Cures That Were Worse Than the Disease

Named cures — a radioactive tonic, a kitchen ice pick, a pill fished from a chamber pot — that harmed the people they were meant to save.

For a long stretch of medical history, the treatment and the injury were hard to tell apart. A family kept a metal laxative, rinsed it, and passed it down. A champion golfer drank bottled radium until surgeons took his jaw. A psychiatrist crossed the country in a van, performing brain surgery with a tool that began as an ice pick from his kitchen drawer. The advertisement, every time, was health.

These stories are that pattern, told one proper name at a time. Eben Byers drank Radithor, radium water sold as a tonic, until the dose lodged in his bones. The radium dial painters later called the Radium Girls licked the same element off their brushes and developed the same destroyed jaw, from a job rather than a bottle. Walter Freeman took the lobotomy out of the operating room and onto the road in the lobotomobile. Cigarette makers put physicians in print — Lucky Strike’s “20,679 physicians,” Camel’s “more doctors smoke Camels,” and the rest of the campaigns that had doctors recommending cigarettes. The everlasting pill and the antimonial cup were household antimony, retrieved and reused.

One story in the set breaks the pattern on purpose. William Baer’s maggots looked like a cure worse than the wound. They cleaned dead tissue, fell out of favor when antibiotics arrived, and came back as a prescription medical device.

This page is not a complete history of quackery. It is the shelf those articles share: cures that failed their patients, or looked as if they would. Start here for radium girls, lobotomy history, or the longer record of medicine that harmed on the way to helping.

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