I've just finished an extraordinarily entertaining and enlightening book, Charlatan, by Pope Brock.
It's about the Golden Age of Quackery, of American medical regulations in the 1920's and '30's.
And what on earth does it have to do with deregulation and The Law of Unintended Consequences?
It has everything to do with what we struggle for today.
To the Flipmobile!
One of the attractions of reading good social history is how it delves below the scanty surface that floats on popular culture. Now we have a real snapshot of the actuality people were living.
For instance, when I say, "The Roaring Twenties," most people will get some black and white Art Deco footage involving Prohibition, Tommy Guns, James Cagney, maybe hip flasks and raccoon coats, flappers with ropes of pearls, and maybe some phrases like "cat's pajamas" or "twenty three skiddoo."
I'm willing to bet not one in a hundred will say, "monkey glands."
And yet, depending on how closely one may have studied those old advertisements on the formica in early Wendy's hamburger restaurants, most are marginally aware that the '20's were soaked in mass advertising, the first real use of those Siamese twins, public relations and propaganda, which plague us to this day. And the overwhelming use of these techniques were in the service of patent medicines and medical gadgets.
Because medicine was entirely deregulated at that time. With horrible results.
This was even after the Pure Food & Drug Act of 1906, which let you put whatever you wanted into your patent medicines, as long as the ingredients were on the label. This was an attempt to keep people from downing alcohol, narcotics, and caustic chemicals unknowingly. If you wanted to, well, g'head.
This, as so often, led to an unwarranted trust in the public mind, a sort of, "Well, that law went through," attitude that left gaping holes con men could drive a truck through. And they did.
One of the biggest crazes of all was for "gland transplantation." Largely forgotten today, men of science debated which glands, and to where, but the underlying premise was unshakable. Somerset Maugham and William Butler Yeats were but two celebrities who visited doctors for treatments, and Harold F. McCormick, heir to the International Harvester fortune, made headlines with his hospital stay in 1922, under the care of a protege of Dr. G. Frank Lydston, a physician so enamored of the possiblities he showed off his third testicle to colleagues.
Wild times indeed.
Perhaps the greatest and most celebrated of them all was Dr. John R. Brinkley. "Dr" was more of an honorific, in his case. He had gone to medical school; and dropped out. He wasn't necessarily licensed in any state he practiced in, but licensing wasn't necessary back then. His specialty, for two decades, was goat glands.
As farm boy himself, he knew goats were famous for, well, goatish behavior. And he accumulated millions in 1920's dollars. Along the way, he almost became governor of Kansas, pioneered mass communications along the campaign trail, and created the across-the-border Mexican station that would later be the home of Wolfman Jack. This one action, undertaken so he could advertise his wares to millions, fostered a craze for country music, and then, ironically, blues and rock'n'roll.
Talk about the Law of Unintended Consequences.
Medical deregulation was the bane of the populace at that time. Then, as now, desperate people believed anything. And to sum up, I can't do better than Mr. Pope's words from his book:
Ambrose Bierce defined a quack as a "murderer without a license," but given the Jurassic state of malpractice laws in Brinkley's day, a license to kill was just what he had. [...] perhaps not the worse serial killer in American history, ranked by body count alone he is at least a finalist for the crown.
Considering his slipshod methods (many patients would turn up at a real doctor with gangrene of the scrotum,) outright tissue rejection from even a successful operation (anyone familiar with the boxful of pills modern transplant patients require can only imagine the havoc wreaked by goat glands) which led to blood infections and unhealing fistulas, and his propensity to sell colored water for even the most deadly of complaints, we need only divide his vast fortune by the $500 or so he charged patients to come up with a staggering number.
That's Deregulation in Action.
It goes on. What Brinkley did was not illegal. Immoral, unscrupulous, and dishonorable, but not illegal. He was not brought to trial for any of the deaths, disfigurements, or diseases he introduced to his patients. The only way he was stopped was when he attempted to keep his scam going by suing for libel a publication that had only printed the truth. He lost.
He lost his fortune and reputation. And that took years.
Finite is the human mind, and finite its memory. The Depression years burned the need for financial regulation into a generation. It took another generation for the Republicans to tear it down.
The people and players in this slice of history are gone now. It's doubtful that we will ever return to those free-wheeling days when anyone could bottle up a potion and sell it without any consequences. But when we deregulate our own medical/pharmaceutical industry, or make those laws toothless, we see the consequences.
Unintended, or not.