https://www.orlandosentinel.com/space/la-sci-sn-gut-bacteria-aging-20181115-story.html

Look at this damn mouse. Wow!

https://blog.undoctored.com/stay-40-years-old-next-40-50-60-years/

https://blog.undoctored.com/l-reuteri-yogurt/

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3879365/

Hitler was also a terrible patient, the kind that thinks he know better than his doctor, and did a bunch of self medication, like drinking Ballistol for his stomach complaints.

On the other hand, a lot of quackery has some basis in reality. Graham mentions the bacteria pills, and yet today, fecal transplants are an effective treatment for C-Dificile (the only really effective one), and I saw a recent article about a possible like between the gut biome and Parkinson’s. I can well see why gut bacteria from an individual who seemed immune to intestinal complaints would be a viable treatment for same.

A lot of the weird hormonal treatments of the ’20s and ’30s (as mentioned in the book), still have at least some basis in science. Testosterone is still testosterone, synthetic, natural from human sources, or from slaughtered cattle. The problem was lack of proper research and double blind studies.

There is also the rather strange thing known colloquially as “corpse medicine”. It started in the 17th and 18th century, with various preparations devised by apothecaries.

Medicine back then was quite primitive, and drugs more so. A treatment for gunshot wounds, for example, was the blood of a dog that had been shot. A piece of skull from an epileptic ground up and added to wine and a few other things was considered the sovereign remedy for various mental illnesses, a recipe reputed to have been devised by King Charles himself. (not sure which one, I or II). Powdered mummy (literally, crushed bits of an Egyptian mummy), were considered very effective for a wide variety of complaints.

In the same way a Pervitin and other dangerous drugs could be had over the counter well into the 1950′s. so too could preparations containing cadaver pituitary gland and similar such gruesome and likely medically useless ingredients.

I’m not sure we are any better off today, given the amount or quackery you can find at your local health food store, Homeopathy is the least of it!

I recall reading that herbal folk remedies often had a sound pharmacological basis, but that it was often hidden under other ingredients. An attempt was made in South Africa to study the various herbal potions of the local “Sangomas” (which-doctors).

It was surmised that much of it was potentially good, but the attempts failed because of professional jealousy.

The herbal basis of the treatment might be simple and correct (this plant alkaloid had this effect and so on), but if it became widely known that a tea made of plant “A” cured “B” then anyone could brew it and put the Sangoma out of business. Thus, a bunch of useless, or potentially harmful ingredients had to be added to disguise the effective agent.

Also, primitive or uneducated people believe in cause and effect. Medicine must be strong tasting and have side effects to be effective. (Patrick O’Brian goes into some detail about this in his Aubrey-Matturin books). So laxatives and strong tasting and often toxic ingredients are also added.

Whenever I encounter medical practices from the Victorian era, interwar, or even early postwar, I always marvel at the stuff we now think of as innovative and the stuff that is arrant quackery. Everybody hopped up on goofballs, often with no apparent need or reason is one thing. Love of alternative therapies is another. [In Britain the Profumo scandal was facilitated by the easy access of a "society osteopath" to the high elites. He paid the hardest price for the scandal in some ways.] Odd remedies for pain, still another.

And yet, that thing about the bacteria pills, gross as it sounds, sounds like either a genuine innovation or at least a thought on the path to the right direction. The idea of varying gut flora is right up there in modern medical treatment for stomach complaints.

I just never can tell. It took our society years to accept that most ulcers were caused by bacterial infection, and those guys were long seen as quacks. Totally right. Everybody just blamed it on stress or maybe, with more reason, three martini lunches.