Word: fishbeins
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Like a mother fretting over a willful child's diet, beagle-eyed Dr. Morris Fishbein, editor of the American Medical Association Journal, keeps a sharp watch over the nation's food & drug habits. Last fortnight Dr. Fishbein was worrying about mineral oil, of all things...
...naughty '90s, and peddled the theory that tight-laced corsets were responsible for gallstones. It launched crusades for a "Safe & Sane" Fourth of July, for white blankets (to show dirt) and separate tooth-brushing basins in Pullman washrooms. But far & away its liveliest campaigns have been Fishbein's terrible-tempered crusades against quacks...
...suit, which was filed by the makers of Wine of Cardui, a herb-and-alcohol mixture advertised as a cure for "any sort of female trouble," but widely sold to men who drank it straight). The A.M.A. considered the loss (if damages) a great moral victory. Soon afterward, when Fishbein became editor, he was encouraged to begin beating the bushes. Some of the odd game he flushed: a healer named Percival Lemon Clark, who attacked all diseases with a "sanatology blower" that was supposed to "dry clean the entire [internal] system"; a California dentist who called himself Painless Parker...
A.M.A.'s birth in 1847, Fishbein thinks, ranks in historical and scientific importance with two other events of that same year: Helmholtz's discovery of the law of conservation of energy and the first use of chloroform in anesthesia. In those days, it took only 16 weeks of medical study to get a doctor's diploma. The A.M.A. was founded, by a zealous doctor named Nathan Smith Davis, primarily to raise medical training standards...
...greatest charlatan in medical history," Fishbein thinks, was the late John R. Brinkley, famed "goat gland doctor," who narrowly missed being elected governor of Kansas. At one time Brinkley had three yachts, a 16-cylinder red Cadillac, diamond rings, an estate with great fountains illumined by his name in electric lights, and a $1,300,000 income from gullible patients who insisted on being grafted with goat glands (at $750 an operation). Fishbein observes that the only thing to do with "great charlatans of the Brinkley type" is to lock them up, but thinks that the public's gullibility...