The history of quackery

"History of Charlatanism" of Medicine Doctor Lydia Kang and journalist Nate Pedersen is a story of the worst treatment methods that have been practiced by doctors, healers and scammers from antiquity to the present day. Today, many of these methods seem incredible to us: imagine the times when doctors prescribed opium with an infant crying, mercury with yellow fever and cauterization with hot iron as a means of love torment.

These stories about a strange and frankly dangerous treatment, illustrated by ancient engravings, photographs and advertising sheets, are not only an important evidence of a person’s insurmountable craving for life, but also the opportunity to think that charlatanism is not limited to the past. After all, someday, about our modern ways to stay healthy, beautiful and young, it may also find out that they are meaningless or dangerous.

Usually, when you read books about the history of medicine, you feel horror and fight nausea. This book is different: when you read it, feel horror, fight nausea and have fun a lot. I did not think that it is so cheerful and funny to write about bloodletting, treatment (read: poisoning) with mercury and lobotomy ".
Daria Sargsyan,
Medical journalist, editor of the online publication "Medusa", co-founder of telegram channel "Wet Mantu"

"The book that you are holding in your hands is not only a fascinating and shocking story about quackery and medical fraud permeating the millennia. This is a story about those absurdities and misconceptions from which scientific progress was crystallized, about those errors, thanks to which there is not only modern medicine, but also humanity itself. This is the truth about the origins of that cultural code that is in each of us doctors and patients.
Alexey Kashcheev, neurosurgeon, translator