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Health Fraud: A Hardy Perennial
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 14 October 2011
Extract
Quackery forms a gaudy thread in the fabric of health care through the course of American history. In the colonial years, the American market for commercial self-dosage was dominated by “patent medicines”—some of them actually patented—shipped overseas from the mother country. Packed in containers of distinctive shape, sealed in wrappers printed with boastful therapeutic claims, advertised in the slender newborn press, these British nostrums far overshadowed occasional American imitators.
- Type
- Articles
- Information
- Journal of Policy History , Volume 9 , Special Issue 1: Health Care Policy in Contemporary America , January 1997 , pp. 117 - 140
- Copyright
- Copyright © The Pennsylvania State University, University Park, PA. 1997
References
Notes
1. The historical section that launches this essay has been adapted from my publications: The Toadstool Millionaires: A Social History of Patent Medicines in America before Federal Regulation (Princeton, 1961)Google Scholar; The Medical Messiahs: A Social History of Health Quackery in Twentieth-Century America (updated edition: Princeton, 1992)Google Scholar; “From Hooper to Hohensee,” Journal of the American Medical Association 204 (April 1, 1968): 100–104Google Scholar; “American Health Quackery: AnHistorical View,” Georgia Journal of Science 38 (1980): 33–40Google Scholar; “The Foolmaster Who Fooled Them,” Yale Journal of Biology and Medicine 53 (1980): 555–66.Google Scholar
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