“For example, here at the museum, we have cholera medication which, if you analyze it, it has nothing to do with battling cholera but it probably took your mind off it,” he adds. For many people who relied on them they often were effective in that they felt better.” “If it’s effective for you, then it’s effective therapy. “It’s difficult to judge the effectiveness of these things because it’s all in the eyes of the beholder,” says curator Paul Robertson. That includes surgical tools, laboratory instruments and medical potions, including a large collection of bottles of the enduringly popular, “Lydia Pinkham’s Vegetable Compound,” a cure-all for “female complaints.” The Museum of Health Care in Kingston, Ontario, houses more than 30 000 medical artifacts from the 18th century onward. The silver bullets include weight-loss gimmicks and cures for life-threatening conditions or diseases, he adds. The basic trick is to say, ‘I’m the only guy with the cure for this.’ When you’re at the point when you’re saying, ‘Look, medical science isn’t doing anything for me,’ that’s when you take the bait.”
“The scammers are constantly preying on the consumer’s sense of fear. Zimmerman says scammers often seek to drive a wedge between patients and doctors. It’s also perhaps a field where, I won’t say biomedicine has failed, but there is a gap there between what organized medicine might be able to do and the quack can slip through the cracks and appeal directly to the customer.” Hucksters may also be more adept at “sensing where the gaps are” in the market, Connor adds. But if you put something on the Internet, who knows how many millions of people you could hit in a millisecond.” “The characteristic 19th-century quack or charlatan would maybe go to a fair and try to drum up business with a crowd of maybe 10 or 20 people around you. So I would be very mobile and it would be very difficult for the long arm of the law or the medical law to catch up with me.”īut scammers can now tap a much larger audience, he adds. If you go back to the 19th century, I could just get on my horse and wagon and go around villages and set up my stall and sell my coloured water for everything that ails you and move on. “The quack has to use different media and you have to pay for that media and that means that they leave a paper trail or some kind of record. There’s probably less quackery than in the past due to stronger government regulation and a medical establishment that quacks find harder to duck, Connor says. Potions and pills promising wondrous benefits have “always been with us,” says Jim Connor, professor of medical humanities and history of medicine at Memorial University in St. They may take on different colours and hues and shapes and sizes over the years, but clearly they seem to be able to exploit the public, or a gullible public, or sometimes a very willing public, with respect to a particular in-vogue ailment or problem or market niche.” “Maybe the common factor is quacks certainly directly respond to the marketplace. “Quackery has always been with us,” says Jim Connor, professor of medical humanities and history of medicine at Memorial University in St. It’s also an excellent example of what are commonly called quack medicines - salves and tonics, pills and potions, gadgets and cures that promise wondrous benefits. Black salve is outright illegal in the US and hasn’t been approved for sale in Canada,” although some websites claim otherwise. So you end up with scars and burn tissue. He said that he experienced a lot of pain with it but he tolerated it as he knew it was working.”Īdam Zimmerman, competition law officer with the Competition Bureau of Canada, which regulates false and misleading advertising, says there’s a good reason the user experienced a lot of pain.
“My Brother-in-law … used Black Salve that I had given him. “About two years ago my Brother-in-law had a cancerous mole on his forehead,” says another. When the doctors took x-rays … the cancerous growth was gone.” … On the 5th day Howard said he passed a large quantity of black, vile smelling feces, apparently the growth itself. “He took an oral dose of Compound X the night before his scheduled surgery. “In the 1960’s (Howard McCreary) was diagnosed as having stomach cancer,” says one website. Marketed under such monikers as Grandma’s Black Salve, American Native Black Salve, Balm of Gilead or Compound X, it has testimonials galore: It’s called black salve and according to dozens of websites, it will cure cancer (skin, prostate, colon and breast), alleviate yeast infections, remove plaque and even eradicate gum disease.