ABSOLUTELY QUACKERS

S. D. Tucker. Quacks! Dodgy Doctors and Foolish Fads Throughout History. Amberley, 2018.

‘Purity’ has been the theme of a few books I have reviewed lately, basing my views on Peter Rogerson’s comments in his last ever Magonia piece: “… surely all the worst crimes are committed in the name of purity and pure lands: pure religion, pure nation, pure race, new model pure people, a pure world cleared of ‘human pollutant’, pure souls freed from organic bodies, pure lands that no actual-existing human being is ever pure enough to inhabit.”

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PLACEBO DEFECT

John S. Haller Jr, Shadow Medicine: The Placebo in Conventional and Alternative Therapies. Columbia University Press, 2014.

The author states his position clearly in the Introduction. His aim is ‘not to lay waste [to] one side or the other in the ongoing feud between the proponents of evidence-based medicine and those supporting unconventional therapies’, and on the whole his objectivity is indeed remarkable, especially for a field that is infamous in its high emotional reaction and indeed academic vendettas.
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THE FORGOTTEN EPIDEMIC

Molly Caldwell Crosby. Asleep: The Forgotten Epidemic that Remains One of History's Greatest Mysteries. Berkeley Books, 2011.

If you were to ask citizens of the United States what was the very worst thing that had happened in their country since the Civil War, I would suspect that at least 90% would say 9/11. Sadly they wouldn't even be close; like the rest of the world their country was torn by two terrible epidemics which swept the world in the wake of the Great War.
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