| Book Review | The Journal of American History, 90.4

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| Book Review | The Journal of American History, 90.4 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

Quacks and Crusaders: The Fabulous Careers of John Brinkley, Norman Baker, and Harry Hoxsey. By Eric S. Juhnke. (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 2002. xvi, 215 pp. $29.95, ISBN 0-7006-1203-3.)
Until now medical quacks were the stuff of local color. Their chicanery enlivened state and local histories. Their gullible customers provided guffaws for metropolitan sophisticates who welcomed any reason to mock people from the Midwest or South. Eric S. Juhnke, however, takes them seriously and offers an interpretation that places them in American social history.	1
Juhnke argues that slick talkers such as John R. Brinkley, the goat gland doctor of Kansas who restored male sexual vitality with transplants from billy goats, or Norman Baker of Iowa and Harry Hoxsey of Texas, who offered wondrous elixirs that cured cancer, were populists in today's general sense of the word. They "employed populism primarily as a rhetorical tool to advance their personal desires for profit, power, and fame" and to gain "an appearance of legitimacy" (p. xiii). They assailed smug privilege (mainly the American Medical Association) and recounted grim conspiracies in order to appeal to outsiders and malcontents. Examining the careers of his three subject quacks, Juhnke ascribes to them a type of cynical genius.	. . .

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