Marketplace of the Marvelous: The Strange Origins of Modern Medicine [Kindle Edition] Author: Erika Janik | Language: English | ISBN:
B00DXKG9RW | Format: PDF, EPUB
Marketplace of the Marvelous: The Strange Origins of Modern Medicine
Free download Marketplace of the Marvelous: The Strange Origins of Modern Medicine from with Mediafire Link Download Link An entertaining introduction to the quacks, snake-oil salesmen, and charlatans, who often had a point
Despite rampant scientific innovation in nineteenth-century America, traditional medicine still adhered to ancient healing methods such as induced vomiting and bleeding, blistering, and sweating patients. Facing such horrors, many patients ran with open arms to burgeoning practices promising new ways to cure their ills: Hydropaths promised cures using "healing tubs." Franz Anton Mesmer applied magnets to a patient's body, while Daniel David Palmer restored a man's hearing by knocking on his vertebrae. Phrenologists emerged, claiming the topography of one's skull could reveal the intricacies of one's character. Bizarre as these methods may seem, many are the predecessors of today's notions of health. We have the nineteenth-century practice of "medical gymnastics" to thank for today's emphasis on daily exercise, and hydropathy’s various water cures gave us the notion of showers and the mantra of "eight glasses of water a day." These early medical “deviants,” including women who had been barred from the patriarchy of “legitimate doctoring,” raised questions and posed challenges to established ideas, and though the fads faded and many were discredited by the scientific revolution, some ideas behind the quackery are staples in today's health industry. Janik tells the colorful stories of these "quacks," whose shams, foils, or genuine wish to heal helped shape and influence modern medicine. Download latest books on mediafire and other links compilation Marketplace of the Marvelous: The Strange Origins of Modern Medicine
- File Size: 1973 KB
- Print Length: 353 pages
- Page Numbers Source ISBN: 080702208X
- Publisher: Beacon Press; 1 edition (January 7, 2014)
- Sold by: Amazon Digital Services, Inc.
- Language: English
- ASIN: B00DXKG9RW
- Text-to-Speech: Enabled
X-Ray:
- Lending: Not Enabled
- Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #374,255 Paid in Kindle Store (See Top 100 Paid in Kindle Store)
This very intelligent, informed, fascinating and entertaining book will likely appear on the bestseller list - if the PR for it is on its toes. Erika Janik has researched the history of medicine, particularly medicine in the United States from the 17th century to the present and has uncovered some gripping information that should alter the manner in which holistic medicine is viewed today. While more and more people are struggling to get off the obesity wagon and the chronic disease train and finally paying attention to nutrition, forsaking processed foods and fast foods and refined sugar etc, and acknowledging the importance of daily exercise, paying attention to pollution and its effects on our environment, and embracing Eastern medicine in the form of acupuncture and meditation – while these changes are gaining hold of our thinking, Erika Janik has explored the origins of the current forms of medical advances and made some rather startling discoveries that deserve widespread acknowledgment.
In a book sprinkled with old photographs and minibiographies of such people like Mark Twain, Louisa May Alcott, Mary Baker Eddy, Samuel Thomson and many more – names that put faces to incidents and trends so that we can connect more easily – Janik discusses the origins of snake oil (many types actually contained viable medical cures such as quinine for malaria, etc), phrenology, hydropathy (the importance of baths and of hydration by drinking copious amounts of water each day as a means of staying healthy or combating disease), homeopathy, patent medicines, osteopathy, chiropractic, hypnosis, phlebotomy (blood letting) and other branches of alternative medicine.
I am fascinated by modern remedies and am somewhat of a self-healer—always looking for that nutrient or that vitamin that will turn me healthy and slim. I read every article about the latest miracle supplement so I figured this book would be right up my alley, and I was mostly right.
It is incredible how many crazy theories captured the contemporary imagination, at least for a while. If anything is missing from this book, I have no idea what it could be since the breadth and scope are so wide: water cures, mind cures, diagnosis by head shape, something called mesmerism which was supposed to be magnetic in origin but resembles hypnotic suggestion. Of course, the usual thing you would expect of bleeding, purging, etc. All of the theories were serious in their time and the author treats them with academic respect—quite a feat at times.
As we get further into the book we go into homeopathy (which is still active today and which was the first attempt at quantified and tested scientific research. There is chiropractic science, also still practiced though (hopefully) with a bit more care. And my favorite chapter: patent medicines. I can just imagine myself cooking up my own medicinals, as the woman of each house was bound to do. I had read before that Coca-cola started out as a patent medicine and the book confirmed it. As it happens, so did Dr. Pepper, Phillips Milk of Magnesia, and Luden Brothers cough drops. The book is just full of fun little facts like these.
I only have two negatives to mention and they deserve to be treated as minor since they reflect personal preferences:
**the first is that there might just be too much detail. This is sort of an academic treatise and it isn’t fast reading, fascinating as the subject might be.
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