Quackery
by Lydia Kang, MD & Nate Pedersen
Age Range: 16+
Content Notice: Mature content, mildly disturbing imagery
Faith Based: No
ISBN: 978-0761189817
Rating: 
PLOT SYNOPSIS (from the back of the book)
What won’t we try in our quest for perfect health, beauty, and the fountain of youth? Packed with outlandish cures and outright scams, Quackery is a visually rich, humorously macabre, smart, and lively journey into the dark side of medical history. Revisit a time when doctors prescribed morphine for crying infants, when snorting skull moss was a cure for a bloody nose, and when dieters took to ingesting sanitized tapeworms. From monkey glands to blood jam, Quackery shows us that when it comes to health, humans will believe literally anything.
THE BOTTOM LINE
Gross, informative, and entertaining.
THOUGHTS
Quackery is a grossly entertaining highlight reel of the worst treatments in medical history. Nothing here is particularly groundbreaking, but it is amusing to see all the mind-blowingly bad ways people have chased health and beauty over the millennia. The most important lesson from this book is to take a sobering look at our own medical and health practices. After all, many of these “cures” from the past were the leading medical theories of the day. In a century, what practices and rituals of today will be decried with the same level of disbelief and ridicule?