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Quackery: A Brief History of the Worst Ways to Cure Everything by Lydia Kang and Nate Pedersen is a funny, intelligent, and entertaining book by Workman about the past methods used for curing the most important or little illness.
Historical, precious, great old-fashioned illustrations, you will fall in love for Quackery because it will make you smile, laugh, it will entertain you and at the same time will inform you about various chemical elements adopted in the past for the cure of various illness. We will discover the collateral effects for the body with historical important examples.

The book is divided in: Elements, Plants and Soil, Tools, Animals, Mysterious Powers.

Some example?

We will learn that President Lincoln started to suffer of bad headaches and they became more horribly important at some point because doctors insisted to curing them with mercury pills and so with devastating consequences for his body. A man was buried because a mercury addicted; he thought he discovered the fountain of youth; surely a luminous fountain of death.

Arsenic is another important poison. In the past a perfect and elegant "gun" for killing someone. Tasteless, it could be added in food or drinks. Medici and Borgia fans of this poison.

Someone else tried to cure alcoholism with a potion including gold! symbol of immortality as well.

I could continue with long descriptions of other various chemical elements (and not only) used in the past for trying to heal people from the most diversified illness, imagination has no boundaries in this sense, but I just can tell you something: I have a digital copy of this eBook and it's stunning. I guess that the physical copy is incredible and trust me when I tell you that if you will buy this book your money very well spent. There is great quality, it's an old-fashioned book, with a lot of medical history treated with lightness and a lot of fun, and plenty of funny medical stories.


Highly recommended.


I thank NetGalley for this beautiful eBook!



Anna Maria Polidori