'Charlatan' reveals a lurid medical history

0 Comments | USA TODAY, February, 2008 | by Don Oldenburg

Charlatan: America's Most Dangerous Huckster, the Man Who Pursued Him, and the Age of Flimflam

By Pope Brock

Crown, 324 pp., $24.95

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Getting older? Wrinkled? No vitality? Lacking in the sack? How about a simple 10-minute surgical procedure that transplants a billy-goat testicle into your scrotum or, ladies, your abdominal muscle, promising to miraculously renew energy, restore sexual potency and keep you forever young?

Sounds like ba-a-a-a-d medicine, right? Yet during the years between the two World Wars, get-well-quick scams and miracle cures competed toe-to-toe in the USA with an erratic and unregulated medical establishment by selling ludicrous remedies for just such problems.

Amid this medical freak show,...

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