crack in the imperfections and use them to for your point of view. I think thats the case with almost everything, not just science and medicine. Its that you can use what you want selectively to make your case. When you do that its very hard to argue with the person because theyre so dogmatic. Thats one of many different subtle components to why quackery is still very much alive today. It just chemically doesnt make sense to me. [inaudible] exactly. There are people affirmatively that is still works and ask their cancer doctors about it still. There are people who [inaudible] and these people grasp at anything. If a desperate person winds up trying something and it works, you know, they tell everyone that it works, whether there was no evidence of it and it winds up getting spread around. There were times at nih when patients were trying to do everything, unusual things and the doctor didnt know about. And eventually it was found out that these things didnt work. But they were popular because they had no other choice. Yeah. So the power of antidote is incredibly strong, and the power of vice is incredibly strong. Those are two things that are think a very recurrent issues that you see. If someone we trust says that they use some snake oil and worked incredibly well, you will go along with that because you trust them. A lot of the patent medicines in the late 1800s and early 1900s that were being sold all over the place and had these really ridiculous claims that couldnt help of work based on the fact that a lot of the advertisements said mrs. Baker says this shared her, you know, hair problem immediately and i will buy this for everyone. All those things feed into your psyche and make you believe what you want to believe. They really do work along those lines of bias which of these incredibly powerful, very subtle methods of manipulating all of us with everything that we do from day to day whether we like it or not. The bandwagon effect or confirmation bias, all these very powerful ways of turning as to do things the way that somebody wants us to go in advertising and that sort of a thing. So yes, absolutely. Those stories can have the power to [inaudible] can you Say Something about the origin of copper as an antiarthritic . I believe some people also think it has something you boosting function immune boosting function . Not really. Copper is not one of the things we study a whole lot. [laughter] to decide to decide. We had a whole chapter on sex and we were talking about ancient times. People are obsessed with sex and fertility , object of interest, so, yeah. Absolutely. There are a couple of recurrent things that i mentioned but as far as like health quackery goes, sexuallity and staying yo, those are the ones you see time and time again because people are reaching hard to to improve on the status quo as much as possible and that continues to be something that everybody is trying to people want to stay young forever. They dont want to be disabled. They want to live till theyre 120 and they want to be having sex at 120, so its just never going to be something that people are not going to be interested in, so any other questions . Thank you very much. [applause] thank you so much for being here and thank you all for coming here tonight. I want to remind you that we have the book for sale for 15 in the hallway, its a Great Holiday gift. [applause] to decide to decide. It was nice to come out here. To [inaudible conversations] good questions. Book tv is on twitter and facebook and we want to hear from you. Tweet us twitter. Com book tv or post a comment on our facebook page. Facebook. Com booktv. [applause] good evening. I am warren