Quacks Are for Ducks: Medical Mishaps and Miscreants

Tis the season to sign up for health insurance, create health savings accounts, and get your health for the next year in order. I've found some books that will make you very glad that if you do get sick, at least you're doing it in the twenty-first century. Medicine has been full of quacks, opportunists, and snake oil salesmen, and the theme of these books is to be judicious in evaluating claims to your health. Alternately witty and hair-raising and sometimes both at once, these are books on the history of the convergence of science and medicine. 

Quackery, by Lydia Kang and Nate Pedersen, takes us on a tour of false cures, from ancient China to light therapy, arsenic to zootherapy (you don't want to know, but if you do, pick up this book). Lavishly illustrated and full of irreverent wit, the authors take you on a merry tour of frauds that at best won't do anything, but most likely will make you much worse.  

Paul Offit argues passionately for proper research and common sense in Pandora's Lab. Starting with the opium poppy and man's war on pain, Offit looks at seven discoveries that have done harm to humans and the world around them. Offit also looks at scientists, including Nobel winners, who strayed into pseudoscience because they were unwilling to change with the data. A sobering look at the fallibility of humans in science, Offit's sardonic wit is present throughout.

Lindsey Fitzharris has written an excellent biography of Joseph Lister in The Butchering Art. Lister was reviled early in his career for going into the manual labor of surgery and his promotion of Louis Pasteur's germ theory. However, he was fortunate in his patients: Queen Victoria was one, and the data backed him up. The descriptions of early Victorian surgeries and operating theaters are truly cringe-inducing, and this highly accessible biography makes you glad of Lister's advances.  

It used to be that the best way to study the brain was to damage it. In The Tale of the Dueling Neurosurgeons by Sam Keane, we get the history of neuroscience. Until the twentieth century, most study of the human brain was courtesy people who had survived traumatic, obvious brain injuries. Of course, dissection also played a role, as this compelling history makes clear. Bad science eventually begets good science in another book that even those completely unfamiliar with the subject can read.

Got more cautionary tales of medicine? Tell us in the comments.