Quacks!: dodgy doctors and foolish fads Throughout history

Great subject but the delivery borders on malpractice Author SD Tucker Publisher Amberley Price £14.99 Released Out now

This book promises an interesting glimpse into the quack medicines and procedures over the last century or so. Unfortunately, it is clumsily written, littered with errors, and spends too much time on personal tangents, reading as the rambling diary of a man angry about a lot of things (vegans, liberals, Macaulay Culkin).

The tone of the book is written so negatively and bitterly, that it becomes hard to actually want to turn the page.

One subtitle reads “Greta Garbage” – no doubt an attempt at humour, but without wit it is simply a insult towards deceased actress Greta Garbo. There appears to be no reference to ‘garbage’ at all, so the selection criteria for this ‘joke’ seems to be it is insulting and it alliterates. This is a common theme and it becomes tedious quickly.

To Tucker’s credit, the book is well researched and he describes in detail the weird and wonderful methods of quack doctors alongside historical illustrations.

But unfortunately even the captions of these images are not safe from Tucker’s bizarre attempt at humour, with one caption describing that particularly dangerous medicine might be a great way to “kill a liberal”. More disappointingly still, for a book claiming to debunk pseudoscience it is littered with Tucker’s own-brand pseudoscience. (HIV can’t be transmitted via swallowing sperm – a fact that seems to have eluded Tucker)

This book on a fascinating topic is a mostly dull read – quite an achievement when the subject is tapeworm diets, alien moon potatoes, and cactus juice injections.