Evening everyone. Im tracy diamond from the programs and Locations Department of the Enoch Pratt Free Library and welcome to writers lives at the Maryland State Library for the blind and handicapped. Thank you for joining us to welcome doctor lydia kang to baltimore. We hope you will join us for some of our upcoming events. And stearns, author of redefining age a caregivers guide to living your best life will be reading on wednesday, november 29 at 12 pm at the Hatton Senior Center in canton and we are hosting, same day, mark oden, author of play 1968 a turning point of the american war in vietnam and conversation with Steve Luxenberg at 7 pm at church of the redeemer and you can sign up for our email list or pick up a liar on the table to the right. So tonight, doctor lydia kang, a practicing internal medicine physician and author of adult and the young Adult Fiction will share from her book quackery a brief history of the worst ways to cure anything cowritten with nate peterson, 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. You will read about times when acute callous was en vogue or how families passed down heirloom pills. Yes, think about how you had to pass those down. Kang and peterson right with fascination for and dark humor. The platitudes , no pain no gain and what doesnt kill you makes you stronger come to mind while reading that blood on a coat was a sign of a good surgeon or that electric unbreakable corsets were topoftheline. Many of the proposed remedies were comically useless and wildly high, yet conventional wisdom was that poison is not a poison in the hands of a physician. While reading quackery, you may begin to wonder what products are peddled today that could elicit another volume of the book in 100 years. It was painful to be a human and it still is. Your to provide levity and wisdom inthe quest for health, give a warm welcome to doctor lydia kang. [applause] thank you. Can you hear me okay . So thank you so much for having me here today. And its nice to be back home. I was born and raised, 18 years in baltimore and i have been since then 16 years in new york city and 10 years in omaha nebraska which is where i live with my kids and Practice Medicine at the university of nebraska. Whats, one second. Trying to get this right. I write other books as well so quackery is my first Nonfiction Book and i was excited to work on it before that, control and catalyst were my first first books i ever wrote. And they are both young adult Science Fiction novels. Mymost recent adult , my first adult book is a beautiful poison and it 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 poison that one came out in august and my most recent young adult book is the november girl with with entangled teen and mcmillan and it came out about a week ago. That takes place on Lake Superior and it was inspired by the song the wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald by gordon lightfoot, one of my favorite songs. Its a heartbreaking song and i knew one day i was going to contribute to it and this is what this book is about, shes the witch of november who takes down ships. But were not going to talk about any of that today. We are going to talk about quackery. What im going to do is take you through a tour of the book. Theres too much to talk about in one evening so i figured id talk about my favorite subjects in the book and i figured a good place to start would be with snake oil. Its interesting depending on my audience, sometimes i ask dunes in middle school whose heard of the term snake oil or Snake Oil Salesman and no hands go up at all and i look at them and go you dont know this . The term snake oil is you know, a product that is fake or someones out there just to make a buck off of you, it doesnt work and a Snake Oil Salesman is a charlatan, someone doing their best to make money off of you knowing what they are trying to talk doesnt work well but the story comes from a real person, Clark Stanley in the late 1800s. He was at this exposition and he made this very, you know, shall we, it was pretty funny because he basically took a real live snake and it was a rattlesnake and he added that boiling water and he killed the snake and plunged it into the boiling water and skidded off and put it in jars and sold it. He claimed that his snake oil could cure anything. Achy joints, if youre not feeling well, clark family Snake Oil Liniment could cure it all. By the time they got a chance to look at the contents of the liniment they realized it didnt have any snake opponents in it at all, it was fake. The interesting thing about it is it was born of a 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 doing a lot of this work and they brought with them a medicine that was made of chinese water snakes, all liniment and they used it on their aching joints. These chinese water snakes is a file in omega3 fatty acids which does have some antiinflammatory activity and Clark Stanley saw this, but it was exotic, but he could make his own but the interesting thing is that in the United States, we dont have chinese water snakes for one thing and for another thing we have a lot of rattlesnakes but they dont have as much fat in them as a chinese water snake, nor did they have the content of the only three fatty acids so he was working on the concept that made sense but in the end it was just smoke and mirrors. So thats the origin of the concept of or the term snake oil and the Snake Oil Salesman. So all right, onto the next subject. Does anybody know what this is . It does look like a knife, can you be more specific western yes, it is for bleeding someone. You can buy these on the internet, get them on ebay and i thought of bringing one with me on to her until i realized the tsa would probably tackle me. I said im not going to do that. Exactly. This is actually called a spleen. And it is a knife that is used pacifically for bloodletting. If you notice there is a notch on the side and thats the notch, its not the long blade that used the cost, its the knife used to puncture blood vessels for bloodletting. Were going to talk a little bit about bloodletting because it is a practice that has gone on for hundreds and hundreds of years. Nowadays we see it in the movies and we scratch our head and wonder, that persons really sick, the last thing you want to do is suck two pints of blood out of them when they need that blood and now when most physicians realize that we do as much as we can to keep peoples blood in them and not spill it when we dont have to. But why did this happen for so long. It really was a main part of medical therapies for a long time. And it goes back to the ancient humoral theory of medicine. So this is a bit of a graph that shows you some of the concepts behind humoral medicine. This is from the time of hippocrates so hundreds of years bc that the human body, the health of the human body was based in the four humors. London, yellow bile, black bile and phlegm in these four elements were in your body in this balance and when you were sick, they would blame the illness on an imbalance of one of those humors to go to get things in order you would do something to maybe get rid of the blood if there was too much of the blood humor or if you had too much of the black bile, you would give yourself something that would make you have horrible diarrhea and have this blackish colored stool and that would mean you would get that black while balanced out. They even blamed peoples personalities on whether or not you had a tendency toward one tumor or another so if you look like one of those people, thats what they said you look like that because you had too much phlegm or too much blood. There were relationships with the time of the year, the earth elements like dryness, witness, fire, those sorts of things so for most of the time it was often bought that blood was a dominant humor that tend to be out of whack more often than the other ones and that is why bloodletting was so commonly used to treat many things because they kept blaming it on too much of the blood humor. This is a different way of taking blood out. When i showed you before the spleenwas a pretty big knife, about the state. And oftentimes they used it on larger people and horses actually. This is were black and they still are blended today as someone recently told me at one of my meetings that this is commonly done with some thoroughbreds after a bad race when they go into Heart Failure but other methods of bloodletting existed as well and this one is called a scarf dictator which sounds like a movie, a gory movie. Its from around 1820 to 1870s and you can get these on ebay, apparently you can find all these things on ebay but the reason that work is that it had somewhere around 15 blades in it and it was springloaded so you would put it against somebodys arm , sort of touch the trigger point and the blades would entail your arm and you have all these different cuts. A theory often used with a coping method so they would take a small glass cup , heat it over a flame and they would put the cup on top of, the cop on top of the cut and once it formed the seal and the air inside the cup cooled it would suck out more of the blood. So verification was often used with cupping as a method. Now, most of the time when bloodletting was done it was done in a classic way which was from the upper arm, the distillate vein which is located in your arm. Many of you gentlemen probably recognize that hole. From outside a barber. The year goes to the barber and there is a poll still outside of your barber there you go. Its still around. You know what colors are on the pole outside of your establishment . Certainly red and white. So just red and white. Its not always red white and blue, times its only red and white but the history behind this goes back to bloodletting. Counselors in roman times and media times, there were surgeon barbers who were the people who took care of bloodletting so it wasnt your physician, i would order the surgeon barber to take off a pipe and they would scurry off and get that done. Along with getting your nails cut and your hair trimmed and your rotten teeth pulled. You boiled the land. They did all those kinds of things. So what they often did was put a turn against on your arm. Often times it was a white cloth so that symbolized white. When you get your blood drawn at the doctors or something, you probably are used to having them put a turn iton and they will Say Something like , pump your fist. Instead they would often have you hold onto a pole and the reason for that is blood flow onto your arm and allows more backflow so you get a better reading. Eight have you holding onto the pole and we have a pole. At the bottom of the bowl there was a dish and so sometimes would hold the pole downward. The blood would run down your arm and collecting the dish. So theres the red color that symbolized the blood as well as possibly the arteries, but they were using the arteries. The blue often times symbolized the blue color of the pain but this is where that comes from. Barbers back when were the ones doing a lot of the bleeding and that pole was a useful instrument for them. Next time you get your haircut you can ask your barber if he knows his bloodied history and where he got his trade from 100 years ago. Okay. So we talked about using liens, we talked about using smart dictators and good oldfashioned tourniquet there were other ways to remove blood from the body as well. This is a woodcut from 1638 that shows a lady and some leeches on herself and shes got a nice bowlful of leeches. So why do people use leeches . Instead of bloodletting, any ideas . [inaudible] they can. Why else would they be used . To suck the blood, right. Who here has been by a leech . Whos ever been bitten by a leech in this room . You have. Did you remember getting bit . No, because leeches are very stealthy about biting. In their saliva they have an anesthetic which means when they bite you, it goes nonvery quickly and they also have an anticoagulant in their saliva which is a blood thinner so that way they can bite surreptitiously so you dont know its happening because the last thing they want you to know is see it and slap it off and pull it off because they want a nice long drink and they will bite surreptitiously, painlessly, suck out anywhere from a teaspoon to a tablespoon of blood depending on the size of the leech and when their fold, they just let go, roll off and go on their merry way. Leeches compared to a knife is a lot gentler. Some people found it was more humane as a means of bloodletting. The great thing about leeches is that they are small, which means that you can use them in all these different parts of your body that you might want not not want to do bloodletting often times there was this idea that if you can bleed close to the place where you are having a problem, you would make that problem better. If you had aheadache , its hard to do bloodletting from your head, what are you going to tourniquet, your neck . So leeches might be used so they can apply leeches to your temple or behind your ear if you had your rate, to your stomach if you had a stomachache. Leeches were used everywhere and anywhere and when i say everywhere, i mean everywhere. So they could be used in your armpit, on the gentlemen they could be used on the testicles, for ladies, they could be used internally. They would sometimes have been applied to the cervix and they were also apply rectally. There was rectal leaching that was happening too. They decided they needed to take care of that area, there was a special rod that had rooms where you can put the leech and off it went. Im so sorry. I hope you guys already ate. I noticed a couple people crossing their legs going all my god. They had chairs so you can do rectal leeches. Before leeches, honestly, it was really kind of sad. These are a couple of leech applicators because interestingly with leeches, they are hungry and you pick them up and they will swing around and try to bite you because theyre hungry. These were a couple leech applicators where you can put the squirmy guy in there and apply it to the place where you wanted to. Even did leachings inside your mouth or your tonsils but they dont want you to swallow the leech because they want to release the leeches. This is not a time of single use anything and leeches are hard to get by because they became so popular that there was such a huge demand in england and the United States that there were millions of leeches being deported and there was a demand so they wanted to reuse them. Sometimes they would so a silk thread through the tale of a leech and they would sort of put it down your throat so they could get right on your tonsils and when the leech was done instead of choking on it or swallowing it, they would yank it up bya string and get the leech back. They had all these books and compendiums on how to take care of leeches and keep them alive and all sorts of things but leeches didnt always want to do their job. Ifound out that they can have a blood feeding and six months later they are still fine. Though the doctors or the medical people who were using them might be no, we need you to eat a little bit. Sometimes they would get them in wine get them in the mood. Sometimes they would cut the skin a little bit, get blood flowing just to entice it to take a bite. When they wanted to pull it off, they didnt want to yank it off, they would flick it with your finger or pour salt on it. These poorly just, i dont think they had quite a great life, especially when you consider i read this one passage where someone wanted the leech to continue to get the blood out, but they didnt want to switch leeches so they just caught the tail off so it would drink and drink and then never get full. It was the sisyphus of the leech world, its kind of terrible. So it was amazing how much was written on how to take care of them, use them right. There were cases where there was one written case of a young girl getting syphilis because of a reused leech off a previous person who had syphilis and there were cases of people who had gotten written so many times by leeches that they bled to death though it wasnt always such a gentle treatment. I have a treat for you. This is my pet leech. I gave a 10 x talking a lot several weeks ago and i brought a leech with me to make a point onto the stage, but i also realized if i did that i would have to take care of this leech for life so heres what he looks like. Hes actually quite colorful. These red, green, a little bit of purple. Not me. My kids have refused to let him eat off of me. We feed him use of defrosted beef liver. We drop it in their and he gets excited, start swimming around the bowl but he cant find it so we have to bring them closer and he sucks on one side and the other side and at one point he stops and keeps going around the bowl. He seemed to recognize hes on a diet, not the real thing, you will but so far so good. Doing okay but his full name is george leech referred legions time but he goes by doctor bleached and stein depending whos in the house. He does sit in our kitchen. He tried to escape ones, that was interesting. He lives in a fishbowl and we had a piece of plastic rock on top but after we had him for a couple weeks we realized he never went out of the water so this one day i took the top offand went to work , came home and my daughter, i had dropped the kids off and came home 10 minutes after that and my daughter ran in. She was like, hetried to escape. He washalfway across my Kitchen Floor like the Sahara Desert of leeches. I dont know what he was aiming for, it clearly wasnt be liver because hes unsatisfied with the menu at the house but she put him back in the bowl and now we keep the top on. So we dont wake up to have nightmares ofleeches trying to find us. Okay. So were going to talk about bold now. Gold is not just one topic because people wear it for jewelry, its been around forever as a substance that we have craved and wanted and we use it as money. A lot of people have thought that gold is particularly special and must have some sort of magical qualities to it in medicine as well and part of that comes from the idea that gold doesnt tarnish. Real gold, just leave it out there. It wont tarnish like over and that quality of it not changing made it feel like it was this really magical elements. Above and beyond other elements. Obviously optimists were obsessed with making more of it but the problem they realized early on was that if you take a chunkof gold, pure gold and you swallow it, its going to pass right through your digestive system , your feces, out pretty bling doubt but it doesnt do a whole lot because you dont absorb the lamentable. So for quite some time people figured you know, gold must be good for you somehow but if we can figure out a way to make it absorbable, then we got our stuff. In the middle ages, around the 13th century they finally figured out how to make this solution that was called aqua red here which means royal water and this water actually dissolved gold and ones that pass, you can make a gold so and eat it and absorb it. So this aqua reggio was made in this very toothsome concoction metric acid and hcl so you can dissolve gold. When you do that it turns into that yellow liquid down there. So yes, it works. The problem was when you drank it the toxicity profile was terrible though people would get something called auric fever where they had fevers, chills, shaking. They felt really bad so it was easy to get poisoned by goal. They accomplished what they wanted but the end product wasnt very good. Another product they had was absorb all was something called eating gold which unfortunately would spontaneously explode. Sometimes advancements are a good thing. Now, just because gold didnt turn out to be a great treatment doesnt mean people didnt still use it to sell stuff. There were people who would paint rocks and try tosell them off as the real thing or make cordials they claimed had gold in them but didnt. [inaudible] they do and we mention that in the book as well. There are several things in the book that seem kind of ridiculous or strange that have reallife usage and that is one of them. Gold is also using electron microscopy for lifetime the gold was used in Rheumatoid Arthritis because it helps with swelling in the joints for ra but most rheumatologists dont use it because of the toxicity profile is not very good and there are better medicines today but in the late 1900s and early 20th century, people thought that gold could be this fantastic way of curing drunkenness. There was a gentleman named doctor keeley who granted, he had very good ideas because he did believe that alcoholism was a disease. The unfortunately also believed he could cure it very easily. He had this sanitarium around the country where you could go there if you were a drunk and they would live you up several times a day and give you a shot of something and you would drink this gold elixir, bold tonic and after you were doing this for a couple weeks you would be cured of their your drunkenness, sent off without alcohol and you were good to go. When they kept trying to secretly test his drinks and things likethat, it didnt have any gold in it at all. He didnt really say it out loud. He said theres gold in everything, isnt there . Maybe theres gold in air so there must be some bold and mitotic but when they tested them, if he had of the tonic over and sent test this they would find gold. If someone grabbed something off theshelf and tested it would find no gold. What theyfound in his drinks were things like tennis, opium , alcohol. So it was full of all these other substances that probably made the alcoholic forget they were missing alcohol because either they were getting alcohol or drunk on Something Else but that went on for a while and until his death he never revealed the actual contents of his special elixirs. Okay. So on to the next subject, this is one of my favorite subjects of the book, mostly because it was the most horrific and shocking to me as a physician but we are now going to enter the realm of quirks and cannibalism medicine. Okay. So what you see here, 1618 the gallows at tyburn england. And whats going to happen here is that from criminals, most likely young males criminals are going to get on and after the hangman or the executioner says okay, they are officially dead, what happened was people would go up to the swinging bodies and if they had a wart on their hand or a boil, they would run it on the dead body. On occasion they would let the body down and cut their neck open, get blood and people who suffered from epilepsy would drink the blood because they knew this was a surefire way to take care of their epilepsy. So courts 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 fat. They often got to keep the body after birth if they were , say, given to a medical person for dissection and they would harvest the fat and sell it as a liniment for people who use it on all sorts of things. Use it for symptoms of rabies, use it for aching joints or any kind of skin condition. They call it hangman cells and poor center staff and man greece but it was a commonly used treatment that the executioners and executioners wives would sell. This sort of healing spirit or healing power in it. Ideally, you wanted someone who was young and healthy, who had died a very sudden death. The last person you want to use for a corpse medicine is someone who was older, someone who has a chronic illness. You want someone who was young and strong and at the peak of the vitality when they die suddenly and hopefully violently. Because all other essence is in them which is why drinking gladiator blood was a popular thing. The executions were also popular. You didnt want to use a home female because females were not considered as strong and you did what somebody was older or wet and ongoing illness. Outside of that there were also other types of corpse medicine. Egyptian mummies. Egyptian mummies for quite a long time were plundered from their tombs. They were dressed up with spices and myrrh, fancy ingredients and sold around your. It was considered one of the best medicines, like topoftheline. If nothing else worked, you needed to use mummia which was what they called it. The interesting thing is that mommies were used as medicine probably because of a a mistak. For a long time there was this Petroleum Product that came out of the ground that was called mummia. In persian, a word for blacks, sort of waxy black substance. Used in things like that the photos are helpful. Im not sure exactly how it happened, someone saw a blackish material inside the courts and said this is the same thing. But this is a different place you 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. So were going to go on to another subject which im sad to say opium, and opium problems is not really left our civilization at all. Seems like its getting worse and worse as we speak. Opium has been used for quite aa long time as well. Alongside many of these very, very harsh treatments. In the beginning of the book we talk about things like mercury. Nobody would willing eat mercury nowadays because we know its toxic. We freak out if theres too much mercury in our fish. We dont want mercury in her medicine or anything like that. Arsenic and strychnine, radioactivity water, these are all things we know now are just awful. Back then those were the main states of treatment with a really harsh. So antimony, for example, make you vomit pretty badly. Mercury products generally gave you horrendous diarrhea. So in comparison to that, things like opium were a lot gentler. They made you feel better. The actually helped with pain. They were not nearly as hard on the body so a lot of people to turn to opium and opium products as way to making them feel better shooting themselves even though it didnt cheer anything. It just make them feel better. So a little back story on one of the monsters of our day, heroin. While opium was being used in pills and things like that, it was easy to get. You could go to your local store and there it was. People are giving it to the babies when they were keeping. They were drinking for whatever made you feel ill. In the 1900s, excuse me, in the 1800s they finally were able to figure up what was the main component and opium that made it so awesome and that was morphing. They isolated morphing and soon after that they also invented the hypodermic syringe. 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 indisputable cases so generally the wealthy were the ones that were suffering from morphine. They realized towards the end of the 1800s there was a big problem with addiction and the want to figure out a way they can take care of pain i wasnt going to be addictive. So the Company Bayer in germany was kind of playing around with two medicines. That it recent been invented. One was aspirin and the other one was called diacetyl morphine. They were trying to figure out what would use this when you make us the money . Delicate aspect is that this will never make us any money. Lets try Something Else. They looked at morphine and they realize they could use very, very little of it and have an effect. They started testing it on themselves and after they tested it on themselves, which is not the way youre supposed to do things today, a lot of the people with the guinea pig said it made them feel heroic. And so heroin was born, the name comes from the german word for heroic. So heroin was born. Baer thought this is going to be fantastic, a great pain reliever. And because you have to use so little because it is so potent it will not be addictive. It was sold as lozenges, cough syrup, pills. And for about two years everybody said heroin its the best thing ever. Physicians writing about in journals saying its not addictive, going to be fantastic. About two years into it they figured out how wrong they were. A couple years later we had the narcotics act to cut passed and start to come in the United States, really regulate the sale and creation and distribution of narcotics. And baer took care without the market and, on, at least for bayer it stop being a product, but the damage was already done. That is sort of the dark, kind of 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 repeated over and over again when it comes to producing new medicines. People give excited, they think its the best thing ever. They start using it everywhere and then they start reeling it in when they realized its even not as good, not as helpful or the side effects are really quite dangerous. Yes . Another one, a second choice that bayer had, aspirin, does do a tremendous amount. They cant earn any money from it now exactly. Aspirin, its funding how they didnt think aspirin was going to be a big deal but aspirin is an incredibly wonderful medication with very strong antiinflammatory effects, its an antiplatelet medicine so it helps quoteunquote thin the blood. It s. A. P. From heart attacks. Its funding how they were kind of wrong about their first choice when you decided to go with heroin. All right. So were going to talk a little bit about mercury. This is another one of the questions were asked middle schoolers and they gave me a blank look, but i asked him how many of you have actually play with mercury as a kid . Yes, many of us, including our videographer. So mercury as many must note, its the silver stuff that you found in thermometers, if the bro, scheduled around the floor and you could play with it. Hopefully you didnt eat it. I will talk about that in a little bit. Mercury is a fascinating element. It is the only metal that is liquid at room temperature. It comes with the name i always pronounce that wrong, which means water silver. Its also called quicksilver. The symbol in the middle is the alchemist symbol for mercury, and 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 purgative to cause horrible amounts of diarrhea. It was used to treat many, many things. It was a staple in the medicine cabinet for quite a long time. This is a woodcut from it shows the various ways that mercury was used to treat syphilis. So syphilis was a major scourge on society for a long time. Everybody, it was easy to get. It was spread through sexual activity. That kind of syphilis that seem to people in the past was really quite bad. People would have like holes in their cheeks and rotting, festering wounds. The poor gentleman down on the right has a case of syphilis agency. Hes got the pox with all the skin manifestations. This poor gentleman in the middle who looks like hes inside a bong or a barrel, so is getting treatment for syphilis using, its kind of a spa treatment. Hes in the barrel, his head is taking at a dinner date they are heating up and up elemental mercury. When you heat it up hot enough it vaporizes so youre getting the paper. Member i told you not to worry too much if youre playing with mercury as a kid . Elemental silver, elementary elemental mercury if you swallow it, if you do get some mercury poison is because some of the Mercury Vapor rises and you absorb it through your intestines. Vaporizing mercury is one of the worst things you can do as far as toxicity that they left it because they felt mercury was working if you showed signs of toxicity. One of the ways you would know that you are getting way too much mercury in a good way was you would create like pints and pints of saliva. So up in the top right there is a poor fellow lying in bed and theres this continual waterfall of saliva coming out of his mouth. They would now we are treating you well if you are just like drooling like crazy, like just pints and pints of drool. Why did he think virtually worked . This was used for hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of years. This was a staple treatment for syphilis. Part of it is because when you touched mercury you know its doing something because it made you 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 sentence all just sort of go away after a few months your and then a couple years you are symptomfree. The second stage comes and get a fox, like the rash all over and after a couple of months that also goes away and you can have a third stage. So people would say all right, come back, ill take some mercury and the wood and guess what, it would go away. They thought it worked. The natural course of the disease fooled people into thinking that it worked. The same thing goes for the common cold. Its going to go away on its own so anything 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. So seizures for many epilepsy sufferers are episodic. They will come, youll have a couple, maybe one, and then you might have a couple days free or a couple weeks free with anything and then youll get another seizure. So its very easy for people to say hey, i just had a seizure, i need to do something. They take something, its gone. Well, it worked. This is a common repeating pattern we saw throughout the book. Were going to do a little bit of an archaeology lesson. Benjamin rush who is one of our founding fathers, he was the physician sort of in charge of the lewis and clark expedition. He was the person who wrote this very long set of papers that detail to lewis and clark how they would take care of themselves on the trip if there to get sick and had to stay healthy what are the things he told him would be, includes own proprietary blend of mercury, and herb that was cathartic and major diarrhea. He called these bills his thunderbolts or his thunder flappers because of what he did to the toilet when you took them. So there are these wonderful documents that a red in his beautiful handwriting the basically said things like when you have some constipation, take one or two of the pills. When youre not feeling like him take one or two of the persian pills. If you feel an illness coming on, take one or two. It went on and on. It was like use for everything. They took somewhere around 600 thunder clappers with them on the trip. Yes, oh, lord is right. 600 of these. We know the pathway that lewis and clark took across the United States, but for a long time we didnt actually know what the specific campsites were. Several years ago in lolo montana citizen excavate and they found a campsite and through carbon dating they figured this was probably the tt everywhere campsite was set and the timing of it, the dating of it matched the time that lewis and clark would have passed through. Now, the expedition was a military one which means they were following the instructions something called the military blue book which told him exactly how to do everything precisely the way you would do in the military. Every time they had a campsite the blue book would say you have to put your latrines 300 feet away from the kitchen area, which is a safe and sensible thing to do. In lolo, montana, when the archaeologists found the kitchen campsite they started sampling the soil in a 300foot radius from there, and mobile they behold they started fighting huge volumes of mercury in the soil at the right depth. They basically had a scatological bingo winner. [laughing] and that is how they were able to document lewis and clark actually, literally, squatted in lolo, montana. [laughing] okay, so were just about finished, our talk, but the last word on mercury. Theres our handsome god in the middle and hes holding, its hard to see but hes holding some of the symbols that he is very famous for. Hes got the wings on his little helmet and hes holding a rod, and if you look carefully you will see that there are two snakes on the rod. So that is the caduceus that he is famous for. Mercury is also not as the god of the the quick tongue and is also, people call them the god of peace and trickery. Now, in 19 the two, 19 at five, the u. S. Army medical corps decided theyre going to make their sort of simple and they grabbed the caduceus and a slap it on there. That was actually the wrong symbol. What they were trying to do, what theyre trying to use the rod of ascepius who was the greek god of healing and medicine, who if you look on the right side that is the flag for the world health organization, and you will notice that the symbol is a a single rod with a snake, no wings, no double snakes. Back when the Army Medical Corps made this mistake again repeated so many times that the caduceus has become synonymous with the medical establishment when, in fact, it is completely wrong. Not only does it symbolize medicine that was used for all the wrong purposes, but also its also like a symbol of the god of fees and trickery, which is last thing you want to do when it comes to quackery and physicians. Its interesting because i just drove by a street like yesterday and there was a physicians sign up that had the caduceus on and i just, i thought i should email him or something. Because he shouldnt have it on there. So most legitimate Health Organizations today, universities and national institutions, if they are going to put a symbol on you notice it is the rod of ascepius and it is correct. But a lot of times because a lot of people dont know the history, youll see the caduceus improperly put on a site 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 got the wrong rod. So were going to finish up. This is the last stop of my tour that they sent me on. My coauthor Nate Pedersen has also finished his torso were 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 he is on twitter as well. You can also find it on my website lydia kang. Com, on twitter, instagram which is my favorite social media, and on facebook. If you ever have any questions just shoot me an email. Im always happy to answer them. I think this is a part will begin 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 the things. I saw a lot of faces tonight, a lot of so i apologize for that, but hope it was entertaining. [applause] i have two questions. Did you purchase your leech on ebay . I did. I think i got it on Something Like leech. Com. I literally googled i want to buy a leech, and it showed up and i bought him. I think he was like seven dollars and he came in the mail in a Little Package and i put them in some water and he starts when it around thought i cant believe i just did that. [laughing] but now we have them forever. We will see how it goes. Secondly, where does the word quackery commit . The term is actually a middle dutch word, black silver which is a is 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 it is originally a dutch word. I would dont think it is quacked up to be what youre advertising, but the part of leeches, are people who collect leech jars. They used to make leech jars and you could buy them, and it was for your leeches. There are many other things, things people used to take them 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 we didnt research but we know is definitely out there. As for the leech jars, they are very much available, again on ebay. I swear i dont represent them and have no stake in ebay whatsoever. You can find it and there beautiful jars with it would keep leeches and carry them around with them. Leeches are interestingly still used today in very particular circumstances. So, for example, if youre getting a surgery in a very delicate place, lets elect the tip of the nose got sliced off and it got so back on, because at such a small piece of tissue and its so susceptible to dying if it swells up enough then it cuts off its own blood supply and that new piece of tissue they just so darn might die. Sometimes hell put a leech on in the leech will decompress some of the extra fluids, keep the blood flowing because of that blood thinning saliva and prevent a piece of tissue from dying. And so there are some surgeons use it. At the university of nebraska i asked one of my friends who is a pharmacist there if they kept the leeches in the pharmacy, and they do. So it is still using very rare circumstances in medicine. Some of the things you talk about have been supported by what was used by sites at the time. Im curious about whats not. Any idea what it is that makes people grab onto certain things, or have you noticed any pattern . Im also thinking more moderate things modern things like [inaudible] yeah. So people are still doing it. Have you noticed any pattern about sort of thing, or something as no real support from any authority . So thats a very good question, like why do some things catch on and find support weather is a scientific basis for it . A lot of times it seems to be supported by some of the great names of the time who are a lot of people have some difficulty opposing them or, for example, you know, peristalsis is one of his great names who decided that a lot of the teachings of hippocrates were not really up to stop because what we needed to do was innocent look at the humor is look at the universe and the cosmos as this macrocosm and the human body was the microcosm, and he could find those relationships you would realize actually mercury was one of these elements that would cure a lot of things because it was like ash, and these other elemental things. So he would have a theory that fit his world and was so bombastic about it, and so [inaudible] it is part of his neighbor he was so bombastic it and he was so vehement about supporting this idea that he had these people gathered ratted and believed the same thing. It lasted for a very, very long time. A lot of it has to do with the cult of personality who speaks the loudest and the strongest about something, it seems to be making the most sense. I think in a lot of other cases, there isnt going to be one obvious answers to why that is, like youre talking about this idea that you can have this vitamin in your body, its not actually a vitamin, that is made of a sinai type compound that will kill cancer cells directly. How does it know to do that . We dont know but they say it does. And it has been disproven multiple times, but as long as there is going to be some, so much of our fax and our research is imperfect and its very easy to find the cracks in the imperfection and use them to support your point of view. I think thats the case with almost everything, not just science and not just medicine, is that you can use what you want selectively to make your case. When you do that its hard to argue with a person because they are so set in believing what they want to because they are very dogmatic. I think thats one of many different subtle components to why quackery is still very much alive today, and while something that seems as ridiculous as those trials because it chemically doesnt make sense to me. [inaudible] exactly. But there are people from the blade that it still works and ask their cancer doctors about it still. There are people who [inaudible] and these people [inaudible] if they does the person wanted if a desperate person wanted to try something and it works, you know, they tell everyone that it works whether there was no evidence of it and winds up getting spread around. There are other times at nih when they were tried very unusual things, and the doctors know about, and eventually it was found out that these things didnt work, but they were popular because they had no other choice. So that power the power of bias is incredibly strong pick those are things that are very recurrent issues that you see. If someone that we trust says that they use some snake oil and it worked incredibly well, people 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 could be held up were based on the fact a lot of their advertisements said mrs. Baker says that this cure her hair problem immediately and i will definitely buy this for everyone. I mean, all those things feed into your psyche and make you believe what you want to believe, and so 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 when we like it or not, the bandwagon effect or confirmation bias are all these very powerful ways of turning us 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 have people do a lot of [inaudible] can you Say Something about the origin of copper [inaudible] some people think it has some function [inaudible] not really. Copper is not one that we say a whole lot about. I know that it has been popping up in a lot of cosmetics and it is been popping up in a lot of Health Supplements as well, but i am not familiar with the Research Behind them, so i cant really speak to that. We did have a tendency in the book to stick to a lot of the all time remedies. Many thanks parvin last decade or so. We didnt have the time nor the page to concentrate on them, so i cant answer that one, sorry. [inaudible] in the other questions . How far back have people try to come up to improve their sexual prowess . Or ever. [laughing] adam and eve . Probably. We had a whole chapter on sex, and were talking about ancient times. People are obsessed with sex and fertility. From the male side as well as the female side. But it has never not been an object of interest, so yeah, absolutely. There are a couple of recurrent themes i mentioned, but as far as like how quackery goes, sexuality, staying young, fighting off cancer, those are probably ones that you see time and time again because theyre the ones where people are really reaching hard to improve upon 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 until they are 120 120 and the want to be having sex at 120. So its just never going to be something that people are not going to be interested in. Any other questions . Thank you very much. [applause] thank you so much for being here, thank you all for coming here tonight. I also to remind you that we have the book for sale for 15 in the hallway. Its a Great Holiday gift. Thanks for coming. 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