Posted on Mon, Mar. 21, 2005


 
 R E L A T E D   C O N T E N T  

PETER TOBIA / Inquirer  
Among the phony product pitches on display at the Philadelphia Museum
of Art is this one, created in the 1890s by the celebrated American
artist Maxfield Parrish.


http://www.philly.com/images/philly/inquirer/11187/125155780883.jpg

Charlatans' art

An Art Museum exhibit shows how cure-alls and nostrums were peddled
long ago. Some say quackery is still with us.

By Marie McCullough

Inquirer Staff Writer

Would you buy a product that claimed to treat "all cases of mental and
physical breakdown" and "strengthen the entire system"?

Probably not. It sounds so magical, it has to be quackery.

Then again, lots of popular dietary supplements promise to
"strengthen," "revitalize" or "boost" bodily functions. And somebody
is responding to Internet spam pitching products that purport to
enlarge a certain organ.

"Quacks are a natural part of humanity," says New York City medical
historian William H. Helfand, 78. "People want a magic pill."

Alas, as Helfand's research shows, the magic can take a tragic turn
for patients - financially, emotionally and medically.

Helfand got interested in quackery some 50 years ago when he was a
pharmaceutical marketing executive and discovered that "many of my
predecessors were commonly characterized as charlatans and quacks."
Fascinated, he began collecting and researching historical posters and
advertisements to see how quacks operated - and how fuzzy the line
between orthodox and outlandish can be.

This past weekend, 75 of Helfand's vivid artifacts from 18th- and
19th-century England, France and the United States went on display at
the Philadelphia Museum of Art. Among the artists who created the
pieces were Maxfield Parrish, William Hogarth and Honoré Daumier.

The exhibition is the fourth in a series on medical history, developed
with the support of Philadelphia pharmaceutical firm SmithKline
Beecham Corp. and others.

The exhibit, like Helfand's $40 catalog, is titled "Quack, Quack,
Quack: The Sellers of Nostrums in Prints, Posters, Ephemera & Books."

The title is a hat-tip to Benjamin Franklin, who was well aware that
so-called "regulars" (trained physicians) were not much more effective
or popular than "irregulars" (quacks) back in the 1700s.

As Helfand explains, Franklin was appointed in 1784 to a prestigious
French scientific task force that exposed Franz Mesmer - the father of
"animal magnetism" and "mesmerizing" - as a fake. Franklin agreed, but
he also poked fun at his learned colleagues' eagerness to accuse
rivals of being quacks. Jotting in the margins of the report, he said
it was fitting that the coat of arms stamped on the first page showed
ducks with sprigs in their mouths - to prevent them from saying
"quack, quack, quack."

It should be noted, as Helfand's catalog does, that Franklin's famous
Poor Richard's Almanac was full of ads for elixirs and balms.

Historians say the word quack may have come from the Dutch word
quacksalver - someone who boasts about his salves - or from the
squawking theatrics of itinerant peddlers of nostrums, who employed
magicians, musicians and dancers to help draw crowds.

A poster in the exhibit caricatures the powerful British prime
minister, William Gladstone, as a traveling quack. Overdressed,
bug-eyed and yelling, he sells cans of Infallible Home Rule Ointment
as the remedy for England's misrule in Ireland.

Although most quacks had no medical training, a few were credentialed
physicians. Helfand cites Samuel Hahnemann, the developer of
homeopathy. Philadelphia's Hahnemann University Hospital is named in
his honor, though it is not a homeopathic center.

Today, more than 200 years after Hahnemann's heyday, his followers
swear by his therapies, while consumer advocates dismiss them as
placebos because they contain virtually no active ingredients.

"Homeopathy gets bigger all the time and has a lot of staunch
defenders," says Helfand. "They tell me I have no right" to include
homeopathy as quackery.

Steven Barrett, a retired Allentown psychiatrist who runs the Web site
Quackwatch.org, said Helfand's catalog and research reveal much about
the current situation.

"What strikes me is that things haven't changed that much," he said.
"Only superficial things about quackery have changed. Quack cures are
rampant, and people spend billions of dollars on it."

In the 1800s, both regulars and irregulars prescribed mercury,
opiates, powerful laxatives and other dangerous drugs. Physicians,
however, cornered the market on bloodletting, surgery and hospitals -
which were denounced as deadly in posters commissioned by quacks such
as James Morrison.

Morrison, who claimed his vegetable pills could fix the "blood
impurities" that he said caused all disease, was the subject of many
lampoons. The exhibit includes an 1841 print of a horrified-looking
grocer sprouting plants all over his body because he ate "132 boxes"
of Morrison's pills, then got caught in the rain.

Another famous quack, Frenchman Angelo Francois Mariani, made the
claim about treating "all cases of mental and physical breakdown" and
renovating the body with his tonic. While it had no therapeutic value,
it was potent stuff - cocaine dissolved in Bordeaux wine. The exhibit
includes an ad for Vin Mariani, done in garish yellows and oranges by
painter Jules Chéret, showing two Folies Bergere-ish women floating on
air as they imbibe.

Mariani sent out complimentary cases of his wine, then published the
thank-you notes as testimonials, turning popes, kings, presidents,
inventor Thomas Edison, actress Sarah Bernhardt and other famous
people into his sales force.

"He was rather brilliant in the way he advertised and promoted it,"
Helfand says.

Some quacks were not so brilliant. An exhibit ad shows an emaciated,
pocked, bloody woman named Nancy Linton - after she had drunk a glass
of Swaim's Panacea to treat her scrofula, a form of glandular
tuberculosis.

Pills and potions were only a small part of the weirdness that passed
for therapy. Quacks loved technology, and used electric belts, "ozone
boxes," light passed through blue glass, even radium. The exhibit
includes an ad showing a beautiful woman holding Le Solitaire - an
electric gizmo - as it destroys a microbe that looks like a ghoul from
Ghostbusters.

By the turn of the 19th century, muckraking magazine journalists were
writing exposes about the toxic ingredients in many patent medicines.
Newspapers, which depended on ad revenue from such products, were
conspicuously mum, Helfand says.

Under pressure from reformers, Congress in 1906 passed the Pure Food
and Drug Act. This and subsequent laws curbed the most egregious
abuses of quackery.

Today, while most quacks have toned down the hype in view of modern
medical knowledge and regulation, "they have also learned to take
advantage of the anonymity of the Internet to claim excessive benefits
for their products," Helfand concludes in his catalog.

"Quackery has shown that it can adapt itself to almost any prevailing
political and regulatory system... . Despite what we do, the quacks
and their nostrums will be with us forever."

If You Go

"Quack, Quack, Quack: The Sellers of Nostrums in Prints, Posters,
Ephemera & Books" is on exhibit through June 26 in the Berman Gallery
at the Philadelphia Museum of Art. For more information, go to
http://www.philamuseum.org.

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