Quacks and Crusaders: The Fabulous Careers of John Brinkley, Norman Baker, and Harry Hoxsey (review)

In this interesting and enlightening book, Eric Juhnke has extended our insights into twentieth-century quacks and quackery—and their patients. At first glance, these three men—John Brinkley, Norman Baker, and Harry Hoxsey—could not seem more different.

John Brinkley peddled his elusive fountain of youth over the radio waves from the 1920s to the 1940s in the form of transplanted goat glands: "He had observed that goats were the most virile and healthy animals in the world" (p. 6). Norman Baker also started as a radio peddler, dispensing free medical advice on everything from lockjaw to appendicitis until he began to appreciate the financial possibilities of cancer treatment. Advertising in 1929 that cancer was "curable without operation, radium, or x-ray" (p. 46), he opened his own clinic in Muscatine, Iowa, charging fees ranging from $10 to $1000 for diagnosis and treatment of cancer. Cut off from the airways by the Federal Radio Commission and defeated in the courts, Baker sought redemption in Iowa politics, but he failed in that endeavor as well. After relocating his clinic to Eureka Springs, Arkansas, he was again put out of business in 1940 and died in 1958 from cirrhosis of the liver.

By the 1960s, the cancer clinic industry centered around one Harry Hoxsey, whose original Dallas clinic had opened in 1936 and began to expand into satellite offices throughout the country. With separate remedies for "external" and "internal" cancers, the clinic attracted thousands of patients willing to spend hundreds and even thousands of dollars for treatment. By the early 1960s, an unprecedented campaign of collective wrath was unleashed on Hoxsey and his clinics by almost every professional and governmental medical group around. Led by Oliver Field, director of the American Medical Association's Bureau of Investigation, the campaign against Hoxsey soon became broad-based, including Sloan Kettering Institute, the National Cancer Institute, and the Food and Drug Administration, which went so far as to issue a public warning poster (modeled after the FBI Most Wanted List) on the dangers of renouncing conventional care to take Hoxsey's treatment.

Although these three Midwesterners took different paths through the medical borderlands, Juhnke demonstrates quite conclusively that they shared several attributes. First, they were businessmen who made a profit, beloved in the communities they enriched. Second, they were able politicians, albeit always for the underdog party. Third, they had more than their share of willing patients. Juhnke argues convincingly for and then provides us with a nuanced portrayal of these willing patients. Examining testimonial evidence, he concludes that the patients "were not isolated among the desperate, ignorant, or the lunatic fringe but represented a cross section of America—farmers, Christians, housewives, African Americans, factory workers, and professionals, whose reasons for choosing quackery over conventional care varied as much as their backgrounds" (p. 117). The public appeal of all three quacks, Juhnke concedes, "was never really bound by the veracity of their medical claims" (p. 120), and their common frame of reference illustrates what he calls an "enduring relationship between populism and alternative medicine" (p. 154). Their "vision of medicine," according to Juhnke united the three men as "compatriots" who, in turn, "championed common Americans, denounced elitism, and affirmed rustic values" (p. xii).

Baker and Brinkley were at the height of their popularity when radio was new, and far-flung rural listeners gratefully responded to their folksy rhetoric and uplifting messages, "homey rather than highbrow" (p. 128). Listeners often seemed to be responding more as voting citizens than as medical consumers. When Brinkley's and Baker's activities drew scrutiny by local courts and medical societies, they easily (though not always successfully) capitalized on their mastery of the rhetoric of radio and gravitated toward politics, rather than revamping their medical message to stay one step ahead of the local medical establishment. Hoxsey's situation, in his early years, was much the same. Though his political...